This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been "rigid" in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilising a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. By doing so we can arguably overcome the potential aggregation bias as...

At the turn of the millennium three frequently cited potential causes of new challenges for wage policy in Germany are revisited in this study: skilled- biased technological progress, the increasing international integration of labor and product markets, and the monetary integration of the EMU....

Several empirical minimum wage studies have recently been published that simulate employment effects of a federal minimum wage in Germany. We disentangle various factors that explain the variation in previous simulation results. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the newly...

This paper examines the effects of a substantial change in publicly funded paid parental leave in Germany on child development and socio-economic development gaps. For children born before January 1, 2007, parental leave benefits were means-tested and paid for up to 24 months after childbirth....

This study analyses the 2004 Eastern Enlargement to the European Union to obtain evidence on the employment effects of an increase in trade liberalisation. The Enlargement is thought to generate a trade-induced demand shock with no (or only limited) supply effects. Besides the variation over...

This paper develops a theory of contests based on perceived abilities, and provides evidence for the predictions of this theory using panel data from professional soccer. We examine how soccer players perform in club matches during the informal)nomination contests for national teams prior to an...

Since September 2000, as a result of mobility restrictions, the supply of Palestinian workers competing for local jobs in the West Bank has increased by about fifty percent. This paper takes advantage of this unique natural experiment to study the effects of labor supply shocks on labor market...

The deterioration of the income and employment position of unskilled workers in the OECD since the 1980s is a well-documented fact. The debate about the causes of this development is dominated by two competing hypotheses, "North-South Trade" ("globalisation") and technological progress. Several...