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...

The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...

We analyse the relation of firm performance and managerial turnover in 19th century German banking by probit estimation. This period covers a major reform of corporate governance. Before the reform performance and turnover were unrelated, whereas after the reform more successful managers left...

This paper examines the effects of changes in uncertainty of household income on the macroeconomy. Households face substantial idiosyncratic income risk that is up to two orders of magnitude larger than total factor productivity uncertainty, very persistent and varies substantially over the...

real option value effect of time-varying uncertainty.

calibration of these models.

This paper documents a new set of stylized facts on the joint distribution of labor and capital productivity across plants. We exploit panel data from Germany, Chile, Colombia and Indonesia and show that the basic patterns are similar in all economies. Decomposing factor productivities into high...

We study the relationship between cyclical job and worker flows at the plant level using a new data set spanning from 1976-2006. We find that procyclical labor demand explains relatively little of procyclical worker flows. Instead, all plants in the employment growth distribution increase their...

This paper suggests a combination procedure to exploit the imperfect correlation of cointegration tests to develop a more powerful meta test. To exemplify, we combine Engle and Granger (1987) and Johansen (1988) tests. Either of these underlying tests can be more powerful than the other one...

The cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level investment rates is procyclical. This makes investment rates different from productivity, output, and employment growth, which have countercyclical dispersions. A calibrated heterogeneous-firm business cycle model with nonconvex capital adjustment...