Research

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.

This article shows that digital capital and working from home were essential for the resilience of local labour markets in the context of the COVID-19 crisis in Germany. Employment responses differed widely across local labour markets, with differences in short-time work rates of up to 30 percentage points at the beginning of the pandemic. Using recent advancements in the difference-in-differences approach with a continuous treatment, we find that digital capital potential higher by one standard deviation led to a short-time work rate that was lower by 1.5 percentage points on average at the onset of the shock. The effect was nonlinear, disproportionately disadvantaging regions at the lower end of the digital capital distribution. We also find that working from home potential led to lower short-time work, especially during the first lockdown period. However, digital capital smoothed the employment shock beyond the effect of remote work, extending into 2021. Moreover, local digital capital potential increased the adoption of remote work after the shock.

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 stated preference 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.

Im September 2023 stellte die CDU das Konzept der „Aktiv-Rente" vor. Die Idee dahinter ist, den Arbeitsverdienst von Rentnerinnen und Rentnern, die neben dem Bezug einer gesetzlichen Rente eine bezahlte Beschäftigung aufnehmen, bis zu 2.000 Euro pro Monat steuerfrei zu stellen. Diese Steuerbefreiung soll unter anderem die Arbeitsanreize verbessern sowie dem Fachkräftemangel entgegenwirken. Wir quantifizieren die möglichen Auswirkungen der Aktivrente auf die Beschäftigung von Rentnerinnen und Rentnern sowie auf die Nettoeinkommen der beschäftigten Ruheständler im Alter von 63 bis 73 Jahren auf der Basis von Stichproben des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) von 2019. Weil die verfügbaren Einkommen durch eine Aktivrente im Mittel um 5,5 Prozent stiegen, würden nach unserer Analyse 5.000 bis 15.000 Ruheständler zusätzlich arbeiten. Mithin kann eine Aktivrente selbst unter optimistischen Annahmen dem Fachkräftemangel aus gesamtwirtschaftlicher Sicht wohl nur in begrenztem Umfang entgegenwirken. Außerdem gibt es mögliche unerwünschte Nebenwirkungen.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is diffusing rapidly in the workplace, yet aggregate productivity gains remain limited. This paper examines the dual diffusion of AI – through both formal, employer-led and informal, employee-initiated adoption. Using a representative survey of nearly 10,000 employees in Germany, we document a high extensive but low intensive margin of usage: while 64 percent use AI tools, only 20 percent use them frequently. This diffusion is strongly skill-biased and depends less on establishment and regional characteristics. While formality is associated with more frequent usage, training, AI-based supervision, and higher perceived productivity gains, it does not broaden access. The patterns suggest that widespread informal usage can coexist with limited productivity effects when complementary investments and organizational integration lag behind.

We provide experimental evidence on how employers adjust expectations to automation risk in high-skill, white-collar work. Using a randomized information intervention among tax advisors in Germany, we show that firms systematically underestimate automatability. Information provision raises risk perceptions, especially for routine-intensive roles. Yet, it leaves short-run hiring plans unchanged. Instead, updated beliefs increase productivity and financial expectations with minor wage adjustments, implying within-firm inequality like limited rent-sharing. Employers also anticipate new tasks in legal tech, compliance, and AI interaction, and report higher training and adoption intentions.

Do public holidays meaningfully affect economic output? In Germany, strict Sunday laws create a unique natural experiment: when public holidays fall on Sundays, they typically do not additionally disrupt business activity. Exploiting this variation across states and years, I estimate the economic cost of a "lost" workday. Using monthly manufacturing data and a stacked event-study approach, I find that weekday holidays lead to modest but measurable reductions in output. Scaling the estimates implies annual GDP losses between 0.06% and 0.28%, depending on whether the effect is assumed to apply only to manufacturing or to the whole economy.

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.

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 turn, demand shifts and esp. routinization are important to explain recent wage changes.

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.