If people come to live in a country different from their nation state, due to border shifts, expulsion, or migration, they adopt some of the new country's habits after some time. This paper investigates their (return) migration decision when they have been restricted to live in the foreign...

A growing literature is concerned with the effects of flexible workplace systems or High Performance Work Organizations (HPWOs) on wages. This paper makes use of a new employer-employee-linked panel data set for Germany to examine the effects of adopting HPWOs on wages as well as on the wage...

Many of the recent attempts to find evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity in micro data have suffered from a number of problems, including composition bias and the effects of measurement error. In order to avoid these problems we explicitly model the determinants of wage changes and the...

The degree to which economic status is transmitted from one generation to the next is an important indicator for the inequality of opportunities. One crucial element of intergenerational mobility is the way parents influence the education of their children. Unlike in the UK or in the US, in...

This paper assesses the potential of "workplace training" with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide "optimal" training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...

According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by disabled empoyees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...

The impact of wage increases on job satisfaction are explored. First, it is empirically established that current job satisfaction rises with absolute wage level as well as with wage increases. Second, a basic job satisfaction function is constructed based on the empirical results, and...

The paper studies the determinants of labor force participation by East German women after unification. To isolate the role of preferences on labor force participation from individual characteristics, we develop a panel data model that simultaneously explains participation, employment and wages....

Folklore has it that the comparatively low proportion of self-employed in Germany is in part due to a habit that might be termed "stigmatisation of failure": taking a second chance to build one's own firm after failing as a self-employed is said to be much more difficult here than in other...