There is a successful and growing number of studies published in top-economics journals that exploit the division and re-unification of Germany as a natural experiment for analysing the effects of political regimes on economic behaviour. One strand of the literature shows that socialism shaped...

Empirical research on agglomeration and regional economic growth puts high emphasis on the impact of specialization, diversity, and competition on regional employment dynamics (Glaeser et al. 1992, Henderson et al. 1995, Blien et al. 2006, Fuchs 2009). However, Beugelsdijk (2006) and Raspe/van...

This paper studies the effects of investment tax credits on firms' input choices by exploitinga sudden shift in the tax credit rate by firm size for manufacturing firms in Germany in 1999. I find that more generous tax credits lead to a significant increase in both investment and employment,...

This paper presents a search model with heterogeneous workers, social networks and endogenous search intensity. There are three job search channels available to the unemployed: costly formal applications and two costless informal channels - through family and professional networks. The gain from...

The positive dynamics of the national economy in relation to the generation of jobs formal has been an issue that has generated a great deal of interest in Brazilian society and, consequently, has gained much space in more different vehicles of communication, in the course of the last decade....

This paper develops a labour market matching model with heterogeneous firms, on-thejob search and referrals. Social capital is endogenous, so that better connected workers bargain higher wages for a given level of productivity. This is a positive effect of referrals on reservation wages. At the...

In spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries, little is known about informal sector income dynamics vis-à-vis the formal sector. Some works have been done in this field using household surveys, but they only consider some emerging Latin American countries and a few...

I test some predictions of Gary Becker’s theory of taste discrimination regarding discrimination of foreigners by employers, co-workers and customers. I combine a 2% sample of the German working population and a 50% sample of German plants with low-level regional data, including the vote...

On the basis of a structural labor demand model employment effects of a minimum wage are estimated from a single cross-sectional wage distribution. The main contribution of the paper is to relax restrictive functional form assumptions of earlier papers by introducing more flexible...

The empirical evidence on the incidence of payroll taxation is primarily based on the wage bill of firms. This paper applies matched employer-employee register data on individual wages for all private sector workers in Norway. Exploiting a payroll tax reform and using the...