Ongoing Research Projects
Ongoing Research Projects
(For published research articles, please consult my CV)
(For published research articles, please consult my CV)
(with Erik-Benjamin Börschlein and Martin Popp)
Labor market tightness in Germany rose sharply between 2012 and 2022. We analyze the effect of tightness on wages by combining social security records with unusually rich information on vacancies and job seekers. Instrumental variable regressions reveal positive elasticities between 0.007 and 0.011, which implies that the tightening accounts for 13-19 percent of the real wage increase. The effect is strongest at the bottom of the wage distribution, contributing to the decline in wage inequality over the last decade. Moreover, we provide novel evidence that higher tightness transmits through the broader labor market via composition and spillover effects.
Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Labor Economics.
An old version of the manuscript is available as arXiv Economics Discussion Paper.
(with Lars Chittka and Thorsten Schank)
We present the first empirical evidence on the 22 percent increase in the German minimum wage, implemented in 2022, raising it from €9.82 to €10.45 in July and to €12 in October. Leveraging the German Earnings Survey, a large and novel data source comprising around 8 million employee-level observations reported by employers each month, we apply a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach to analyze the policy's impact on hourly wages, monthly earnings, employment, and working hours. Our findings reveal significant positive effects on wages, affirming the policy's intended benefits for low-wage workers. Interestingly, we identify a negative effect on working hours, mainly driven by minijobbers. The hours effect results in an implied labor demand elasticity in terms of the employment volume of -0.2 which only partially offsets the monthly wage gains. We neither observe a negative effect on the individual's employment retention nor the regional employment levels.
Revise & Resubmit at the German Economic Review.
The manuscript is available as arXiv Economics Discussion Paper.
(with Nicole Gürtzgen and Tim Kovalenko)
Works councils hold extensive co-determination rights in the hiring process, including the approval of personnel measures and the use of selection criteria. Using vacancy-level survey data, we study whether the presence of works councils is associated with hiring frictions. Estimating duration models, we show that there are no major discernible differences in search durations across employers with and without a works council. However, works councils are associated with a significantly larger delay in new hires’ start of work. This partial effect of works councils on vacancy durations translates only into a small fraction of frictional unemployment.
Submitted manuscript available on request.
Female bosses helping other women to advance to managerial positions is a prominent finding of Kunze & Miller (The Review of Economics and Statistics, 99(5), 2017). A replication using novel information in the population of German administrative employment data corroborates the original finding. It also buttresses their result that women have to compete with other women to receive promotion. Complementing these results, I document that female careers are particularly disadvantaged in high-paying firms, where female bosses are even more important for women's chances of advancement. These results underscore the importance of the initial findings for women's chances of reaching managerial positions even in high-paying segments of the labor market.