This paper investigates the impact of air pollution on reservation wages. We use rich survey data on unemployed job seekers in Germany and exploit variation in individual exposure to fine particulate matter (PM10) based on the quasi-random allocation of interview slots to individuals. Our...

In this paper we provide the first evidence on workers' perceptions of the returns to job search effort. The perceived job finding probability is nearly linear in hours searched and only slightly concave for most respondents. While workers are over-optimistic about the probability of receiving a...

This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported...

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...

Stylized facts show that migrants more often face overqualified employment than natives. As shown by previous research, one third of the employed foreign born with tertiary education in the EU-15 are overqualified, with levels reaching up to 57.6%, compared to 20.9% among natives. Among the...

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...