The economic impact of the 2007-2009 increases in the federal minimum wage (MW) isanalyzed using a sample of quick-service restaurants in Georgia and Alabama. Store-levelbiweekly payroll records for individual employees are used, allowing us to precisely measurethe MW compliance cost for each...

Many previous studies try to discover job preferences by directly asking individuals. Since itis not sure, whether answers to these surveys are relevant for actual behaviour, this empiricalexamination offers a new approach based on representative German data. Employees whoquit their job and find...

We address the long standing question of whether production factors are paid their marginalproducts. We propose a new approach that circumvents the need to specify productionfunctions and to compare marginal products to factor payments. Our approach is based on asimple equation that directly...

The robust empirical finding that exporting firms are systematically different from firms thatmerely serve domestic consumers has inspired the development of a new brand of tradetheory, the theory of heterogeneous firms and trade. The establishment of a canonical modeldue to Melitz (2003) has...

We estimate the responses of gross labor earnings with respect to marginal and average netof-tax rates in France over the period 2003-2006. We exploit a series of reforms to theincome-tax and the payroll-tax schedules that affect individuals who earn less than twice theminimum wage. Our estimate...

Drivers of entrepreneurial entry are investigated in this study by examining how entry intosmall-business ownership is shaped by industry-specific constraints. The human- andfinancial-capital endowments of potential entrepreneurs entering firms in various industriesare shown to differ...

Skill shortages are often portrayed as a major problem for the economies of many countriesincluding the Australian economy. Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence about theirprevalence, causes and consequences. This paper attempts to improve our understandingabout these issues by using...

This paper contributes to the already vast literature on demography-induced internationalcapital flows by examining the role of labor market imperfections and institutions. We setup atwo-country overlapping generations model with search unemployment, which we calibrateon EU15 and US data. Labor...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – inparticular instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling forfinancial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed householdsparticularly use personal...

The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact onnational labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also variedgreatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurancebenefits and minimum...