Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers' wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent labour force surveys. In 2015, South Africa...

Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine the short-term impact of strengthening...

The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate homogenous and heterogeneous private returns to...

This paper is related to the literature on the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the labour market of host countries. Labour market literature has focused on the demand side of FDI; that is, increasing wage inequality by demanding more skilled workers or just increasing the overall...

This doctoral thesis analyses the impact of education and other determinants on labour market outcomes using microeconometric methods. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction. Chapter 2 uses a randomised field experiment among German human resource managers to evaluate which skill signals such as...

This paper addresses the question of why prolonged regional unemployment differentials tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages in the highunemployment regions have fallen relative to those in the low-unemployment regions). We suggest that the...

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...

Standard economic theory assumes that individual risk taking decisions are independent from the social context. Recent experimental evidence however shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. In particular, subjects strive for balance in the...

This paper documents the short run and long run behavior of the search and matching model with staggered Nash wage bargaining. It turns out that there is a strong tradeoff inherent in assuming that previously bargained sticky wages apply to new hires. If sticky wages apply to new hires, then the...

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...