Research Papers
Employment and Reallocation Effects of Higher Minimum Wages
Revise & Resubmit (2nd round): JPE Macro
Abstract: This paper studies the employment and reallocation effects of minimum wages in Germany in a search-and-matching model with endogenous job search effort and vacancy posting, multiple employment levels, a progressive tax-transfer system, and worker and firm heterogeneity. I find that minimum wages up to 70% of the median wage significantly increase productivity, hours worked and output without reducing employment. In frictional labor markets, however, reallocation takes time whenever the minimum wage cuts deep into the wage distribution. I show that gradually implementing a high minimum wage is necessary to avoid elevated unemployment rates during the transition.
Previous versions of the paper circulated under the titles “Employment, Output and Welfare Effects of Minimum Wages” and “Macroeconomic and Distributional Effects of Higher Minimum Wages”
Are Male Bosses Bad for Women’s Careers? Evidence from a Multinational Corporation
with Felix Holub
Abstract: We study whether gender-based favoritism impedes women's career progression using data from a European multinational corporation. Leveraging manager reassignments, we show that manager gender does not affect gender differences, neither in wage growth nor in promotion rates. Remarkably, this holds across a wide range of countries and departments, i.e., workforces that differ substantially in terms of gender norms, occupations, and gender composition, but are all subject to the same management practices and corporate culture. Analyzing performance and potential ratings, we find that manager gender only matters in low-stakes decisions that do not affect managers’ own career prospects.
Falling Behind: Has Rising Inequality Fueled the American Debt Boom?
with Fabian Greimel
Accepted at the Review of Financial Studies
Abstract: This paper studies whether the interplay of social comparisons in housing and rising income inequality contributed to the household debt boom in the US between 1980 and 2007. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with general social comparisons in housing to show that changes in the distribution of income affect aggregate housing demand, ggregate debt and house prices if (and only if) social comparisons are asymmetric. In the empirically relevant case of upward-looking comparisons, rising inequality can rationalize up to a quarter of the observed debt boom.
2020 WFA PhD Candidate Award for Outstanding Research
Work in Progress
Housing Booms, Labor Mobility, Misallocation, and Segregation
with Katrin Hohmeyer and Max Löffler
Gender Inequality among Top Earners
with Elena Herold, Andreas Peichl, and Johannes Schmieder
Reallocation Effects of Transfer Policies
with Lilly Fischer, and Pascal Zamorski
Income Inequality Across and Within Regions in Germany
with Andreas Peichl
Publications
Inequality and Income Dynamics in Germany
Quantitative Economics, 2022, 13(4), p. 1593-1635
with Andreas Peichl, Johannes Schmieder, Kai D. Schmid, Hannes Walz and Stefanie Wolter
part of the Global Income Dynamics Project
Consumption-Savings Decisions under Upward-Looking Comparisons
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2014, 106, p. 254–268
with Kai D. Schmid