With the introduction of a new welfare benefit system in 2005, Germany implemented quite strict benefit sanctions for welfare recipients aged younger than 25 years. For all types of non-compliance except for missing appointments, their basic cash benefit is withdrawn for three months. A second...

The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 19752004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

In dem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie sich Berufserfahrung und beruflicher Hintergrund auf die Dauer der Selbstständigkeit von Unternehmensgründern auswirken, insbesondere welchen Einfluss ausgewogene Qualifikationen auf diese Dauer haben. Es wird ein Bezugsrahmen zur Berufswahl eingesetzt, der...

Increasing wage inequality is associated with changes in the degree of labor market sorting, i.e. the allocation of workers to firms. To measure sorting, we propose a new method which disentangles the respective contributions of worker and firm heterogeneity to wage inequality. Inspired by...

Routine-intensive occupations have been declining in many countries, but how does this affect individual workers' careers if this decline is particularly severe in their local labor market? This paper uses administrative data from Germany and a matched difference-in-differences approach to show...

We examine the effects of endogenous offshoring on cost-efficiency, wages and unemployment in a task-assignment model with skill heterogeneity. Exact conditions for the following insights are derived. The distributional effect of offshoring (high-) low-skill-intensive tasks is similar to...

We analyse the role that education signals play in the transition rates from unemployment to finding a job. We compare the results for Ethnic Germans with those for foreigners from the same origin countries and Native Germans. In the first case, the two have the same labour market access but...

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women's employment rates but decrease their wages in case of extended leave durations. In view of these potential trade-offs many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major...

Fertility in the US exhibits an increasingly more procyclical pattern. We argue that women's breadwinner status is behind procyclical fertility: (i) women's relative income in the family has increased over time; and (ii) women are more likely to work in relatively stable and countercyclical...

In this paper, we investigate the short-run effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on vocational education and training after the first lockdown in the year 2020 in Germany. We exploit rich establishment-level survey data to estimate the causal effects of the pandemic by applying...