Recent evidence suggests that employers acquire more precise information about a worker’s productivity the more time he or she spends in the labor market. The following question arises: Is learning symmetric, that is, do all employers have the same information about workers’ productivity, or is learning asymmetric, that is, does the current employer have superior information about workers’ productivity? This article develops a learning model with endogenous mobility that nests both learning hypotheses. It then proposes new tests for asymmetric employer learning. Overall, learning appears to be mostly symmetric, except possibly when the employees involved are college graduates.

This article analyzes the impact of five major expansions in maternity leave coverage in Germany on mothers’ labor market outcomes after childbirth. To identify the causal impact of the reforms, we use a difference-in-difference design that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who give birth shortly before and shortly after a change in maternity leave legislation in years of policy changes and years when no changes have taken place. Each expansion in leave coverage reduced mothers’ postbirth employment rates in the short run. The longer-run effects of the expansions on mothers’ postbirth labor market outcomes are, however, small.

This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task‐specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor market skills are more portable than previously considered. We find that individuals move to occupations with similar task requirements and that the distance of moves declines with experience. We also show that task‐specific human capital is an important source of individual wage growth, accounting for up to 52% of overall wage growth.

This paper investigates whether unions, through imposing wage floors that lead to wage compression, increase on-the-job training. Our analysis focuses on Germany. Based on a model of unions and firm-financed training, we derive empirical implications regarding apprenticeship training intensity, layoffs, wage cuts, and wage compression in unionized and nonunionized firms. We test these implications using firm panel data matched with administrative employee data. We find support for the hypothesis that union recognition, via imposing minimum wages and wage compression, increases training in apprenticeship programs.

Existing evidence on peer effects in the productivity of coworkers stems from either laboratory experiments or real-world studies referring to a specific firm or occupation. In this paper, we aim at providing more generalizable results by investigating a large local labor market, with a focus on peer effects in wages rather than productivity. Our estimation strategy—which links the average permanent productivity of workers' peers to their wages—circumvents the reflection problem and accounts for endogenous sorting of workers into peer groups and firms. On average over all occupations, and in the type of high-skilled occupations investigated in studies on knowledge spillover, we find only small peer effects in wages. In the type of low-skilled occupations analyzed in extant studies on social pressure, in contrast, we find larger peer effects, about one-half the size of those identified in similar studies on productivity.

We examine heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care program in Germany by exploiting variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large expansion staggered across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from the full population of compulsory school entry examinations, we find that children with lower (observed and unobserved) gains are more likely to select into child care than children with higher gains. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to attend child care than children from advantaged backgrounds but have larger treatment effects because of their worse outcome when not enrolled in child care.

By exploiting a commuting policy that led to a sharp and unexpected inflow of Czech workers to areas along the German-Czech border, we examine the impact of an exogenous immigration-induced labor supply shock on local wages and employment of natives. On average, the supply shock leads to a moderate decline in local native wages and a sharp decline in local native employment. These average effects mask considerable heterogeneity across groups: while younger natives experience larger wage effects, employment responses are particularly pronounced for older natives. This pattern is inconsistent with standard models of immigration but can be accounted for by a model that allows for a larger labor supply elasticity or a higher degree of wage rigidity for older than for young workers. We further show that the employment response is almost entirely driven by diminished inflows of natives into work rather than outflows into other areas or nonemployment, suggesting that “outsiders” shield “insiders” from the increased competition.

This paper challenges the view that the wage structure in West-Germany has remained stable throughout the 80s and 90s. Based on a 2 % sample of social security records, we show that wage inequality has increased in the 1980s, but only at the top of the distribution. In the early 1990s, wage inequality started to rise also at the bottom of the distribution. Hence, while the US and Germany experienced similar changes at the top of the distribution throughout the 80s and 90s, the patterns at the bottom of the distribution are reversed. We show that changes in the education and age structure can explain a substantial part of the increase in inequality, in particular at the top of the distribution. We further argue that selection into unemployment cannot account for the stable wage structure at the bottom in the 80s. In contrast, about one third of the increase in lower tail inequality in the 90s can be related to de-unionization. Finally, fluctuations in relative supply play an important role in explaining trends in the skill premium. These findings are consistent with the view that technological change is responsible for the widening of the wage distribution at the top. The widening of the wage distribution at the bottom, however, may be better explained by episodic events, such as changes in labour market institutions and supply shocks.

This article derives novel testable implications of referral-based job search networks in which employees provide employers with information about potential new hires that they otherwise would not have. Using comprehensive matched employer–employee data covering the entire workforce in one large metropolitan labour market combined with unique survey data linked to administrative records, we provide evidence that workers earn higher wages and are less inclined to leave their firms if they have obtained their job through a referral. These effects are particularly strong at the beginning of the employment relationship and decline with tenure in the firm, suggesting that firms and workers learn about workers' productivity over time. Overall, our findings imply that job search networks help to reduce informational deficiencies in the labour market and lead to productivity gains for workers and firms.

Most studies on the labor market effects of immigration use repeated cross-sectional data to estimate the effects of immigration on regions. This paper shows that such regional effects are composites of effects that address fundamental questions in the immigration debate but remain unidentified with repeated cross-sectional data. We provide a unifying empirical framework that decomposes the regional effects of immigration into their underlying components and show how these are identifiable from data that track workers over time. Our empirical application illustrates that such analysis yields a far more informative picture of immigration's effects on wages, employment, and occupational upgrading.