This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

The enlargement of the European Union in 2004 to new members from beyond the former Iron Curtain could increase the attractiveness of the whole European continent for firms concerned about competitiveness. The competitive advantage of new members is derived mostly from labor productivity, and...

This paper examines the relationship between product demand and the pattern of rising skill premia and rising employment of skilled workers in the US and the UK since the 1980s. If more skilled workers demand more skill-intensive goods, then an increase in relative skill supply will also induce...

We study the distributional effects of preferential tax policies for FDI using China’s corporate income tax unification reform as a natural experiment. We first present a simple model to motivate our empirical analysis. Using a differential exposure approach, we then show that eliminating...

This paper examines the wage and job satisfaction effects of over-education and overskilling among migrants graduating from EU-15 based universities in 2005. Female migrants with shorter durations of domicile were found to have a higher likelihood of overskilling. Newly arrived migrants incurred...

This paper examines the determinants of gross labour flows in a context where modeling the migration decision as a wage-maximizing process may be inadequate due to regional wage rigidities that result from central wage bargaining. In such a context, the framework that has been developed by...

This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey, a new international dataset of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich, previously unavailable, set of factors in the...

We quantify firm heterogeneity in skill returns and present direct evidence of worker–firm complementarities. Within a model of firms' demand for cognitive and noncognitive attributes we show that identification depends on the availability of skill measures. Linking administrative data to test...

As governments worldwide increase their commitments to tackling climate change, the number of low-carbon jobs are expected to grow rapidly. Here we provide evidence on the characteristics of low-carbon jobs in the US using comprehensive online job postings data between 2010-2019. By accurately...

Using a panel of corporate transactions in 27 EU countries from 1999 to 2012, we investigate the impact of the financial crisis on the market for corporate assets. In particular, we test the 'fire-sale FDI' hypothesis by analyzing the number of cross-border transactions, the price of corporate...