Publications
Computers as Stepping Stones? Technological Change and Equality of Labor Market Opportunities
joint with Melanie Arntz, Guido Neidhöfer and Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage, 2025, Journal of Labor Economics (Forthcoming )
Abstract: This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by increasing the returns to skills relative to the returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, computer-driven technological change improved the access to technology-adopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents, and reduced their wage penalty within these occupations. We also show that this significantly contributed to a decline in the overall wage penalty experienced by workers from disadvantaged parental backgrounds over this time period. Competing mechanisms, such as skill-specific labor supply shocks and skill-upgrading, do not explain these findings.
Wage Returns to Technological Change are Higher for Individuals from Disadvantaged Parental Backgrounds
Do Preferences for Urban Amenities Differ by Skill?
joint with Melanie Arntz and Eduard Brüll, 2023, Journal of Economic Geography
Abstract: 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.
Willingness to Pay for Different Types of Urban Amenities in % of Wages
joint with Bertrand Koebel and Ralf Wilke, 2022, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society- Series A
Abstract: This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for correlated unobserved heterogeneity to correctly identify the relevance of career and education for fertility decisions. By exploiting individual-level life-cycle information on fertility, career and education from large administrative longitudinal datasets, this paper shows that non-linear panel models produce substantially different results than the cross-sectional approaches widely used in previous studies. Higher opportunity costs of having children are found to be associated with lower fertility within a country, while the magnitude of the adjustment differs strongly across countries. In Germany, fertility decisions are found to depend more on individual circumstances than in France, where better public childcare support enhances the compatibility between family and professional life.
Effects of Education and Career Aspects on the Number of Children in France and Germany
joint with Simon M. S. Lo, Shuolin Shi and Ralf A. Wilke, 2021, Japanese Journal of Statistics and Data Science
Copulas are a convenient tool for modelling dependencies in competing risks models with multiple spells. This paper introduces several practical extensions to the nested copula model and focuses on the choice of the hazard model and copula. A simulation study looks at the relevance of the assumed parametric or semiparametric model for hazard functions, copula and whether a full or partial maximum likelihood approach is chosen. The results show that the researcher must be careful which hazard is being specified as similar functional form assumptions for the subdistribution and cause-specific hazard will lead to differences in estimated cumulative incidences. Model selection tests for the choice of the hazard model and copula are found to provide some guidance for setting up the model. The nice practical properties and flexibility of the copula model are demonstrated with an application to a large set of maternity leave periods of mothers for up to three maternity leave periods.