Over the recent decades, wide-spread automation has led to a shift of the US labor force from occupations intensive in routine tasks into occupations intensive in manual and abstract tasks. I integrate routine-biased technological change into an incomplete markets model with occupation-specific...

In this paper I investigate the causal relationship between labor market polarization and intergenerational mobility, two of the most important features of advanced labor markets in recent decades. The former relates to the disappearance of middle-wage routine jobs and the rise of both high- and...

Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many countries. Such longevity gaps affect the actuarial fairness and progressivity of public pension systems. However, behavioral responses to longevity and policy complicate...

The incentives to search for employment vary systematically over the life cycle and with idiosyncratic productivity. These variations should be accounted for when designing UI policy. Using a life cycle model with endogenous human capital accumulation and permanent differences in worker...

It has been shown that a person's relative income - compared to a reference group - has a negative impact on self-reported happiness. This suggests that people who aim at increasing their happiness should try to find a better-paid job if their relative income is low. In this paper we study this...

This paper analyzes the relationship between spatial mobility and social mobility. It develops a two-skill-type spatial equilibrium model of two regions with location preferences where each region consists of an urban area which is home to workplaces and residences and an exclusively residential...

Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for...

Over the past 50 years, the U.S. and several European labor markets have undergone two most incisive developments: job market polarization and deunionization. In this paper, we argue that routine-biased technical change is not only the driving force behind polarization, as prevalently assumed,...

This paper proposes three theoretical mechanisms through which polygyny may be related to social unrest. The mechanisms are related to different dimensions of grievance-inducing and, partly, greed-related inequality, which may occur in polygynous societies. These dimensions include (i) economic,...

We employ the German social security register data to analyze the development of wage inequality among foreigners in Germany. The data show a sharp increase of wage inequality which exceeds the size observed for natives. The decomposition methods proposed by DiNardo et al. (1996) are employed to...