We use the German Socio-Economic Panel to show that introducing a high-impact statutory minimum wage causes an increase in reservation wages of approximately 4 percent at the low end of the distribution. The shifts in reservation wages and observed wages due to the minimum wage reform are...

While the first chapter provides only indirect evidence on the underlying behavioral channels, in the second chapter I develop a novel approach that allows to learn about the relative impor- tance of the two key margins of job search - reservation wage choice and search effort. In the framework...

Occupational prestige or job status may induce people to remain unemployed even when jobs are available. Thus measured unemployment will always have a voluntary component. Accumulated wealth in a family tends to increase the opportunity cost of job search, more so in a world where job status is...

We evaluate the impacts of a randomized job-fair intervention in which jobseekers and employers can meet at low cost. The intervention generates few hires, but it lowers participants' expectations and causes both firms and workers to invest more in search as predicted by a theoretical model;...

By using unique web-survey data, this paper assesses the gender wage gap in Polish academia. We conduct a detailed study of the gender gap considering monthly salaries and reservation wages. The study involves regression analysis, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of mean wage differentials and...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...