This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by decreasing returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, computerization improved the access to technologyadopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents,...

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability,...

Routine-intensive occupations have been declining in many countries, but how does this affect individual workers’ careers if this decline is particularly severe in their local labor market? This paper uses administrative data from Germany and a matched difference-in-differences approach to...

With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Of the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or spent years in captivity. We examine the impact of such wartime experiences on labor market careers and show that they often...

This paper utilizes a comprehensive worker-firm panel for the Netherlands to quantifythe impact of ICT capital-skill complementarity on the finance wage premium after the Global Financial Crisis. We apply additive worker and firm fixed-effect models to account for unobserved worker- and...

Motherhood and parental leave are frequent causes of worker absences and employment interruptions, yet we know little about their effects on firms. Based on linked employer-employee data from Germany, we examine how more generous leave benefits affect firm-level employment and hiring decisions....

Speculative news on corporate takeovers may hurt productivity because uncertainty and threat of job loss cause anxiety, distraction, and reduced collaboration and morale among employees and managers. Using a panel of OECD-headquartered firms, we show that firm productivity temporarily declines...

Informal care reduces work on the intensive and extensive margins; however, we do not know how caregiving affects work productivity. We link two new unique national U.S. data sets to provide the first causal estimates of the effect of providing at least 80 hours of informal care in the past...

Leveraging two cohort-specific pension reforms, this paper estimates the forwardlooking effects of an exogenous increase in the working horizon on (un)employment behaviour for individuals with a long remaining statutory working life. Using differencein-differences and regression discontinuity...

In this paper, we examine which dimensions of cognitive ability are most predictive of key financial outcomes and what pathways could account for the observed relationships. We begin by proposing a conceptual framework that accounts for several plausible "channels" through which dif- ferences in...