Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market...

The skill premium has increased significantly in the United States in the last five decades. During the same period, individual wage risk has also increased. This paper proposes a mechanism through which a rise in wage risk increases the skill premium. Intuitively, a rise in uninsured wage risk...

This paper studies the relationship between changes in occupational employment, occupational wages, and rising overall wage inequality. Using long-running administrative panel data with detailed occupation codes, we first document that in all occupations, entrants and leavers earn lower wages...

The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

We present an equilibrium model with inter-linked frictional labour and marriage markets. Women's flow value of being single is treated as given, and it captures returns from employment. Single unemployed men conduct a so-called constrained sequential job search, and can choose to improve their...

This paper develops a new method to study how workers’ career and wage profiles are shaped by internal labor markets (ILM) and job hierarchies in firms. Our paper tackles the conceptual challenge of organizing jobs within firms into hierarchy levels by proposing a data-driven ranking method...

Using rich linked employer-employee data for (West) Germany between 1996 and 2014, we analyze the most important drivers of the recent rise in German wage dispersion and pin down the relative contribution of plant and worker characteristics. Moreover, we separately investigate the drivers of...

We study the labor market outcomes of a deregulation reform in Germany that removed licensing requirements to become self-employed in some occupations. Using longitudinal social security data, we implement a matched difference-in-differences design with entropy balancing to account for...

This paper documents earnings dynamics over the life-cycle and income level using a large administrative database from German tax records. I find that labor earnings display important deviations from the typical assumptions of linearity and normality. For the bottom earners, large income changes...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of income inequality and income dynamics for Germany over the last two decades. Combining personal income tax and social security data allows us — for the first time — to offer a complete picture of the distribution of annual earnings in Germany. We find...