As skills of labor-market entrants are usually not directly observed by employers, individuals acquire skill signals. To study which signals are valued by employers, we simultaneously and independently randomize a broad range of skill signals on pairs of resumes of fictitious applicants among...

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,...

Do investment programs create more jobs in tight or in slack labor markets? We study this question using data from a large, long-term photovoltaic invest scheme in Germany. Comparing counties with high and low unemployment both over time and across space, we find that photovoltaic installations...

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 technology adopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents,...

Much of today’s software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

Skilled labor is a key input to the innovation process. A shortage in supply of skilled labor may hence impede innovation activities, resulting in lower productivity gains. While governments are concerned about these likely negative impacts, there is only limited empirical evidence whether and...

This study analyses the situation of the Brazilian population vis-à-vis the Social Security System (SSS) using data from PNAD. We chose the 1982, 1992 and 2002 PNAD data to give a series of pictures of the Brazilian population at equal intervals but under different legal instances with respect...

To assess the influence of nonstandard employment for the labor market participation of different demographic groups, we provide detailed descriptions of the development of atypical employment in comparison to standard employment, unemployment, and economic inactivity between 1996 and 2011. In...

Computing power continues to grow at an enormous rate. Simultaneously, more and better data is increasingly available and Machine Learning methods have seen significant breakthroughs in the recent past. All this pushes further the boundary of what machines can do. Nowadays increasingly complex...