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...

This paper measures the impact of sectoral composition, international trade and technological progress on the rising wage gap in Germany. I find a positive effect of the increasing importance of services on the rising wage gap in Germany that is comparable to the effects of international trade...

This paper measures the impact of sectoral composition, international trade and technological progress on the rising wage gap in Germany. I find a positive effect of the increasing importance of services on the rising wage gap in Germany that is comparable to the effects of international trade...

This paper examines the determinants of functional income distribution in West Germany. The approach is to estimate a complete system of factor share equations for low-skilled labor, high-skilled labor, capital, energy, and materials, taking account of biased technological progress and...

This paper considers labor market adjustments following a large import shock in the German clothing industry caused by the phasing out of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. Using the German shoe industry as a control group and administrative data, we study adjustments on the individual and firm level...

This paper uses unique new data for German manufacturing enterprises from matched regular surveys and a special purpose survey to investigate the causal effect of relocation of activities to a foreign country on various dimensions of firm performance. Enterprises that relocated activities abroad...

This paper studies the effects of import competition from China and Eastern Europe (EE) on the fertility decisions of individuals in German manufacturing. Through the lens of gender, the paper uniquely contributes to the literature by linking import competition to longitudinal individual data to...

In this paper, we empirically assess the causal relationship between trade and individual income risk and study the role that human capital plays in this relationship using a rich, worker-level, longitudinal data set from Germany spanning from 1976 to 2012. Our estimates suggest substantial...

From the early 1990s until 2005 the unemployment rate rose in Germany from 7.3% to 11.7%. While the unemployment rate reached its peak in 2005, it decreased steadily in the following years. On the one hand, the fourth stage of the German labor market reform (Hartz IV) was implemented in 2005...

This paper studies the economic and political effects of a large trade shock in agriculture - the grain invasion from the Americas - in Prussia during the first globalisation (1871-1913). We show that this shock accelerated the structural change in the Prussian economy through migration of...