This study analyzes the effect of education on the number of children, childlessness, and the timing of the first birth. We use exogenous variation from a mandatory reform to compulsory schooling in West Germany to deal with the endogeneity of schooling. In contrast to studies for other...

We develop the hypotheses that the size of training firms affects long-run cumulated unemployment exposure, and that the access to large training firms depends on young workers ability and their luck to live in a region with many large and medium-sized training firms. We test these hypotheses...

To assess to what extent collective job displacements can be regarded as unanticipated exogenous shocks for affected employees, we analyze plant-level employment patterns before bankruptcy, plant closure without bankruptcy, and mass layoff. Utilizing administrative data covering all West German...

This paper uses panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to analyze welfare entry and exit among natives and immigrants after a substantial reform of the welfare system (``Hartz reform''). Using results from dynamic multinomial logit models, we calculate transition matrices between...