This study explores the relationship between firms' characteristics and their recruitment strategies. We propose a model based on a search and matching framework with two search channels: a formal channel which is costly for firms and a costless informal channel, i.e. referrals. There is a...

This paper estimates the effect that the size of an individual's labour-market entry cohort has on the subsequent duration of search for employment. Survival-analysis methods are applied to empirically assess this relationship using a sample of apprenticeship graduates who entered the German...

We study the long-term impact of job displacement on workers' commuting behavior. Our measures of commuting exploit geo-coordinates of workers' places of residence and places of work, from which we calculate the door-to-door commuting distance and commuting time. Using German employee-employer...

Expectations regarding the economic development might be correlated due to various reasons: because individuals use the same public information and similar evaluation methods, and because of social learning or herding amongst peers. We analyse to what extent expectations are driven by herd...

We analyze the causal effect of commuting on wages, using a large sample of German job changers. Information on their home and workplace addresses in combination with road navigation software allows us to calculate exact door-to-door commuting distances with an unprecedented degree of precision....

We study the impact of social ties on the migration of inventors from East to West Germany, using the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification as a natural experiment. We identify East German inventors via their patenting track records prior to 1990 and their social security records in...

Reservation wages indicate the wage threshold for which individual workers are inclined to supply their working capacity. In important theoretical approaches it is assumed that this threshold depends on the unemployment rate. If this is true, the variation of reservation wages might be an...

This paper estimates the effect that changes in the size of the youth population have on the wages of young workers. Assuming that differently aged workers are only imperfectly substitutable, economic theory predicts that individuals in larger age groups earn lower wages. We test this hypothesis...

Using data from 49 European regions covering 2005-2012, this paper finds that the estimated effect of cohort size on employment and unemployment outcomes is very sensitive to the age range of the sample. We argue that this is because the identification strategy commonly used in this literature...

In this paper we study the effect of small labor market entry cohorts on (un)employment in Western Germany. From a theoretical point of view, decreasing cohort sizes may on the one hand reduce unemployment due to "inverse cohort crowding" or on the other hand increase unemployment if companies...