The work and the family sphere are interrelated. This project, therefore, addressed several questions: Is self-employment good for partners? How is self-employment transmitted across generations? How are risk attitudes distributed within households and among partners? How important are the incomes of self-employed individuals in their households?
Interference in children’s affairs: An exploratory study about the role of self-employed parents, Journal of Business Venturing Insights.
Income loss among the self-employed: implications for individual wellbeing and pandemic policy measures, Review of Economics of the Household.
A Systematic Analysis of Risk Attitudes across Partners in Entrepreneurial Double-earner Households, International Review of Entrepreneurship.
This project addressed several questions: Is business growth a steady process, or is high growth a temporary event? We also focused on relative growth instead of the usually applied measures of growth rates. In this regard, we were asking whether young firms really grow faster than more mature ones. Moreover, we analyzed the determinants of firm growth.
A replication study on growth paths of young firms: Evidence from German administrative data, Journal of Business Venturing Insights (with Arndt Werner and Hans-Jürgen Wolter).
Times are a Changin'? The Emergence of New Firms and Rank Reshuffling, Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade (lead article of vol. 20).
Does innovation shape the employment growth distribution? Evidence from East European firms, Review of Economics (with Sebastian Nielen and Christian Dienes).
This most constructive and fruitful project with Christian Pfeifer was about the effects of relative standing on job mobility. Our results suggest that workers with higher status tend to quit more likely than the ones with lower standing. We, moreover, extended the analysis and found nonlinear effects. Workers with low status and those in the highest positions are more likely to quit their jobs compared to the ones in middle positions. I was able to replicate the basic results with a different German data set, whereas the effects of relative standing on job satisfaction, quit intentions, and intentions to become self-employed were analyzed.
Relative Wage Positions and Quit Behavior: New Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data, Industrial and Labor Relations Review (with Christian Pfeifer).
Nonlinear Effects of Comparison Income in Quit Decisions: Status versus Signal!, LABOUR (with Christian Pfeifer).
Nonlinear evaluation of status and signal effects, Evidence-based HRM: A Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship. [Outstanding Paper Award; Corrigendum]
It is well known that the self-employed are over-represented at the bottom as well as the top of the income distribution. This paper shifts the focus from the income situation of the self-employed to the distributive effects of a change in self-employment rates. With representative German data and unconditional quantile regression analysis, we show that an increase in the proportion of self-employed individuals in the labor force increases income polarization by tearing down floors at the bottom and allowing higher earnings potentials at the very top of the hourly income distribution. Recentered influence function regression of inequality measures corroborate that self-employment is a source of income inequality in the labor market.
Self-Employment as a Source of Income Inequality, Eurasian Business Review.
The objective of this project was to shed light on the reasons why the self-employed tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than paid employees. I was able to corroborate the predictions of 'procedural utility theory': self-employed individuals seem to derive utility from the way outcomes are achieved.
Why the self-employed are happier: Evidence from 25 European countries, Journal of Business Research.
Revisiting Procedural Utility: Evidence from European Survey Data, The Empirical Economics Letters.