Topic Labor and Employment

Firms, Workers, and Households in Times of Crisis and Digital Transformation

We are pleased to invite submissions for our workshop taking place on November 26-27, 2026 at DIW Berlin. The workshop is part of the SOEP-LEE2 project and brings together research on resilience, crisis responses, digital transformation, and cyber security, with a particular emphasis on empirical work using survey and linked data on firms, employees, and households. It will also showcase new data...

The role of non-cognitive skills for wage growth across occupations and firms

The aim of this research agenda is to analyze the effect of non-cognitive skills on individual wage growth and earnings trajectories across occupations and firms, and to quantify how returns to these skills vary with occupation- and firm-specific skill requirements. We also examine how non-cognitive skills affect occupational choices over the working life and analyze the potential of education...

Union Responses to Revenue Shocks: Evidence from Right-to-Work Laws in the US

Unions decide how to allocate their resources to organise new workers and to benefit existing members. While there is a growing literature studying the aggregate effects of shocks to union power, little is known about how individual unions change their behaviour in response to these shocks. We illustrate the importance of accounting for union equilibrium responses when studying the impact of...

The male-dominated construction sector and the female-dominated childcare sector are least affected by AI transformation

Public Sector Relocation and Regional Development in Germany

As regional economic disparities within countries grow, governments are increasingly experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. In this paper, I estimate the causal effect on local labor markets of a German policy that relocated about 3,000 public sector jobs to lagging regions. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations from 2015–2025, I estimate employment and...

The Impact of Patent-Induced Shocks on Firms and Workers: Causal Evidence from Quasi-Random Patent Allocation

This paper provides novel evidence of patent-induced shocks on firm survival, growth, and productivity, and how innovation shocks impact worker compensation and employment prospects. Using linked employer-employee data with newly linked German firm data and web-scraped patent documents, we leverage quasi-random assignment of patent applications to examiners. Patent allowance reduces market exit...

Understanding Criminal Record Penalties in the Labor Market

This paper studies the earnings and employment penalties associated with a criminal record. Using a large-scale dataset linking criminal justice and employer-employee wage records, we estimate two-way fixed effects models that decompose earnings into worker’s portable earnings potential and firm pay premia, both of which are allowed to shift after a worker acquires a record. We find that firm pay...

Manufacturing Work Beyond Manufacturing Industries: A Reassessment of Structural Change

This paper studies the labor market impact of structural change by distinguishing between industry- and occupation-based measures of manufacturing and service employment. Using German data from 1975–2019, we find that 67% of manufacturing jobs lost in manufacturing industries are offset by new manufacturing jobs in service industries. Linking these aggregate patterns to worker-level outcomes, we...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market

Does Management Matter? Evidence from Indigent Defense in Texas

The majority of felony cases in the United States involve indigent clients represented by publicly financed attorneys. In this paper, we examine the effects of efforts to improve representation for economically disadvantaged defendants through the adoption of managed indigent defense offices (MIDs) in the state of Texas. MIDs impose a layer of oversight and accountability on attorneys providing...