This paper studies the causal effects of graduating from university with an honors degree on subsequent labor market outcomes. While a rich body of literature has focused on estimating returns to human capital, few studies have analyzed returns at the very top of the education distribution. We...

Governments are often willing to subsidize firms on the verge of bankruptcy. The main economic rationale behind these interventions is that a plant closure would not only harm the workers employed in that plant, but create a domino effect on the regional economy as a whole. Yet, little is still...

This paper investigates the degree of monoposony power of German employers in different industries, using a semi-structural approach based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition. The empirical analysis is based on a linked employer-employee data set which allows us to control for...

Job polarization the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs occurred in the US not just recently, but also in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that in each case polarization resulted from increased automation, and...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

This paper investigates the behaviour of employers' monopsony power and workers' wages over the business cycle. Using German administrative linked employer--employee data for the years 1985--2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, we construct a time series of the firm-level...

The rise in global value chain (GVC) participation has coincided with significant changes in the distribution of wage income both within and across countries. This paper sets out to identify the linkages between these phenomena. It shows that GVC participation has a small effect on the...

This study empirically investigates the direct incidence of the corporate income tax through wage bargaining, using an industry-region level panel data set on all corporations in Germany over the period 1998 to 2006. Our measure of direct incidence for the first time accounts for employment...

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good...

The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector has been found to be growing further. Different accounts exist as to the cause of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital and increased wealth contrasted with push...