We reassess the empirical effect of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a novel two-step estimation procedure that allows applying instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the theory of incomplete markets, we...

We provide evidence on life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations, comparing the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about 25% of the dispersion in wages within an age group in all three countries....

This paper develops a dynamic structural model of migration decisions that is aggregated to describe the behavior of interregional migration. Our structural approach allows us to deal with dynamic self-selection problems that arise from the endogeneity of location choice and the persistence of...

Differences in regional unemployment rates are often used to describe regional economic inequality. This paper asks whether changes in regional unemployment differences in West Germany are persistent over time. Only if such changes are persistent, the differences are a sensible measure of...

This paper develops a tractable dynamic microeconomic model of migration decisions that is aggregated to describe the behavior of interregional migration. Our structural approach allows us to deal with dynamic self-selection problems that arise from the endogeneity of location choice and the...

In Germany, there is a vivid political debate on introducing a general statutory minimum wage. In this paper, we study the effects of minimum wages on labor supply using a structural household model where we distinguish between married and single households. In the model, labor supply of married...

In recessions, predominantly men lose their jobs, which has given rise to the term "man-cessions". We analyze whether fiscal expansions bring men back into jobs. To do so, we estimate vector-autoregressive models and identify the effects of fiscal shocks and non-fiscal shocks on the gender...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...