The IAB’s Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB) and the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are the two data sets most commonly used to analyze wage inequality in Germany. While the SIAB is based on administrative reports by employers to the social security system, the SOEP is a survey...

This paper performs a meta-analysis of 1472 estimates extracted from 199 previous studies to investigate the gender wage gap in China. The results show that, although the gender wage gap in China during the transition period has an impact that statistically significant and economically...

This paper focuses on the structure and extent of wage differences among graduates of different higher-education institutions in Germany. We ask how large these differences are and how they relate to fields of study and regional labour markets. The results from our application of...

Lea Immel prepared this study while she was working at the Research Group Taxation and Fiscal Policy at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

This paper explores the role of school quality in immigrants' home countries on their earnings in Germany, using native Germans as a benchmark. We propose an empirical analysis that highlights two important insights. First, there is a substantial gap in the returns to education between natives...

It is often stated that certain occupations in Germany, because of "Demographic Change ", are dwindling, implying a labor shortage. We investigate the 10-year wage growth of young employees entering the labor market in different occupations. Our findings suggest that regional labor market...

This paper provides precise figures on the incidence and wage penalties of mismatching in Germany. We use the BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey 2006 to compute two different measures of person-to-job matching. A first measure indicates an educational (mis)match, i.e., whether a worker’s attained...

Overqualification signals a mismatch between jobs’ educational requirements and workers’ qualifications implying potential productivity losses at the macro and the micro level. This study explores how the family background of German graduates affects the probability to hold a job that does...

Large variation in the estimated income premium of occupational licensing can be found in the existing literature. I revisit the natural experimental design of a change in the German crafts regulation in 2004, which removed the traditional licensing requirement for self-employment in certain...

This study analyses the selection of a sample of 203 young male asylum seekers from Middle Eastern and African countries that recently arrived in Germany. The findings suggest that, on average, asylum seekers in our sample have 22% more years of schooling-the indicator used for human...