This paper presents the results of an experiment that is designed to examine how information presentation and complexity impact retirement-savings behavior. The experiment is performed twice, using both a Qualtrics panel of new employees and a sample of business school students. In this...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

Higher replacement rates often imply higher levels of absenteeism, yet even in generous welfare economies, private sick pay is provided in addition to the public sick pay. Why? Using comparative workplace data for the UK and Norway we show that the higher level of absenteeism in Norway compared...

Many OECD countries invest heavily in labour-market programs to prolong careers. Although active labour-market programs designed for this purpose have frequently been evaluated, less is known about the employment impact of more passive regimes that make labour-market participation later in life...

Does the search and matching model fit aggregate U.S. labor market data? While the model has become an important tool of macroeconomic analysis, recent literature pointed to some significant failures in accounting for the data. This paper aims to answer two questions: (i) Does the model fit the...

We provide new empirical evidence regarding the magnitude and the determinants of a firm's costs required to fill a vacancy. The average costs required to fill a vacancy for a skilled worker in Switzerland amount to about 16 weeks of wage payments. The main components of the vacancy costs are...

This paper analyzes the structure of hiring costs of skilled workers in Germany. Using detailed and representative firm-level data on recruitment and adaptation costs of new hires, we find that average hiring costs amount to more than 8 weeks of wage payments (4,700 Euros). The structure of...

In a segmented labor market, theory predicts that employment protection has an asymmetric impact on entry and incumbent wages. We explore a reform that increased the protection of open-ended contracts for a well-defined subset of firms, while leaving it unchanged for other firms. The causal...

About one in four workers challenges her dismissal in front of a labor court in France. Using a data set of individual labor disputes brought to French courts over the years 1996 to 2003, we examine the impact of labor court activity on labor market flows. First, we present a simple theoretical...