There will be three (15 to 20 minutes each) presentations, followed by a short discussion.
This paper explores how the motherhood effect on earnings evolves amid rising childlessness, using population-wide administrative data from South Korea, where fertility has fallen to the world's lowest level.
Using an event study design, we find that earnings losses after childbirth have increased across recent cohorts of mothers. Evidence suggests that the expansion of parental leave and increasingly positive selection into motherhood - toward women with higher earnings and stronger family preferences - contributed to this trend.
The results indicate that as fertility declines and selection grows more salient, the motherhood effect may persist, even as overall gender earnings gaps narrow.
This study is about the effect of finding a job through one’s social contact on starting wages. Using combined SOEP-INKAR data for Germany and propensity score analysis - both matching and weighting - we document that referral hiring is associated with a wage penalty of 10%. This penalty is stable over time. Separating by the type of the social contact, we find that referrals from former colleagues are associated with a 9% wage premium compared to a direct formal application. In contrast, referrals from friends are associated with a 7% wage penalty.
Our results highlight persistent self-selection of workers on observable and unobservable characteristics. Using information from a short test of cognitive abilities (symbol digit test) we document that workers recommended by former colleagues perform best in the ability test, consistent with the predictions from a sorting model. The lowest performance is recorded for those relying on the help of their friends. The effects are primarily driven by the sub-sample of women. No significant differences across search channels are found for personality traits.
This study is about developing a unified cost-benefit framework of climate, nature conservation and land policies under risk and uncertainty. We derive modified Hotelling rules from a social planner’s welfare optimization.
Four forces jointly determine market design: First, discounted marginal climate damages enter the social cost of carbon (SCC), marginal ecosystem services the social value of nature (SVN) and the marginal product of land determines the social value of converted land (SVCL). Second, climate, nature and land are coupled, which raises all prices: degradation of ecosystems increases the SCC and the SVCL, while climate damages raise the SVN. Third, a climate-nature beta quantifies additional hedging components of policies against fat tails, when we consider a stochastic setting with exogenous random shocks. The climate-nature beta summarizes the option values for abatement, adaptation, ecosystem restoration and carbon dioxide removal. Fourth, Markov markups quantify tipping risks, which we capture by extending the model to a constrained Markov decision process with state-contingent transition probabilities.
Thereby, we endogenize tipping points: the likelihood of moving into a high-damage regime becomes a function of the atmospheric carbon stock and natural capital, which depend on policy choices. Thus, hazard risks are a policy-sensitive component of the system’s dynamics. The model yields state-contingent asset-pricing formulas for carbon prices, restoration subsidies, taxes on land use and land conversion and capacity payments.
Since 2022, manufacturing employment in Germany has declined markedly, even as overall employment remained stable. This paper examines whether tighter financial conditions contributed to this development. Using pre-pandemic sectoral leverage as a measure of financial exposure, we show that highly leveraged manufacturing sectors experienced significantly larger employment declines following the sharp increase in euro area interest rates. The decline is particularly high for capital intensive manufacturing sectors and robust to controls for energy intensity and preexisting trends. The findings suggest that financial leverage amplified the impact of monetary tightening on manufacturing employment.
Joint work with Enzo Weber.
We exploit exogenous variation in the pricing of childcare caused by a nationwide reform to estimate the impact of lower childcare costs and the propensity of individuals to start a firm. The reform capped the childcare prices, whereas the exogenous variation in the reduction of childcare prices comes from the pre-reform prices, which depended on the place of residence and family type. Decreasing the cost of childcare lowers both the capital and time constraint, which can lead to individuals becoming entrepreneurs.
We evaluate such potential mechanisms both for males and females separately in a difference-in-difference setting up to 5 years post reform. We find that reducing childcare costs increases entrepreneurial activity for both mothers and fathers.
The German economy is going through a period of profound transformation. Technological change, decarbonization and demographic developments are fundamentally changing labor markets – albeit not uniformly, but with significant differences between regions, sectors and groups of workers.
At the same time, structural change is not a new phenomenon. Past transformation processes provide important insights into how labor markets respond to disruptions and the role institutions and policy can play in managing these adaptation processes.
The workshop brings these perspectives together: the focus is on papers that analyze current transformation processes, examine their heterogeneous effects, and/or draw lessons from past transformations for today’s economic policy challenges.
The aim is to exchange up-to-date research that provides new insights into transformation processes and illuminates their economic policy implications.
Special issue of the workshop:
Selected papers from the workshop may be invited for submission for aplanned Special Issue in the Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbücher für
Nationalökonomie und Statistik).
When submitting to the workshop, authors are asked to indicate whether they are interested in submitting to the Special Issue at a later date.
Submission for the Special Issue takes place separately until 31.12.2026 and is subject to the journal’s regular peer review process.
This paper studies the short- and long-run adjustment of distressed regions to a positive globalization episode: access to an increasingly thriving Luxembourg labor market for residents of the French "Rust Belt". We document a three-phase expansion of local labor markets, driven by a short-run workplace substitution of incumbent workers towards cross-border commuting, a medium-term rise in labor force participation, and a long-run sustained increase in population via net domestic in-migration.
Welfare effects for residents of treated areas are unequal: higher foreign incomes are partly offset by lower domestic employment, rising housing costs and congestion, and reduced fiscal transfers. Improved job opportunities abroad lead to a net decrease in far-right and anti-EU vote shares, muting the rise of populism visible elsewhere in former industrial regions of France.
Taken together, our findings suggest that former industrial regions are not inherently rigid, but that their capacity to adjust depends critically on the nature, scale, and spatial incidence of economic shocks.
Joint work with Antoine Levy.
This paper investigates the optimal design and implementation of labor market institutions within an open economy framework. We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) DSGE model featuring search and matching frictions to analyze the interaction between labor market flexibility and international trade, with a specific focus on the German experience. Our findings suggest that labor market institutions, when analyzed in isolation, have a marginal impact on aggregate unemployment and welfare. However, their efficacy is significantly amplified when an economy is exposed to international trade.
We show that while import competition exerts upward pressure on unemployment in the short run, more flexible labor market institutions are essential for maximizing welfare in the long run. Crucially, we study the optimal policy sequence and find that a stepwise, sequential implementation of reforms is superior to a "big bang" approach. Such a trajectory maximizes aggregate welfare over a longer time horizon by effectively shielding heterogeneous agents from the regressive distributive effects of globalization shocks during the transition phase. Our results provide a normative rationale for gradualism in structural reform agendas within integrated economies.
Joint work with Andreas Hauptmann (IAB) and Benjamin Schwanebeck (FernUniversität in Hagen).
We analyze income inequality between and within German regions from 1957 to 2021 using a newly collected panel. We confirm previous evidence on convergence between regions during the decades after World War II, but do not find pronounced regional divergence since the 1990s - in contrast to some earlier studies.
Instead, the national income inequality rise since the 1980s is closely tracked by the near-unanimous rise in income concentration within regions, driven by overproportional labor income growth of the top income decile. Regression analysis suggests that regional growth switched from equality-enhancing to inequality-increasing in the 1990s.