I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...

This paper looks inside the firm and investigates how trade alters the matching of worker-specific abilities and task-specific requirements. The outcome of this matching depends on how firms organize their recruitment process and how much they invest into the screening of applicants. In the open...

We investigate dynamic coordination among members of a problem-solving team who receive private signals about which of their actions are required for a (static) coordinated solution and who have repeated opportunities to explore different action combinations. In this environment ordinal...

The longer an agent is employed in a job, the more the principal will have learned about his ability through the history of performance. With implicit incentives, influence perceptions and effort incentives decrease over time. Rotating agents to a different job deletes learning effects about...

We specify and estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of labor supply, retirement and savings decisions of single-adult and couple households. Drawing on our model, we study the interplay between family labor supply and public insurance mechanisms. By including family labor supply, we...

Although discrete hours choice models have become the workhorse in labor supply analyses. Yet, they are often criticized for being a black box due to their numerous underlying modeling assumptions, with respect to, e.g., the functional form, unobserved error components or several exogeneity...

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of...

Job polarization is a widely documented phenomenon in developed countries since the 1980s: employment has been shifting from middle to low- and high-income workers, while average wage growth has been slower for middle-income workers than at both extremes. We document 1) that polarization has...

We consider a bargaining model in which husband and wife decide on the allocation of time and disposable income. Since her bargaining power would go down otherwise more strongly, the wife agrees to having a child only if the husband also leaves the labor market for a while. The daddy months...

This paper analyzes the question why desired and actual sharing of market work and family duties among parents with young children in Germany fall apart. Potential explanations include financial incentives favoring the single-earner model, as well as constraints in choosing working hours due to...