Ongoing Research Projects
Ongoing Research Projects
(For published research articles, please consult my CV)
(For published research articles, please consult my CV)
(with Ying Liang and Thorsten Schank)
Germany introduced a national minimum wage in 2015. While prior studies find limited effects on overall employment, we go into detail and examine its impact on working hours and minijobs. The minimum wage significantly reduces inequality in hourly and monthly wages. Average working hours remain stable, despite various theoretical considerations favoring reductions. However, minijobbers experience notable cuts in working hours, reflecting institutional constraints. Employment in regular jobs remains unaffected, but minijobs decline, driven by transitions into both regular jobs and non-employment. The latter implies an employment elasticity of -0.16 for minijob employment. Following the first major minimum wage increase in 2022, we reveal a reduction in working hours that is not limited to minijobs, corresponding to an employment volume elasticity of -0.38.
Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Public Economics.
The manuscript is available as arXiv Economics Discussion Paper.
It is also available as IZA Discussion Paper 16964.
(with Martin Popp)
Using detailed information on vacancies and job seekers, the authors study the effect of labor market tightness on labor demand for the near-universe of German firms. To this end, novel Bartik instruments are constructed, combining firms’ predetermined employment shares with nationwide shifts at the occupational level. A doubling in labor market tightness reduces firms’ labor demand by 5 percent, highlighting that the observed tightening led to a significant slowdown in employment growth. The negative tightness effect creates search externalities at the aggregate level, reducing the own-wage elasticity of labor demand from -0.7 to -0.5 through the reallocation of workers between firms. To guide the analysis, the authors embed elements of the canonical search-and-matching model into a labor demand equation, while allowing vacancy-posting cost to increase in tight labor markets. Through the lens of this model, the pre-match component of hiring costs amounts to 17-24 percent of annual wage payments.
Revise & Resubmit at the ILR Review.
The manuscript is available as arXiv Economics Discussion Paper.
It is also available as IZA Discussion Paper 16837.
(with Erik-Benjamin Börschlein and Martin Popp)
Labor market tightness tremendously increased in Germany between 2012 and 2022. We analyze the effect of tightness on wages by combining social security data with unusually rich information on vacancies and job seekers. Instrumental variable regressions reveal positive elasticities between 0.004 and 0.011, implying that higher tightness explains between 7 and 19 percent of the real wage increase. We report greater elasticities for new hires, high-skilled workers, the Eastern German labor market, and the service sector. In particular, tightness raised wages at the bottom of the wage distribution, contributing to the decline in wage inequality over the last decade.
Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Labor Economics.
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.
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.
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.