Using data from the 2006 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes how a minimum wage affects employment, wage inequality, public expenditures, and aggregate income in the low-wage sector. It is shown that a statutory minimum wage of EUR 7.50 per hour would cost...

Macro-level changes can have substantial effects on the distribution of resources at the household level. While it is possible to speculate about which groups are likely to be hardesthit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward...

German family policy underwent a reform in 2007, when the new instrument of "Elterngeld" replaced the previous "Erziehungsgeld". The transfer programs differ in various dimensions. We study the effects on the labor supply of young mothers, by comparing behavior before and after the reform. We...

We review the labor market implications of recent real-business-cycle models that successfully replicate the empirical equity premium. We document the fact that all models considered in this survey with the exception of Boldrin, Christiano, and Fisher (2001) imply a negative correlation of...

In this paper, we assess the impact of firms introducing part-time work schemes for gradual labour market exit of elderly workers on their employees' labour market outcomes. The analysis is based on unique linked employer-employee data that combine high-quality survey and administrative data....

This paper quantifies the impact of the Hartz reforms on matching efficiency, using monthly SOEP gross worker flows (1983-2009). We show that, until the early 2000s, close to 60% of changes in the unemployment rate are due to changes in the inflow rate (job separation). On the contrary, since...