Since its inception, the traditional form of providing survivor benefits through public pension schemes has lost much of its legitimacy. As a result of fundamental changes in marriage behaviour and the typical division of labour between married spouses, offering non-contributory benefits of this...

US labor productivity in ICT-skill intensive industries experienced tremendousincreases in post–1995 trend growth compared to Germany, while other (non-ICT-skillintensive) industries showed similar growth trends in both countries. Examining thesource of industry productivity growth in German...

Empirical literature has found evidence in favour of household bargaining models.In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use childpreference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining topublic household goods. In the empirical...

Extending the common baseline model in various dimensions does not fundamentally change the low contribution of labor quality to productivity growth in Germany. Labor quality growth is low owing to a small increase in the share of workers with higher education, a negative contribution from a...

The statutory pension system is still the most important income source among seniorcitizens in Germany. Due to increasing disruptions in employment biographies since the1970s and due to the mass unemployment in Eastern Germany since the 1990s, there isa growing fear of post-retirement poverty in...

Attendance of pre-primary institutions is positively associated with PISA test scores inmost countries. Several indicators of structural quality of pre-primary education areidentified that can account for the variation in the estimated coefficients on pre-primaryattendance across countries,...

This study was prepared by Martin Schlotter while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in June 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Econcomics at the University of Munich in November 2011. It addresses the effects of different early...

Business cycle indicators based on the balance statistics are a widely used method tomonitor the actual economic situation. In contrast to official data, indicators frombusiness surveys are early available and typically not revised after their first publication.But as surveys can be in general...

In this paper we account for observed management practice in the estimation of aproduction function. In our model management practice is observable and we allow it toaffect output directly (neutral shift) and indirectly by affecting input productivity. Thisformulation gives us a semiparametric...

In theoretical trade models with variable markups and collective wage bargaining, exportexposure may reduce the exporter wage premium. We test this prediction using linkedGerman employer-employee data from 1996 to 2007. To separate the rent-sharingmechanism from assortative matching, we exploit...