Why do people work unpaid overtime? We show that remarkable long-term labor earnings gains are associated with unpaid overtime in West Germany. A descriptive analysis suggests that over a 10-year period workers with unpaid overtime experience on average at least a 10 percentage points higher...

Labor supply in the market for low-paid jobs in Germany is strongly influenced by tax exemptions - even for individuals to whom these exemptions do not apply. We present compelling evidence that an individual's choice set depends on other workers' preferences because firms cater their job offers...

The paper extends a static discrete-choice labor supply model by adding participation and hours constraints. We identify restrictions by survey information on the eligibility and search activities of individuals as well as actual and desired hours. This provides for a more robust identification...

As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel...

Institutionen werden in diesem Beitrag als Regeln menschlichen Handelns begriffen. Im einzelnen geht es um eine Analyse der in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften angewandten Regeln zur Untersuchung individueller Erwerbsentscheidungen (rational choice Ansatz), um Regeln, die in Form von...

We estimate economic incidence of social security contributions (SSC) on the basis of cross-sectional earnings distributions. The approach exploits discontinuities in earnings distributions at kinks in the budget set which are informative about tax incidence. Contrary to most research on SSC...

The price for institutional long-term care is a central determinant of the demand for formal and informal long-term care. In this paper, we show how macroeconomic conditions affect these prices. The analysis is based on administrative data that contains rich information on the universe of...

Why are female entrepreneurs so rare? Women have both to a lower entry rate into selfemployment and a higher exit rate in Germany. To explain the gender gap, a structural microeconometric model of the transition rates is estimated, which includes a standard risk aversion parameter. As inputs...

When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because...

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...