Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that...

According to the Hutchens (1999) model, early retirement is not explained as a result of maximizing expected individual utility but rather as a demand-side phenomenon arising from a firm's profit-maximizing behaviour. Firms enter into contracts with their employees that include clauses about...

Technological innovation has historically contributed to inclusive economic growth in Germany. In more recent decades, however, this contribution has weakened due to the declining impact of technological innovation on labor productivity growth. Fearing that this declining impact would undermine...

This study revisits the increase in wage inequality in Germany. Accounting for changes in various sets of observables, composition changes explain a large part of the increase in wage inequality among full-time workers. The composition effects are larger for females than for males, and...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full-time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task-based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a...

This paper explores the possible job creation effect of innovation activity. We analyze a unique panel dataset covering almost 20,000 patenting firms from Europe over the period 2003-2012. The main outcome from the proposed GMM-SYS estimations is the labour-friendly nature of innovation, which...

We investigate the impact of obstetrician supervision, as opposed to midwife supervision, on the short-term health of low-risk newborns. We exploit a unique policy rule in the Netherlands that creates a large discontinuity in the probability of a low-risk birth being attended by an obstetrician...

We analyze if technological progress and the corresponding change in the occupational structure have improved the relative position of women in the labour market. We show that the share of women rises most strongly in non-routine cognitive and manual occupations, but declines in routine...

We analyse the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment prospects of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, we first estimate wage bill share equations for different age groups. Consistently with what is...

This paper argues that changes in the returns to occupational tasks have contributed to changes in the wage distribution over the last three decades. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we first show that the 1990s polarization of wages is explained by changes in wage setting between and...