Topic Labor and Employment

The Persistence of Employment Gaps in Couples

A Star Was Born: How Workers Respond to Politically-Charged Job Postings (with Pawel Adrjan, Mária Balgová, Simon Jäger, and Jason Sockin)

Migration and native health: new evidence from employer-employee data

This paper evaluates the effects of immigration on health in the workplace. Using rich linked employer-employee data, I demonstrate that firms with a higher concentration of foreign workers experience lower rates of long-term sick leave among native employees. The effect on the total sick rate is smaller in magnitude. The results are consistent with foreign employment alleviating understaffing and...

Relief through software? A linear probability model on the relationship between digitalization, semi-automation and work intensity in acute nursing care

This study asks how work intensity differs between nurses that work in three different hospital settings: 1) non-digitalized hospital, 2) digitalized hospital and 3) digitalized+semi-automated hospital. Theoretical and political expectations are that nurses experience less work intensity with higher digital maturity of the hospital. The digital transformation of hospitals is a current political...

The effect of pension reforms on old age poverty

This project analyses various reform and labour market scenarios with regard to their impact on old-age poverty in the period up to 2045. These are changes to the lower limit for the level of protection in the GRV (holding lines), the pension adjustment rule, a higher retirement age, a generous exemption scheme for pension income from the GRV for basic security, and increased gainful employment at...

Stock market participation, remote work, and inequality

Stock market participation jumped upwards in Germany in the year 2020 by about 25%. A major cause for this was the enforced use of remote work. We show this by repeating a benchmark study with demanding data requests and adding remote work to the explanatory variables. Moreover, we implement an instrumental variables estimation based on commuting distance and work-from- home capacity. The...

Pension and Long-Term Care Expectations: Evidence from Germany

Two significant drivers of a person's financial situation in old age are pension income and costs for long-term care dependence. Both are unknown when the person makes her most important financial decisions, which makes it particularly interesting to understand her beliefs about them and how they influence her choices. In a representative survey, we elicit detailed expectations about individuals...

Gender differences and stereotypes in media coverage of company board members

Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions in the corporate sector such as on company boards. One of the reasons for this underrepresentation are gender stereotypes on the skill distribution, social and occupational roles, personality traits, and how they affect labor market decision making. Media plays an important role in transporting gender stereotypes. In this paper we...

Short-time Work vs. Unemployment: Gendered Differences in Labour Market Outcomes

In the recent economic crises, Germany has made use of job retention schemes and in particular short-time work benefits ('Kurzarbeit') to tackle shocks in labor demand. Under these schemes, workers have not been laid off and received unemployment benefits, but reduced their working hours (or stopped working) for a limited amount of time while receiving short-time leave benefits. While the effect...

Increasing disability benefits: selection and labor market effects.

We study the incentive and labor market effects of disability benefit programs using unique policy variation in Germany. In 2014, disability benefits of new recipients were increased considerably while eligibility criteria were not changed. We exploit this quasi-experimental policy variation to test the implications at two different margins. First, we analyze to what extent an increase in the...