Empirical evidence suggests that managerial overconfidence and government guarantees contribute substantially to excessive risk-taking in the banking industry. This paper incorporates managerial overconfidence and limited bank liability into a principal-agent model, where the bank manager...

We assess the relevance of formal education for the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to...

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,...

We analyze the evolution of the wage structure in East Germany over the past two decades and compare it to West Germany. Both regions experienced a rise in wage inequality between 1995 and 2009 with wage dispersion in East Germany exceeding West Germany, esp. at the top. We also show that wage...

We build a life-cycle model in which a representative firm produces a final good using routine and non-routine labor as well as traditional and automation capital (e.g. robots). Robots can substitute for routine labor. We show that both, population aging and higher robot productivity, foster the...

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...

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 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,...

This paper examines the extent to which aggregate-level de-routinization can be attributed to firm-level technology adoption during the most recent technological expansion. We use administrative data and a novel firm survey to distinguish frontier technologies from older technologies. We find...

This study quantifies the relationship between workplace digitalization, i.e., the increasing use of frontier technologies, and workers’ health outcomes using novel and representative German linked employer-employee data. Based on changes in individual-level use of technologies between 2011...