We revisit the employer size wage effect (ESWE) – arguably the most basic and influential departure from the law of one price for labor. Our main result is that this canonical fact disappears completely across establishments within the same firm, even though they operate in different local labor markets. We uncover and dissect this fact by including a firm fixed effect in otherwise standard cross-sectional regressions of wages on establishment size. We implement this demanding specification in population-wide triple-linked firm-establishment-employee data in Germany. This result is new in the ESWE literature (for which our paper also provides the first systematic meta-analysis). This wage-size decoupling is hard to square with the view that employment is determined along a finitely elastic employerspecific labor supply curve – i.e., employers pay exactly the minimum needed for the quantity of labor, but no more – the foundation of the monopsony view. By contrast, large multi-establishment firms (MEF) appear to hire off their labor supply curves (or those curves are very elastic), pay wage premia above the monopsonistic minimum, and leave excess labor supply. We find some evidence for a reemergence of the ESWE within low-premium MEFs. Overall, at least for the 25% of German employment in large firms for which the ESWE disappears, wage setting and employment determination may be better accounted for by alternative models, namely accommodating above-market-clearing wage premia and rationing of labor supply, such as efficiency wage theories.

This paper examines how firms adjust the number and types of workers they hire in response to increased biodiversity transition risk. Using the adoption of the Key Biodiversity Areas Standard of 2016 as a source of variation that increases the risk of future land-use restrictions, we find that firms reduce job postings in affected areas and reallocate labor to less exposed regions. This effect is concentrated among firms that make negative impacts on biodiversity. Cuts are stronger among production roles, while hiring in green and adaptive occupations increases. The effect is not driven by changes in capital investment or workers’ labor supply decisions. Our findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of biodiversity conservation policies and their implications for labor market outcomes.

This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative – the most pronounced misperception among the various gender norms we examine. Our randomized information treatment improves the accuracy of these perceptions, significantly reducing the share of mothers who perceive gender norms as overly conservative. The treatment also shifts mothers’ own labormarket attitudes in a more liberal direction. Leveraging the fact that we assessed attitudes in a prior survey, we show that specifically the shifted attitude is a strong predictor of mothers’ future labor-market participation. Consistently, treated mothers are more likely to plan an increase in their working hours, particularly those with existing support to facilitate their employment.