Households in developing countries are frequently hit by severe idiosyncratic and covariate shocks resulting in high consumption volatility. A household's currently observed poverty status might therefore not be a good indicator of the household's general poverty risk, or in other words its...

An increasing interest in poverty dynamics has lately also led to an extensive literature on the analysis of chronic poverty. Based on Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking work on capabilities and functionings static poverty measures have long used non-income indicators. In contrast, measures of...

This study analyzes the impact of gender and ethnic discrimination on redistributive preferences and productivity using a large online experiment with US citizens on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Participants are randomly allocated to different payment schemes for a real-effort task. Four payment...

In this paper we investigate whether the extension of the entitlement to unemployment benefits in the mid 80s can explain the increase in the unemployment rates of unskilled and elder workers in western Germany. To answer this question we estimate a version of the Burdett-Mortensen search...

We develop and estimate a non-stationary job search model to evaluate a scheme that monitors job search effort and sanctions insured unemployed whose effort is deemed insufficient. The model reveals that such schemes provide incentives to the unemployed to front-load search effort prior to...

We introduce different skill groups and production functions into the Burdett- Mortensen equilibrium search model. Supermodularity in the production process leads to a positive intrafirm wage correlation between skill groups. Theory implies that increasing returns to scale can lead to a unimodal...