In 1996 Austria introduced a tax for the layoff of older workers, which was tightened in 2000. The regulation requires employers to pay a tax of up to 170 percent of the gross monthly income when they give notice to employees aged 50 or more. We use data from Austrian social security records to...

We study the relationship between job quality and retirement using panel data for European countries (SHARE). While previous studies looked at the impact of bad working conditions on retirement intentions, we can use the panel dimension to study actual retirement as well as other pathways out of...

This paper documents that changes in assortative mating patterns over the last four decades along the dimensions of age, ethnicity, religion and education are not responsible for the increasing marital instability in Austria. Quite the contrary, without the rise in the age at marriage, divorce...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, it is essential to distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

I investigate the effect of income on mortality of the pensioners, comparing three subsequent policy periods in Austria. The pensioners who retired in the second period received 25% lower pension than those in the first period. This reduction in income was removed in the third policy period....

In this paper, we study the socio-economic determinants of birth weight with a focus on the mother s family status. We use Austrian birth register data covering all births between 1984 and 2007 and find that a mother s marriage is associated with a higher birth weight of the newborn in a range...

Using detailed micro data on earnings and employment, I analyze the effects of immigration on the wage distribution of native male workers in Austria. I find that immigration has heterogeneous effects on wages, differing by type of work as well as the wage level. While there are small , but...

We determine workforce composition and wages in firms in the presence of productivity spill-overs between co-workers. In equilibrium, workers' wages depend on the production struc- ture of firms, own group size, and aggregate workforce composition in the firm. We estimate the wage effects of...

Seguino (2000) shows that gender wage discrimination in export-oriented semi-industrialized countries might be fostering investment and growth in general. While the original analysis does not have internationally comparable wage discrimination data, we replicate the analysis using data from a...