This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the...

We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and "the East" – China and Eastern Europe – in the period 1988-2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use...

This paper analyzes savings and asset holdings of immigrants in relation to their return plans. We argue that savings and asset accumulation may be affected by return plans of immigrants. Further, the way savings and assets are held in the home- and host country may also be related to future...

Harmonised microdata show a Gini coefficient for per capita total income of 45.3 percent in China 2002 and 33.6 percent in Russia 2003. A much larger urban to rural income gap in combination with a much smaller proportion of people living in urban areas in China are important reasons for this...

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals' trust and risk, as well...

This study reports results from an empirical investigation of business services sector firms that (start to) export, comparing exporters to firms that serve the national market only. We estimate identically specified empirical models using comparable enterprise level data from France, Germany,...

This study used data from the German Socio-economic Panel to examine gender differences in the extent to which self-reported subjective well-being was associated with occupying a high-level managerial position in the labour market, compared with employment in non-leadership, non-high-level...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for...

This paper analyzes the role of the extensive vis-à-vis the intensive margin of labor adjustment in Germany and in the United States. The contribution is twofold. First, we provide an update of older U.S. studies and confirm the view that the extensive margin (i.e., the adjustment in the number...

With the development of household budget systems and with regard to the requirements of the European Union with new EU-SILC approaches, the cumulation of cross-section surveys to an integrated information system is recently discussed and required. In particular the reconstruction of household...