This paper evaluates the strength of information flow from employed past coworkers on the re-employment duration of displaced workers due to plant closures in Austria. Using the Austrian Social Security Database (a matched employer-employee database) we exploit the panel structure of 36 years of...

Social networks are an important channel of information transmission in the labor market. In this paper investigate how displaced workers searching for new jobs benefit from information provided by their former coworkers. In line with the theoretical and empirical literature we find that the...

The long-term earnings losses of displaced workers are substantial. We investigate the role of post-displacement occupational matching in explaining the cost of job displacement. We combine German administrative data on the work history of displaced workers with information on the task content...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a bipartite network. Coordination frictions arise if workers and firms only observe their own links. We show that those frictions and the wage mechanism are in general not independent. Only wage mechanisms that allow for ex post competition...

Job polarization is a widely documented phenomenon in developed countries since the 1980s: employment has been shifting from middle to low- and high-income workers, while average wage growth has been slower for middle-income workers than at both extremes. We document 1) that polarization has...

We assess the relevance of formal education on the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to...

Over the last decades, the United States and other developed countries have experienced profound job polarization whereby employment in high-skill and low-skill occupations increased at the expense of employment in middle-skill occupations. This paper examines the wage effects of job...

The German employment miracle with a weak decline in employment and low unemployment during the great recession seems to be a good example for a successful labour market reform. While the aggregate level of job turnover seems to be stable over time, there are nevertheless concerns about rising...

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...

We provide difference-in-differences evidence from Germany on the effect of deregulating weekday shop opening hours on employment in food retailing. Using data on the universe of German shops, we find that relaxing restrictions on business hours increased employment by 0.4 workers per shop...