This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the demand for high-skilled workers using a new firm data set, the IZA International Employer Survey 2000. Our results suggest that while workers from EU-countries are mainly complements to domestic high-skilled workers, workers from non-EU countries...

We use a rich longitudinal data set for West Germany to disentangle the wage effects for female workers around first birth. Data on daily real wages reveal a dip in women's real wages shortly before giving birth and a drop of 10 to 20 percent after finishing maternity leave and returning to the...

Despite recent changes in the relationship between unionism and various indicators of firm performance, there is one seeming constant in the Anglophone countries: unions at the workplace are associated with reduced employment growth of around -2.5% a year. Using German data, we examine the...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of the gender wage gap over early careers of skilled workers in Germany using administrative longitudinal data. Advantages of the data for this type of analysis are that we observe complete work and skill accumulation histories from the beginning for up...