Economic development theories and their learning frameworks differently address farms and firms. This article argues that the traditional double-standard of the primacy of manufacturing rests on a debatable stages model that under-recognizes learning and innovation in agriculture and its...

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by...

We study the effect of childcare availability on child penalties. Using Swiss administrative data, we exploit the staggered opening od childcare facilities across municipalities in the canton of Bern. We find that the presence of childcare facilities in the year of birth of the first child...

I study possible determinants of part-time employment among women in France and Germany using microdata of the Labour Force Survey. Voluntary part-time work is substantially more widespread among women in Germany than it is in France. Estimation results show that while the presence of children...

We analyze the long-term effects of gender imbalances on female labor force participation, in particular in the market for politicians. We exploit variation in sex ratios - the number of men divided by the number of women in a region - across Germany induced by WWII. In the 1990 elections, women...

We show that the discontinuity in the distribution of surveyed female income shares at the margin where a woman would outearn her partner is primarily driven by norm induced misreporting in surveys. We draw on unique Swiss data combining survey and administrative information for the same...

I investigate whether two mechanisms leading to biased beliefs about success, overconfidence and competition neglect, influence decisions to enter competitive environments. I use a controlled laboratory setting that allows to elicit belief distributions related to absolute as well as relative...

We use German administrative and survey data to investigate the heterogeneity of part-time penalties in hourly wages and growth rates. Exploiting tax reforms for identification, we find substantial heterogeneity in part-time wage penalties from -28.3% to -7.2% compared to full-time. The...