Curriculum tracking, the separation of secondary school students into academic and vocational tracks, correlates positively with pretracking achievement in both British and international data. I argue that this correlation is caused by the incentives emanating from the track placement decision....

Increasing the participation of women in top-level corporate boards is high on the agenda of policymakers. Yet, we know little about director appointment dynamics and the drivers and impediments of women appointments. This study builds on organizational and group-level behavior theories and...

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

We study the 2011 Austrian Pay Transparency Law, which requires firms above a size threshold to publish internal reports on the gender pay gap. Using an event-study design, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus leaving the gender wage gap unchanged....

We discuss important properties and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive three main results. First, binning of effect window endpoints is a practical necessity and key for identification of dynamic treatment effects. Second, event study designs with binned endpoints and...

Solo self-employment is on the rise despite less favorable working conditions compared to traditional jobs. We show that the introduction of minimum wages in German industries led to an increase in the share of solo self-employment by up to 8.5 percentage points. We explain our findings within a...

We present the first comprehensive evidence on the role of cognitive ability and personality traits in the selection of electoral candidates and election of politicians. Using unique data that combine population registers and election statistics from local government elections in Finland with...

That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on endogenous inequality using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...

In this paper, I contrast the quality of part-time jobs - in terms of hourly wage rates - with those of full-timers. Using the Netherlands as a benchmark, helps to assess the size and seriousness of the estimated wage differentials in Germany. Based on two comparable household surveys, I...