This paper documents that changes in assortative mating patterns over the last four decades along the dimensions of age, ethnicity, religion and education are not responsible for the increasing marital instability in Austria. Quite the contrary, without the rise in the age at marriage, divorce...

Seguino (2000) shows that gender wage discrimination in export-oriented semi-industrialized countries might be fostering investment and growth in general. While the original analysis does not have internationally comparable wage discrimination data, we replicate the analysis using data from a...

In this paper we evaluate the impact of the old-age part-time scheme (OAPT) on the Austrian labour market which was a policy to allow flexible retirement options for the elderly with an aim to increase labour supply. According to our matching estimates employment probability increases slightly,...

The Austrian Social Security Database (ASSD) is a matched firm-worker data set, which records the labor market history of almost 11 million individuals from January 1972 to April 2007. Moreover, more than 2.2 million firms can be identified. The individual labor market histories are described in...

In 1996 Austria introduced a tax for the layoff of older workers, which was tightened in 2000. The regulation requires employers to pay a tax of up to 170 percent of the gross monthly income when they give notice to employees aged 50 or more. We use data from Austrian social security records to...

We investigate whether the costs of job displacement differ between blue collar and white collar workers. In the short run earnings and employment losses are substantial for both groups but stronger for white collar workes. In the long run, there are only weak effects for blue collar workers but...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in Europe as source of exogenous variation in education. Using data from 8 European countries, we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological kids and the incidence of...