Macroeconomics and Labor Markets Archive - Seite 3 von 5 - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Great Recession Babies: How Are Startups Shaped by Macro Conditions at Birth?

We combine novel micro data with quasi-random timing of patent decisions over the business cycle to estimate the effects of the Great Recession on innovative startups.

Marriage and Divorce under Labor Market Uncertainty

This paper analyzes these “labor market divorces” in a novel model of simultaneous search in labor and marriage markets.

Matching Workers’ Skills and Firms’ Technologies: From Bundling to Unbundling

Labor and Wealth Dynamics in Equilibrium

This paper develops a macroeconomic model that combines an incomplete-markets overlapping-generations economy with a job ladder featuring strategic wage bargaining and endogenous search effort of employed and non-employed workers. The model is able to capture the empirical relationships between search activity, labor market transition, earnings and wealth that we document in German data. We use the calibrated model to analyze the determinants of job mobility, earnings and wealth dynamics over the life cycle. We further examine the impact of unemployment insurance and progressive taxation for labor market dynamics, wage inequality and macroeconomic outcomes.

Technological Change, Firm Heterogeneity and Wage Inequality

We argue that skill-biased technological change not only affects wage gaps between skill groups, but also increases wage inequality within skill groups, across workers in different firms. Building on a heterogeneous firm framework with labor market frictions, we show that an industry-wide skill-biased technological change shock will increase between-firm wage inequality within the industry through four main channels: changes in the skill wage premium (as in traditional models of technological change); increased employment concentration in more productive firms; increased wage dispersion between firms for workers of the same skill type; and increased dispersion in the skill mix that firms employ, due to more sorting of skilled workers into more productive firms. Importantly, a simultaneous increase in the supply of skilled workers does not offset the technology- induced rise in inequality. Using rich administrative matched employer-employee data from Germany, we provide empirical evidence of establishment-level adjustments that are in line with the predictions of the model. We further document that industries with more technological adoption exhibit particularly pronounced adjustment patterns along the dimensions highlighted by the model.

Bargaining in the Labor Market

This paper examines the incidence and consequences of individual wage bargaining. We collected survey data on the bargaining policies of more than 700 German firms. Using these data, we validate a new survey measure of firm bargaining policies. We then examine what drives heterogeneity in firm policies. Using the link between these data, administrative Social Security records, and a survey we fielded to 135,000 German workers, we examine the dynamics of bargaining in the labor market. In the last part of the paper we examine the implications of individual-bargaining for wage inequality. We also draw a link between individual specific pay premia and bargaining behavior.

Firm Sorting and Spatial Inequality

We study the importance of firm sorting for spatial inequality. If productive locations are able to attract the most productive firms, then firm sorting acts as an amplifier of spatial inequality. We develop a novel model of spatial firm sorting, in which heterogeneous firms first choose a location and then hire workers in a frictional local labor market. Firms’ location choices are guided by a fundamental trade-off: Operating in productive locations increases output per worker, but sharing a labor market with other productive firms makes it hard to poach and retain workers, and hence limits firm size. We show that sorting between firms and locations is positive—i.e., more productive firms settle in more productive locations—if firm and location productivity are complements and labor market frictions are sufficiently large. We estimate our model using administrative data from Germany and find that highly productive firms indeed sort into the most productive locations. In our main application, we quantify the role of firm sorting for wage differences between East and West Germany, which reveals that firm sorting accounts for 17%-27% of the West-East wage gap.

The Marginal Efficiency of Active Search

Who wants (them) to work longer?

This paper examines age-specific individual preferences for the legal retirement age. Based on a theoretical model we develop the hypothesis that retirees prefer a higher legal retirement age than workers, whereby just retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age. We corroborate the hypothesis empirically with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and show that just retired individuals are indeed most in favor of an increasing retirement age. We conclude that in aging societies the political feasibility of raising the legal retirement age increases. This result is of political relevance especially with regard to the expected retirement wave of the baby boomer generation.

Cross-Border Commuting, Gender Differences, and the Outside Option

We study a cross-border commuting reform that granted German workers in the German-Swiss border region access to the high-wage Swiss labour market. This exogenous increase in German workers‘ outside option led to an increase in average wages paid by German establishments in the border region. But this wage increase is not homogenous across worker types. First, high-skilled workers enjoyed a higher wage increase than low-skilled workers, consistent with a stronger increase in Swiss-labor demand for high-skilled German workers. Second, the positive wage effects only accrue to men in the border region, but not women, consistent with gender differences in the willingness to commute. The outside option clearly seems to play an important role in wage negotiations and its wage effects can be heterogeneous.