We study the descriptive and substantive representation of workers through worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. Becoming a professional representative leads to substantial wage gains for the elected,...

We combine a high-frequency survey on job search effort with administrative data on caseworker interactions from the German unemployment insurance system to estimate how the dynamics of search effort respond to caseworker meetings and vacancy referrals. Meetings alone do not increase...

We compare men and women who are displaced from similar jobs by applying an event study design combined with propensity score matching and reweighting to administrative data from Germany. After a mass layo, women's earnings losses are about 35% higher than men's, with the gap persisting five...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

We empirically investigate the link between parental involvement and shaping of the economic preferences, attitudes and personality traits of their children. We exploit information on the risk and trust attitudes, the Big Five personality traits and locus of control of parents and their...

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment...

People differ in their willingness to take risks. Recent work found that revealed preference tasks (e.g., laboratory lotteries) - a dominant class of measures - are outperformed by survey-based stated preferences, which are more stable and predict real-world risk taking across different domains....

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...

We shed new light on the relationship between cognition and patience, by providing documenting that the correlation between cognitive abilities and delay discounting is weaker for the same group of individuals if choices are incentivized. We conjecture that the exertion of higher cognitive...

We conduct a discrete choice experiment to investigate how the mission of high-tech companies affects job attractiveness and contributes to self-selection of science and engineering graduates who differ in prosocial attitudes. We characterize mission by whether or not the company combines its...