Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. I demonstrate that these activities had a detrimental effect on attitudes and political behavior of the affected individuals. Using survey ...
The most popular method to acquire a job is to use one's circle of acquaintances or social networks to find a position. However, in the current research, there is still no clear conclusion if this job search method has positive implications for different job outcomes such as wages. This paper studies the effects of this job search approach in the context of Germany compared to the formal...
This study uses administrative data on the universe of students in tertiary education in Germany and shows that university enrollment depends negatively on the local unemployment rate at high school graduation. This finding contradicts common evidence on countercyclical US undergraduate enrollment. Students' financial dependency and loan aversion suggest reduced parental income as dominant...
This paper aims to investigate whether Van Parijs' theory of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) can address the criticism of the lack of individual responsibility on the part of recipients. To do so, I relate this UBI theory to the results of field experiments that study the impact of UBI on employment. Theoretical and empirical results suggest that the UBI does not lead to a decrease in labor...
Higher wage dispersion may induce unemployed workers to search longer for a job by increasing their reservation wages. This paper investigates the implications of this mechanism in a job search model featuring a finite work life, showing that a mean-preserving spread of the wage offer distribution could lead to a larger increase in reservation wages of younger than older workers because the...
This article shows the potentials of georeferenced data for labor market research. We review developments in the literature and highlight areas that can benefit from exploiting georeferenced data. Moreover, we share our experiences in geocoding administrative employment data including wage and socioeconomic information of almost the entire German workforce between 2000 and 2017. To make the data easily ...
Objective: Leaders differ in their personalities from non- leaders. However, when do these differences emerge? Are leaders “born to be leaders” or does their personality change in preparation for a leadership role and due to increasing leader-ship experience? Method: Using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel Study, we examined personality differences between leaders (N = 2683 leaders, women: ...
Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age inemployment. An important at-risk group comprises older employees who have worked in demanding jobs formany years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of early retirement options. Tomeasure differences in labor market reactions of employees in low- and high-demand ...