We document the importance of non-pecuniary aspects in employment relationships by showing that labour supply elasticities differ significantly among individuals’ job characteristics. Factor analysis indicates the relevance of four characteristics: autonomy, workload, variety and job security....

This paper reexamines the relation between minimum wages and labor market outcomes for teenagers in the US. Economic theory suggests that real minimum wages drive labor market outcomes. Instead of the commonly used nominal minimum wages, we therefore use real minimum wages to examine this...

The theoretical literature argues that labor markets outcomes are affected by real minimum wages. Real minimum wages, however, co-move with the business cycle; their correlation with labor market outcomes should therefore not be interpreted causally. We employ structural vector autoregression to...

This paper reexamines the relation between minimum wages and labor market outcomes for teenagers in the US. Economic theory suggests that real minimum wages drive labor market outcomes. Instead of the commonly used nominal minimum wages, we therefore use real minimum wages to examine this...

It is well known that smoking causes severe adverse health effects, and it seems evident that governments are justified or even obliged to implement measures of tobacco control to mitigate these effects. Yet, as this paper argues with a distinct focus on Germany, the three most important and...

Individual cognitive functioning declines over time. We seek to understand how adverse physical health shocks in older ages contribute to this development. By use of event-study methods and data from the USA, England and several countries in Continental Europe we find evidence that health shocks...

We study the effect of unemployment on cognitive abilities among individuals aged between 50 and 65 in Europe. To this end, we exploit plant closures and use flexible event-study estimations together with an experimentally elicited measure of fluid intelligence, namely word recall. We find that,...

Informal care reduces work on the intensive and extensive margins; however, we do not know how caregiving affects work productivity. We link two new unique national U.S. data sets to provide the first causal estimates of the effect of providing at least 80 hours of informal care in the past...

This paper considers the role of ownership form for the financial performance of German acute care hospitals and its development over time. We measure financial performance by a hospital-specific yearly probability of default (PD). Using a panel of hospital data, our models allow for state...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for...