Auf Grundlage zweier deutscher Datensätze, des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels und der Zeitbudgeterhebung, untersucht dieser Beitrag den Einfluss der für Hausarbeit aufgewandten Zeit auf die Löhne. Im Gegensatz zum Gros der internationalen Forschungsliteratur findet sich kein negativer Effekt der Hausarbeit auf die Löhne. Dieses Ergebnis zeigt sich in West- wie Ostdeutschland sowohl für Frauen und Männer, für verheiratete Individuen und Singles als auch für Teilzeit- und Vollzeitbeschäftigte. Unsere Ergebnisse ändern sich zudem nicht, wenn wir verschiedene Formen von Hausarbeit unterscheiden oder die Endogenität der geleisteten Hausarbeit in den Lohnregressionen mithilfe von Instrumentvariablenschätzungen berücksichtigen.

We find that increasing the female share in first-level management by 10% points decreases the unexplained within-job gender pay gap by 0.5 log points. The effect is more pronounced for the female share in second-level than in first-level management.

We analyze teacher experience as a moderating factor for the effect of class size reduction on student achievement in the early grades using data from the Tennessee STAR experiment with random assignment of teachers and students to classes of different sizes. The analysis is motivated by the high costs of class size reductions and the need to identify the circumstances under which this investment is most rewarding. We find a class size effect only for senior teachers. The effect exists at all deciles of the achievement distribution but is less pronounced at lower deciles. We further show that senior teachers outperform rookies only in small classes. Interestingly, the class size effect is likely due to a higher quality of instruction in small classes.

Using a large German linked employer–employee data set and methods of competing risks analysis, this paper investigates gender differences in job separation rates to employment and nonemployment. In line with descriptive evidence, we find lower job-to-job and higher job-to-nonemployment transition probabilities for women than men when controlling for individual and workplace characteristics and unobserved plant heterogeneity. These differences vanish once we allow these characteristics to affect separations differently by gender. When additionally controlling for wages, we find that both separation rates are considerably lower and also significantly less wage-elastic for women than for men, suggesting an interplay of gender differences in transition behaviour and the gender pay gap.

Declining union density in many industrialized countries increases interest in alternative forms of employee representation, such as works councils. The German works council is one of the most powerful forms of worker representation in developed countries, but little is known of its causal effect on productivity. The author used a large linked employer-employee panel data set to examine this issue. Comparing firms with and without a works council, the author finds that establishments with a works council are on average 6.4% more productive; but he also presents evidence that this figure underestimates the true productivity effect of works councils.

We provide new evidence on the effects of economic shocks on political support, voting behaviour and political opinions over the last 25 years. We exploit a sudden, large and long-lasting shock in the form of job loss and trace out its impact on individual political outcomes for up to 10 years after the event. The availability of detailed information on households before and after the job loss event allows us to reweight a comparison group to closely mimic the job losers in terms of their observable characteristics, pre-existing political support and voting behaviour. We find consistent, long-lasting but quantitatively small effects on support and votes for the incumbent party, and short-lived effects on political engagement. We find limited impact on the support for fringe or populist parties. In the context of Brexit, opposition to the EU was much higher amongst those who lost their jobs, but this was largely due to pre-existing differences which were not exacerbated by the job loss event itself.

We provide the first systematic evidence on the effectiveness of a contested policy in Germany to help displaced workers. So-called “transfer companies” (Transfergesellschaften) employ displaced workers for a fixed period, during which time workers are provided with job-search assistance and are paid a wage which is a substantial fraction of their pre-displacement wage. Using rich and accurate data on workers’ employment patterns before and after displacement, we compare the earnings and employment outcomes of displaced workers who entered transfer companies with those that did not. Workers can choose whether or not to accept a position in a transfer company, and therefore we use the availability of a transfer company at the establishment level as an IV in a model of one-sided compliance. Using an event study, we find that workers who enter a transfer company have significantly worse post-displacement outcomes, but we show that this is likely to be the result of negative selection: workers who lack good outside opportunities are more likely to choose to enter the transfer company. In contrast, ITT and IV estimates indicate that the use of a transfer company has a positive and significant effect on employment rates five years after job loss, but no significant effect on earnings. In addition, the transfer company provides significant additional compensation to displaced workers in the first 12 months after job loss.

We conducted a field experiment in the natural setting of blood donations to test how oxytocin relates to empathy and altruism. We randomly assigned blood donors in the Croatian Institute for Transfusion Medicine to three groups with the aim to induce different levels of empathy by showing a neutral video to the donors from the control group and an emotional to the donors from the first and second treatment groups. In addition to watching the emotional video, donors from the second treatment group are given a gift which relates to the emotional story from the video. We find no effect of our treatment on induced levels of oxytocin. Null effects of our treatments could be explained by the above average baseline levels of oxytocin and inability of our treatments to provoke emotional stimuli in blood donors. Nonetheless, for our empathy measures we find the effect of gift exchange on empathic concerns, but not on perspective taking. After our experimental treatments, we followed the return of our blood donors for a whole year. We find that only variable which consistently predicts return for blood donation in stated period is the number of previous donations. From policy perspective it is an important finding. Especially for hospitals and other blood providers when faced with time and resource constraints.

We present causal evidence on the rent-sharing elasticity of German manufacturing firms. We develop a new firm-level Bartik instrument for firm rents that combines the firms’ predetermined energy input mix with national energy carrier price changes. Instrumental variable estimation yields a rent-sharing elasticity of approximately 0.20 implying that a 10 percent change in rents leads to a 2 percent change in wages. Rent-sharing induced by energy price variation is asymmetric and driven by energy price increases, such that, on average, workers do not benefit from energy price reductions but are harmed by price increases. Reduced-form evidence shows that a 10 percent increase in firm-level energy prices depresses firm-level wage growth by 0.34 percent.

In empirischen Studien über Firmenschließungen wird häufig die Notwendigkeit betont, zwischen verschiedenen Arten von Schließungen, z.B. freiwilligen und unfreiwilligen, zu unterscheiden. Dieser Methodenreport erläutert vor diesem Hintergrund, wie im Betriebs-Historik-Panel (BHP) Betriebsstillegungen aufgrund von Insolvenzen identifiziert werden können. Insolvenzen können im Gegensatz zu anderen Schließungen eindeutig als Ausdruck ökonomischen Scheiterns und somit als unfreiwillige Schließungen interpretiert werden. (Autorenreferat, IAB-Doku)