The US economy has endured an exceptionally severe recession caused by the measures put in place to contain the spread of COVID-19. This occasional paper assesses the impact of this crisis on key labour market variables, such as (un-) employment, wages and productivity, and highlights the...

This thesis consists of five independent chapters, studying how economic agents respond to unanticipated shocks. Chapter 1 shows that a well-intentioned policy can create unintended barrier to voting by creating seemingly small shocks to voting costs. Election administrators in Munich control...

This dissertation consists of four essays in the economics of digital transformation and specifically considers the link between geography and digitalization in the know-ledge economy.

In Germany, inequality of net equivalized income increased noticeably in the first half of the new millennium. We aim to identify the main drivers of this rise in income inequality since the early 1990s. We provide a broad overview of the circumstances under which inequality evolved, i.e. which...

Fears of job losses and of increasing inequality loom large in current debates on how globalization is affecting our economies. By fundamentally changing the organization of production and work, globalization creates complex and changing patterns of winners and losers. Globalization thus creates...

Um einen genaueren Einblick in die Auswirkungen des Mindestlohns auf das Tarifgeschehen zu gewinnen, hat das Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln im März 2017 Experteninterviews zum Tarifgeschehen in acht Branchen geführt. Alle Experten wurden telefonisch befragt. Die einzelnen Gespräche...

Against the backdrop of continuing adjustment in EU labour markets in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) conducted the third wave of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey in 2014-15 as a follow-up to the two previous WDN...

Die Studie analysiert aktuelle Entwicklungen und Trends in den Ländern Zentral- und Osteuropas sowie Süd- und Südosteuropas und deren Implikationen für die österreichische Regionalpolitik. Das Ziel der Studie ist, einen Beitrag zur Evaluierung der gegenwärtigen Regionalpolitik innerhalb...

Despite notable improvements in the labour market since 2013, wage growth in the euro area was subdued and substantially overpredicted in 2013-17. This paper summarises the findings of an ESCB expert group on the reasons for low wage growth and provides comparable analyses on wage developments...