This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by decreasing returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, computerization improved the access to technologyadopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents,...

Total employment in Germany is supposed to increase if people could realize their desired working hours. However, this back-of-the-envelope calculation overestimates the effect of loosening hours constraints, because even in a very flexible labor market there will exist hours restrictions for...

This paper studies the long-term consequences on firms and workers of the credit crunch triggered by the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Relying on a unique matched bank-employer-employee administrative dataset, we construct a firm-specific credit supply shock and examine firms’ and...

This article describes ZEW-EviSTA®, the microsimulation model developed and used at ZEW - Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim. The model simulates the German tax and transfer system using household micro level data. By estimating fiscal effects, labor market outcomes as well as...

The paper analyses the applicability of vocational training and the earnings of apprentices using survey data from West Germany in 1979, 1985/86 and 1991/92. The applicability has decreased remarkably between 1979 and 1991/92. The objective of the analysis is a survey-data-based assessment of...

This paper explores inequalities in IQ and economic preferences between children from high and low socio-economic status (SES) families. We document that children from high SES families are more intelligent, patient and altruistic, as well as less risk-seeking. To understand the underlying...

We document that the added worker effect (AWE) has increased over the last three decades. We develop a search model with two earner households and we illustrate that the increase in the AWE from the 1980s to the 2000s can be explained through i) the narrowing of the gender pay gap, ii) changes...

Heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian models with sticky nominal wages usually assume that wage-setting unions demand the same amount of hours from all households. As a result, unions do not take account of the fact that (i) households are heterogeneous in their willingness to work, and that (ii)...

We investigate minimum wage spillovers by exploiting the first-time introduction of a minimum wage within a quasi-experiment in a context with an extraordinary large bite: the German roofing industry. We find positive wage spillovers for medium-skilled workers with wages just above the minimum...