Politicians seeking reelection need voters to know what they have done for them. Thus, incentives may arise to spend more money where media coverage is higher. We present a simple model to explain the allocation of public spending across jurisdictions contingent on media activity. An incumbent...

This paper complements previous studies on the effects of health on wages by addressing the problems of unobserved heterogeneity, sample selection, and endogeneity in one comprehensive framework. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we find the health variable to suffer from...

This paper theoretically and empirically examines the impact of self-managed working time (SMWT) on employee effort. As a means of increased worker autonomy, SMWT can theoretically increase effort via intrinsic motivation and reciprocal behaviour, but can lead to a decrease of effort due to a...

The present paper examines the joint effect of fixed-term employment and work organization on job satisfaction using individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Specifically, we analyze whether workers who are heterogeneous in terms of the type of working contract...

Existing evidence on peer effects in a work environment stems from either laboratory experiments or from real-word studies referring to a specific firm or specific occupation. Yet, it is unclear to what extent these findings apply to the labor market in general. In this paper, therefore, we...

While available evidence suggests that the events of September 11th negatively influenced the relative earnings of employees with Arab background in the US, it is not clear that they had similar effects in other countries. Our study for Germany provides evidence that the events also affected the...

Using German employee data, we find that being raised by two religious parents and having no current religious affiliation is associated with higher earnings. This conforms to the hypothesis that people who are raised religiously and reject religion as adults are economically more successful as...

The 1/n problem potentially limits the effectiveness of profit sharing in motivating workers. While the economic literature suggests that reciprocity can mitigate this problem, it remains silent on the optimal degree of reciprocity. We present a representative model demonstrating that...

Existing evidence on peer effects in a work environment stems from either laboratory experiments or from real-word studies referring to a specific firm or specific occupation. Yet, it is unclear to what extent these findings apply to the labor market in general. In this paper, therefore, we...