Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Mannheim and will be on the job market in 2020-2021.

My research studies the causes and consequences of socioeconomic inequalities using both structural models, reduced-form techniques and micro data from a variety of sources.

In my job market paper, I investigate how the minimum wage affects employment, output and welfare using a rich equilibrium search model estimated using German sociol security data.

You can download my CV here.

Job Market Paper

Employment, Output and Welfare Effects of Minimum Wages

In this paper, I investigate how employment, output and welfare respond to increasing the minimum wage. I first construct a search-matching model with worker and firm heterogeneity, endogenous search effort and vacancy posting as well as multiple employment levels. I estimate the model using administrative data and use the recent introduction of a federal minimum wage in Germany as an independent model test. I first show that the model is consistent with the reduced form evidence on the short-run employment and productivity effects of the recent introduction of a federal minimum wage in Germany reform. I then use the estimated and tested model to analyze the effects of increasing the minimum wage. I present three main findings. First, long-run employment does not decline for minimum wages below 60% of the median wage as firms' lower vacancy posting is offset by workers' higher search effort. Long-run total output keeps increasing until the minimum wage reaches about 75% of the median wage -- driven by reallocation to more productive firms and jobs with longer hours. Higher average output per job outweighs the loss of lower unemployment. Second, I show that long-run output gains go along with considerable short- and medium-run unemployment. The higher the minimum wage hike, the more workers are initially laid off and finding a (better) job takes time -- especially in a labor market with fewer vacancies. Third, while per capita welfare increases in the minimum wage, not all workers benefit from higher minimum wages. For women who often rely on low-hours jobs, increasing disutility from working longer hours outweighs the added utility of higher incomes. Moreover, low-skill workers become non-employable as the minimum wage rises.