In the present paper I provide novel evidence on the formation of the gender pay gap with respect to directly measured job task contents. Using high-quality administrative employment data for Germany, and augmenting these by individual-level task information, I provide detailed evidence on the...

Job polarization the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs occurred in the US not just recently, but also in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that in each case polarization resulted from increased automation, and...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

This paper investigates the behaviour of employers' monopsony power and workers' wages over the business cycle. Using German administrative linked employer--employee data for the years 1985--2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, we construct a time series of the firm-level...

This study empirically investigates the direct incidence of the corporate income tax through wage bargaining, using an industry-region level panel data set on all corporations in Germany over the period 1998 to 2006. Our measure of direct incidence for the first time accounts for employment...

This paper uses German linked employer-employee data in order to estimate the impact of intra-firm wage dispersion on the probability that firms pay for continuous training. About half of all firms in the estimation sample cover all direct and indirect training costs, which contradicts the...

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good...

The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector has been found to be growing further. Different accounts exist as to the cause of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital and increased wealth contrasted with push...

This paper analyzes the evolution of wage inequality and wage mobility separately for men and women in West and East Germany over the last four decades. Using a large administrative data set which covers the years 1975 to 2008, I find that wage inequality increased and wage mobility decreased...

Empirical studies find that the age-variance profile of wages is U-shaped. The objective of this paper is to explore the driving forces of the U-shape in a model with search frictions. I introduce endogenous search effort and a fixed retirement age into Cahuc, Postel-Vinay, and Robin s (2006)...