Using a microeconomic model and data from the Establishment Panel of the German Institute for Employment Research, we analyze the optimal establishment size against the background of rent-seeking workers and the influence of works councils. The theoretical part shows that establishment size has...

This paper uses data from an Internet-based CV database to investigate how factors which may be used as a basis for discrimination, such as the searchers' ethnicity, gender, age and employment status, affect the number of contacts they receive from firms. Since we have access to essentially the...

In an analysis of the formation of unions within a single firm, this paper addresses conditions under which encompassing unions form. It is shown that a production function satisfying decreasing marginal productivity leads to the formation of encompassing unions. This result holds for different...

The focus of this paper is on the use of staff policy recommendations in central banks. Based on the responses to a recent survey conducted by the Bank of International Settlements, the paper tries to answer two questions. (1) How (to what extent) do central bank decision-makers make use of...

In this paper I address the question to what extent wages are affected by product market uncertainty. Implicit contract models imply that it is Pareto optimal for risk neutral firms to provide insurance to risk averse workers against shocks. Using matched employer-employee dataset, I adopted the...

How valuable are cognitive and social abilities for entrepreneurs’ incomes as compared to employees? We answer three questions: (1) To what extent does a composite measure of ability affect an entrepreneur's earnings relative to employees? (2) Do different cognitive abilities (e.g. math...

We study the employees' demand for hospital parking. We estimate the effect of the employees' parking price on demand using a difference-in-differences methodology. The deadweight loss generated by non-optimal pricing of parking is at least 9% of the hospitals' parking resource costs.

In many workplaces co-workers have the best information about each other's effort. Managers may attempt to exploit this information through peer evaluation. I study peer evaluation in a pure moral hazard model of production by two limitedly liable agents. Agents receive a signal about their...