This paper examines the publication of quality indicators in service markets with public finance systems, such as education and healthcare markets. We provide a spatial model of product differentiation in which the reporting of such indicators increases consumers’ decision weight on quality...

The paper studies the power of educational investments in relation to transfers for fostering lifetime income and for reducing income inequality in Germany. The welfare analysis is based on a model of age-dependent human capital accumulation, featuring dynamic complementarities in skill...

The standard labor-supply literature typically assumes that the labor supply response to wage increases is the same as that for equivalent wage decreases. However, evidence from the behavioral-economics literature suggests that people are loss averse and thus perceive losses differently than...

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employeesm ay hamper company-sponsored general training. However, the extent of poaching, its determinants and consequences, remains an open empirical question. We provide a novel empirical identification strategy for poaching and...

Existing management research has so far dealt with the consequences of labor turnover for established firms, but has not addressed its effect on young entrepreneurial businesses. In this paper I assess, both theoretically and empirically, the productivity effects of worker replacement in young...

We study the long-run implications of regional and ethnic favoritism in Africa. Combining geocoded individual-level survey data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with data on national leaders’ birthplaces across 41 African countries, we explore the educational attainment of adults...

This paper jointly analyses the consequences of adverse selection and signalling on entry wages of skilled employees. It uses German linked employer employee panel data (LIAB) and introduces a measure for relative productivity of skilled job applicants based on apprenticeship wages. It shows...

This paper investigates the evolution of wages and the recent tendency to rising wage inequality in Germany, based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for 1984 to 2004. Between 1984 and 1994 the wage distribution was fairly stable. Wage inequality started to increase around 1994 in...

This paper investigates the effect of the size of the local labor market on skill mismatch. Using survey data for Germany, I find that workers in large cities are both less likely to be overqualified for their job and to work in a different field than the one they are trained for. Different...