This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives and in particular its impact on the sensitivity of pay to performance. To measure the effect of competition we use two different identification strategies on a panel of...

We document that trust in public institutions and particularly trust in banks, business and government 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 legacy of...

The effects of childbirth on future labor market outcomes are a key issue for policy discussion. This paper implements a dynamic treatment approach to estimate the effect of having the first child now versus later on future employment for the case of Germany, a country with a long maternity...

We study empirically whether there is scope for parents to shape the economic preferences and attitudes of their children through purposeful investments. We exploit information on the risk and trust attitudes of parents and their children, as well as rich information about parental efforts in...

We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently...

This paper presents a methodology to identify net demand shocks as well as wage rigidities in heterogeneous labor markets on the basis of nonparametric regression. We show how this approach can be used to make suggestions for immigration policy in economies with labor market rigidities. In an...

Folklore has it that the comparatively low proportion of self-employed in Germany is in part due to a habit that might be termed 'stigmatisation of failure': taking a second chance to build one's own firm after failing as a self-employed is said to be much more difficult here than in other...

Based on data from the BHPS and the GSOEP, we analyse the economic performance of various ethnic groups in the UK and West Germany, as well as the effects of income redistribution on these populations. Taking the indigenous population of each country as the reference category, we find that, as a...