This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein, upon arrival, an immigrant spouse invests in host country-specific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family's current consumption. Using data for West...

Using data on the valuation of Christmas gifts received by students in different fields at a German university, we investigate whether the endowment effect differs between students of economics and other respondents and whether it varies with the market price of the object under consideration....

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

This paper examines the effect of copayments on doctor visits using the German health care reform of 2004 as a natural experiment. In January 2004, copayments of 10 euros for the first doctor visit in each quarter have been introduced for all adults in the statutory health insurance. Individuals...

We identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on conscripts' subsequent labor-market outcomes by exploiting the regression-discontinuity design of the military draft in Germany during the 1950s. Unbiased estimates of the effect of military service on lifetime earnings, wages, and...

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience...

Economic conditions at the time of labour market entry can induce wage differentials between workers entering the labour market at different points in time. While the existence and persistence of these entry wage differentials are well documented, little is known about their interaction with...

This paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth position of immigrant households residing in Australia, Germany and the United States. Our results indicate that in Germany and the United States wealth differentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational...

This paper combines individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with economic and demographic postcode-level data from administrative records to analyze the effects of immigration on wages and unemployment probabilities of high- and low-skilled natives. Employing an...

Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to human-capital...