We estimate the effect of language training on subsequent employment and wages of immigrants under essential heterogeneity. The identifying variation is based on regional differences in language training availability that we use to instrument endogenous participation. Estimating marginal...

Linguistic distance, i.e. the dissimilarity between languages, is an important factor influencing international economic transactions such as migration or international trade flows by imposing hurdles for second language acquisition and increasing transaction costs. To measure these costs, we...

Drawing on German household data from 1992 to 2011, this paper analyzes how couples allocate housework against the backdrop of three questions: (1) Does an individual’s contribution to household income - both in absolute and relative terms - influence his or her contribution to housework? (2)...

This paper documents a positive impact of cultural diversity and cultural similarity on rental prices of the German districts for the years between 2004 and 2013. On the one hand, an increase of the Herfindahl index as a measure for cultural diversity of 0.1 would increase rents by over 12...

We investigate the extent to which asylum policies that aim to deter individuals from migrating irregularly in fact do so. We specifically consider effects of Germany's recent and high-profile asylum policy adjustments, which include accelerated asylum decision processes, the prospect of asylum...

The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratifi cation literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social...

We study the impacts of WWII service and access to GI Bill benefits on the educational and labor market outcomes of individuals of various ethnic and racial groups. We address selection into military service directly by linking veterans and nonveterans from 1950's census records to the...

Als Reaktion auf die hohe und verfestigte Arbeitslosigkeit in der Bundesrepublik in den 1990er Jahren wurden in der Bundesagentur für Arbeit verschiedene Reformen durchgeführt. Eine der wichtigsten Reformen betraf die Reorganisation der Arbeitsvermittlung durch die sukzessive Einführung der...

While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that disadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot...

This paper shows empirically that the non-employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) for older workers depend in a first-order way on the structure of retirement policies. Using German data, we first present reduced-form evidence of these interactions, documenting large bunching in UI...