Eduard Brüll

Welcome

Eduard Brüll

About me:
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the ZEW’s Research Department Labour Markets and Social Insurance.

Fields of interest:
  • Labour Economics
  • Regional Economics
  • Applied Microeconomics

Contact info:
Tel.: +49 (0)621 1235-146
E-Mail: eduard.bruell@zew.de
GitHub: github.com/edubruell
L7, 1 – 68161 Mannheim, Germany

Publications

Do preferences for urban amenities differ by skill? (with Melanie Arntz and Cäcilia Lipowski)

By investing in urban amenities, city-level policies often aim to attract highly skilled workers.However, studies relying on revealed preferences struggle to provide causal evidence that skilled workers value urban amenities more than less skilled workers. Therefore, we use a statedpreference experiment with hypothetical job choices between two cities that differ in wages, urban amenities and economic dynamism. We find that respondents are willing to forgo a significant fraction of their wages for better urban amenities. Most strikingly, preferences do not differ systematically by skill level. Hence, the higher fraction of highly skilled workers in amenity rich places stems from the inability of low-skilled workers to move to and afford living in their preferred locations.

Discussion Papers

Cut Off from New Competition: Threat of Entry and Health Care Quality (with Davud Rostam-Afschar and Oliver Schlenker ; Resubmitted to Labour Economics)

We study how the threat of entry affects service quantity and quality of general practitioners (GPs). We leverage Germany’s needs-based primary care planning system, in which the likelihood of new GPs reduces by 20 percentage points when primary care coverage exceeds a cut-off. We compile novel data covering all German primary care regions and up to 30,000 GP-level observations from 2014 to 2019. Reduced threat of entry lowers patient satisfaction for incumbent GPs without nearby competitors but not in areas with competitors. We find no effects on working hours or quality measures at the regional level including hospitalizations and mortality

Restricting Long-Term Temporary Employment Contracts (Submitted to JEEA)

This paper investigates the effects of a 2001 German restriction on temporary employment contracts exceeding two years. This restriction applied only to firms with less than 5 employees. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach to compare affected and unaffected hires, I find that the reform has increased the likelihood that workers start new jobs with permanent contracts, while having a negligible impact on overall employment. In addition, the reform has had positive effects on the career stability of post-reform labour market entrants.
Earlier Version: ZEW Discussion Paper No. 19-034

Adjustments of Local Labour Markets to the COVID-19 Crisis: the Role of Digitalisation and Working-from-Home - ZEW Discussion Paper No. 22-031 (with Sarra Ben Yahmed and Francesco Berlingieri )

Employment responses to the COVID-19 crisis differed widely across German local labour markets at the beginning of the pandemic, with differences in short-time work rates of up to 20 percentage points. We show that digital capital, and to a lesser extent working-from-home, were essential for the resilience of local labour markets. Using an empirical strategy that combines a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score weighting, we find that local exposure to digital capital reduced short-time work usage by up to 4 percentage points and the effect lasted for about 8 months. Working-from-home potential lowered short-time work rates, but only in local labour markets exposed to digital capital, and in the first four months of the pandemic when a strict lockdown was in place. Differences in unemployment rates across local labour markets were at most 2 percentage points and did not depend on digital capital or working-from-home potential.

Evolution of the East German Wage Structure - ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-081 (with Christina Gathmann)

We analyze the evolution of the wage and employment structure in East Germany over the past two decades and compare it to West Germany. Our results suggest that wage inequality in the East exceeds that in the West, especially at the top of the wage distribution. We also show that wage inequality is no longer rising in Germany and even declining in East Germany after 2009. Third, unemployment rates have been declining drastically over the past decade in all of Germany but even more so in East Germany. Changes along the supply side seem to play some role for the evolution of wages, especially in the 1990s. Yet, institutional changes, esp. the introduction of sectoral minimum wages, seem to be an important driver of the recent declines in wage inequality in East Germany; in West Germany in tun, demand shifts and esp. routinization are important to explain recent wage changes.

A Novel Approach to Estimate Labor Supply Elasticities: Combining Data from Actual and Hypothetical Choices (with Christina Gathmann)

We propose a novel approach to estimate labor supply elasticities and to separate preferences for leisure from frictions. To identify preferences for leisure, we present respondents of a representative panel survey with a sequence of hypothetical labor supply choices. We then combine our estimates with data on observed labor supply choices to identify the size of frictions. Our preliminary results show that preferences for leisure from hypothetical choices are larger than those from observed choices pointing to the importance of optimization errors. We also document that preferences for leisure differ substantially along observable and unobservable dimensions. These results suggest that estimates from local variation might not be a good proxy for labor supply responses in the broader population.

Work in progress

Other publications