We decompose the persistent satisfaction gap between East and West Germany into effects of objective circumstances and subjective mentality, the latter presumed to be a legacy of communist socialization. Using the methodology proposed by Senik (2014) in a cross-national context, we capture...

We combine particular features of the German civil service with the unique event of German reunification to test the theory of precautionary savings and to quantify the importance of self-selection into occupations due to differences in risk aversion. In the presence of self-selection, failing...

In a seminal paper Gibbons and Katz (1991; GK) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layouts than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers...