There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision towork in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as apuzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee.Information on income...

It is argued that migration from Mexico to the US and its corresponding return migration aredetermined by international wage differentials and preferences for origin. We use a model ofjob search, savings and migration to show that job turnover is a crucial determinant of themigration process...

'Marginal employment', i.e. employment at low working hours and earnings not covered bysocial security, has been gaining importance in the German economy over the past decade.Using a large newly available panel data set and statistical matching techniques, we analysethe effects of marginal...

Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we show both theoretically and empirically that positiveassortative matching between firms...

To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of thelabor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate along run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct forendogeneity in the...

We analyze the distribution and concentration of market incomes in Germany in the period1992 to 2001 on the basis of an integrated data set of individual tax returns and the GermanSocio-Economic Panel. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it encompassesthe whole spectrum of the...

We develop a structural multi-factor labour demand model which distinguishes between eightlabour categories including non-standard types of employment such as marginalemployment. The model is estimated for both the number of workers and total working hoursusing a new panel data set...

This paper contributes to the policy-relevant question whether self-employment is a way outof (long-term) unemployment. We estimate the relationship between the entry rate into selfemploymentand previous (long-term) unemployment on the basis of pseudo-panel data forGermany in the period 1996-2002...