When students themselves enjoy large degrees of freedom in determining the duration oftheir studies, it results in a fairly large degree of interindividual variance in terms of time-todegree.This paper investigates individual time-to-degree in a model where studentsdetermine the optimum...

This paper establishes the cyclical properties of a novel measure of worker reallocation: longdistancemigration rates within the US. This internal migration offers a bird’s eye view ofworker reallocation in the economy as long-distance migrants often change jobs oremployment status, altering...

We document that trust in public institutions ﾖ and particularly trust in banks, business and government ﾖ has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

This study analyzes real wage cyclicality for male full-time workers within employer-employee matches in Germany over the period 1984-2004. Five different wage measures are compared: the standard hourly wage rate; hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus pay; the effective wage, which...

Immigrants have figured prominently in U.S. economic growth for decades, but the recent recession hit them hard. Immigrantsﾒ labor market outcomes began deteriorating even before the recession was officially underway, largely as a result of the housing bust. An analysis of employment and...

Since there is scant evidence on the role of industrial relations in wage cyclicality, this paper analyzes the effect of collective wage contracts and of works councils on real wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data for western Germany, we find that works councils affect wage growth...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

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...

We document three changes in postwar US macroeconomic dynamics: (i) the procyclicality of labor productivity has vanished, (ii) the relative volatility of employment has risen, and (iii) the relative (and absolute) volatility of the real wage has risen. We propose an explanation for all three...