This paper shows that differences in various non-cognitive traits, specifically the "big fiveʺ, positive and negative reciprocity, locus of control and risk aversion, contribute to gender inequalities in wages and employment. Using the 2004 and 2005 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel,...

This paper provides first evidence on the social returns to education from both firm-level and regional human capital. Using panel data from German social security, both at an individual and aggregated at the plant and regional level, I estimate earnings functions incorporating measures of...

This paper provides first evidence on the anatomy of human capital externalities arising from both firm-level and regional human capital. Using panel data from German social security records, both at an individual and aggregated at the plant and regional level, I estimate earnings functions...

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...

I test some predictions of Gary Becker’s theory of taste discrimination regarding discrimination of foreigners by employers, co-workers and customers. I combine a 2% sample of the German working population and a 50% sample of German plants with low-level regional data, including the vote...

Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the average wage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack of detailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newly available data...

This paper observes sexual orientation based differences in German incomes. Gay men and lesbian women sort themselves into different occupations and sectors than their heterosexual counterparts. I find evidence that cohabitating gay men have an income penalty of 9 to 10 percent compared with...

This paper considers the impact of tobacco consumption on wages in the UK using data from fifteen waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Considering both overall smoker status as well as the number of cigarettes consumed, we provide estimates for the smoking wage penalty using standard...

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 investigates the influence of industrial relations on firm wage premia in Germany. OLS regressions for the firm effects from a two-way fixed effects decomposition of workers' wages by Card, Heining, and Kline (2013) document that average premia are larger in firms bound by collective...