This paper studies wage effects and job mobility as a result of skill mismatch in worker- occupation pairs. I develop a Roy model in which learning on the job induces workers to shift more time towards job-specific activities. Using a short task panel containing data on worker’s time...

We show that providing publicly available wage information in vacancies, so-called external pay transparency, can reduce the gender wage gap. There is an increasing interest in pay transparency policies as a tool to combat unequal pay. We exploit a reform of Austria’s Equal Treatment Law to...

This paper introduces a two-stage union-oligopoly-council model of wage and employment determination wherein at the first stage wage is negotiated through collective bargaining and at the second stage employment in each firm is co-determined by the employer and its works council. We provide a...

In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises still defy explanation. Several causes have been suggested (but not tested) in the literature. Many of these causes are proximate in nature, reflecting behavioral...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

This paper studies the persistence of a large, unexpected, and regionally very unevenly distributed population shock, the inflow of eight million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II. Using detailed census data from 1939 to 1970, we show that the shock had a...

We quantify differences in the retirement age between manual and non-manual workers and evaluate these differences in the context of the literature on equality of opportunity. The focus is on the question how individual background during childhood transmits through physical demands of...

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linked employer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows.The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity in this context, taking into account both observed and...

In Germany we observe a decline in regular employment and an increase in atypical forms of employment. Especially marginal part-time employment which is characterized by lower tax rates and lower social security contributions increased substantially after a reform in 2003 made this type of...

Using a semi-structural approach based on a dynamic monopsony model, we examine to what extent workers performing different job tasks are exposed to different degrees of monopsony power, and whether these differences in monopsony power have changed over the last 30 years. We find that workers...