We reassess the empirical effect of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a novel two-step estimation procedure that allows applying instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the theory of incomplete markets, we...

This paper provides a cross-country comparison of life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations. We draw our inference from household panel data sets for the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about...

This paper investigates the pattern of wives' hours disaggregated by the husband's wage decile. In the US, this pattern has changed from downward-sloping to hump-shaped. We show that this development can be explained within a standard household model of labor supply when taking into account...

In Germany, there is a vivid political debate on introducing a general statutory minimum wage. In this paper, we study the effects of minimum wages on labor supply using a structural household model where we distinguish between married and single households. In the model, labor supply of married...

We propose using sign restrictions to identify regional labor demand shocks in a panel VAR of US federal states. Observed migration responds significantly, but less persistently than the residual-based migration measure constructed by Blanchard and Katz (1992)

This paper examines fiscal policy without commitment and the effects of conditional bailout loans. The government relies on distortionary taxation and decides between full debt repayment and costly default. It tends to overborrow due to myopia, which induces default to be a relevant policy...

This paper uses nonparametric techniques to study GDP convergence across German labor market regions and counties during the period 1992-2004. The main result is that regional convergence in unified Germany has been substantial. In the first years after German unification the distribution of GDP...

We propose a new explanation for differences and changes in labor supply by gender and marital status, and in particular for the increase in married women's labor supply over time. We argue that this increase as well as the relative constancy of other groups' hours are optimal reactions to...

We show that parts of the unexplained wage gap in standard Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions result from the neglect of the role played by the family for individual wages. We present a simple model of dual-earner households facing a trade-off regarding whose career to promote and show analytically...

This paper questions unconventional fiscal policy effects when the monetary policy rate is at the zero lower bound. We provide evidence for the US that the spread between the policy rate and the US-LIBOR, which is more relevant for private sector transactions, increases with government...