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The Effects of Biased Labor Market Expectations on Consumption, Wealth Inequality, and Welfare

Idiosyncratic labor market risk is a prevalent phenomenon with important implications for individual choices. In labor market research it is commonly assumed that agents have rational expectations and therefore correctly assess the risk they face in …

Minimum wages and financial constraints in firms

This paper studies how minimum wages affect the wage distribution if firms face financial constraints. Using German employer-employee data and firm balance sheets, we document that the within-firm wage dispersion decreases more with higher minimum …

Demand or supply? Price Adjustment During the Covid-19 Pandemic

We study price-setting behavior and subjective perceptions in German firm-level survey data to infer the relative importance of supply and demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Demand shortages dominate at the onset of the pandemic. A reported …

Comment on “Sectoral shocks, reallocation, and labor market policies” by Joaquín García-Cabo, Anna Lipińska, and Gastón Navarro

This comment discusses the article “Sectoral Shocks, Reallocation, and Labor Market Policies” by Joaquin Garcia-Cabo, Anna Lipinska, and Gaston Navarro. The comment highlights issues that receive only little attention in the paper, but that are …

Air quality in welfare accounting

We measure how taking into account air quality affects relative welfare levels and welfare convergence across countries. We use the equivalent variation framework by Jones and Klenow [(2016) American Economic Review 106(9), 2426–2457.] which takes …

Some surprising facts about working time accounts and the business cycle

Working time accounts (WTAs) allow firms to smooth hours worked over time. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether this increase in flexibility has also affected how firms adjust employment in Germany over the business cycle. This paper uses …

Does short-time work save jobs? A business cycle analysis

In the Great Recession most OECD countries used short-time work (publicly subsidized working time reductions) to counteract a steep increase in unemployment. We show that short-time work can actually save jobs. However, there is an important …

Labour force participation across Europe: A cohort-based analysis

Skill-biased technological change and the business cycle

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology …

New evidence, old puzzles: Technology shocks and labor market dynamics

Can the standard search‐and‐matching labor market model replicate the business cycle fluctuations of the job finding rate and the unemployment rate? In the model, these fluctuations are driven by movements in productivity. This paper investigates the …