A large body of evidence suggests that social comparisons matter for workers' valuation of the wage they receive. The consequences of social comparisons in imperfectly competitive labor markets are less well understood. We analyze an oligopsonistic model of the labor market where workers derive...

When countries need to implement costly economic policy reforms, these often imply uncertainties about their effectiveness for the home country and their spillovers to other countries. We develop a model to show that under these circumstances countries implement too few or too many policy...

What are the incentives for governments to coordinate their policies internationally when there is model disagreement and uncertainty? We build a model where countries disagree on policy targets and how policies affect the economies, and show that uncertainty not only determines the type of...

Empirical studies show that female workers are under-represented in highest hierarchical positions of companies, which is known as the glass-ceiling effect. In this study we investigate the relationship between social networks and the glass-ceiling effect. Specifically, we develop an equilibrium...

Retrospective voting may be an effective instrument for overcoming moral hazard of politicians if voters evaluate the performance of elected representatives correctly. Whether democratic experience helps them to properly assess a policymaker's performance is less well understood. We analyze...

When countries need to implement costly economic policy reforms, these often imply uncertainties about their effectiveness for the homecountry and their spillovers to other countries. We develop a model to show that under these circumstances countries implement too few or too many policy...

Summary Evidence on the role of chaotic and nonlinear dynamics on labor markets is mixed. It is unclear whether nonlinear relationships are responsible for the dynamic patterns observed in Europe during the past decades. In this paper, we test German labor market data for the null hypothesis of...

Summary We develop an agent-based macroeconomic model featuring a distinct geographical dimension and heterogeneous workers with respect to skill types. The model, which will become part of a larger simulation platform for European policymaking (EURACE), allows us to conduct exante evaluations...

Labor courts play an important role in determining the effective level of labor market regulation in Germany, but their application of law may not be even-handed. Based on a simple theoretical model and a new panel data set, we identify a nomination bias in labor court activity - that is, court...