Many cities in developing countries suffer from bad health and environmental conditions due to urbanization. The paper shows that increasing urban manufacturing congestion costs do not necessarily imply a reduction of a city's health as well as of environmental quality as one could expect...

This paper estimates the effects of regional mobility on individual employment prospects and wages, exploiting rich German social security data spanning over 30 years. Our focus is on unemployed workers with strong labor force attachment who search for employment after being exposed to a mass...

This study addresses the question whether policy makers strategically pick winners when selecting the targets for place-based revitalization policies. It evaluates the influence of long-term trends of the unemployment rate and the share of residents of immigrant background on the probability of...

Offshoring is often found to be associated with an increase of wage inequality between low- and high-skilled. This is interpreted as a relative decrease of low-skilled labor demand. However, the effect of offshoring on relative labor demand is ambiguous, since low-skilled workers may benefit...

Using administrative data for West Germany, we investigate whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first document fewer search frictions in denser labour markets. We further show that controlling for search frictions lowers the wage...

This paper investigates the sources of the significantly higher labor force participation of East Ger-man women as compared to their peers in West Germany. The previous literature attributes this to a legacy of socialist labor market policies. This study challenges this hypothesis and...

This paper investigates the effect of the size of the local labour market on skill mismatch. Using survey data for Germany, we find that male workers in large cities are both less likely to be overqualified for their job and to work in a different field than the one they are trained for....

An examination of regional unemployment rates reveals that there are vast differences which cannot be explained by different institutional. Our paper traces these differences in the regions labour market performance back to the regions specialisation in products that are more or less advanced in...

Tax legislation in virtually all OECD countries foresees tax breaks for commuters. Such commuting allowances are implemented with the aim to raise matching efficiency in the labor market and / or to promote an equalization of net wages for workers independent of the length of their commute....

In applied regional analysis, statistical information is usually published at different territorial levels with the aim of providing information of interest for different potential users. When using this information, there are two different choices: first, to use normative regions (towns,...