Welcome

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Publications

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Cut Off from New Competition: Threat of Entry and Primary Care Quality (with Davud Rostam-Afschar and Oliver Schlenker )
Labour Economics, Volume 92, 2025, 102669

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
Earlier Version: ZEW Discussion Paper No. 19-034

Local Labour Market Resilience: The Role of Digitalisation and Working from Home
(with Sarra Ben Yahmed and Francesco Berlingieri )
Journal of Regional Science, Volume 65, Issue 5, November 2025, Pages 1506–1532.

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.
Earlier Version: ZEW Discussion Paper No. 22-031

Do preferences for urban amenities differ by skill? (with Melanie Arntz and Cäcilia Lipowski)
Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 23, Issue 3, May 2023, Pages 541–576

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 statedpreference 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.

Discussion Papers

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Beliefs About Bots: How Employers Plan for AI in White-Collar Work (with Samuel Mäurer and Davud Rostam-Afschar)
ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-057, Mannheim, 2025.

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.

Holy Days, Lost Days?
ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-056, Mannheim, 2025.

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.

Restricting Long-Term Temporary Employment Contracts

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.
Earlier Version: ZEW Discussion Paper No. 19-034

Evolution of the East German Wage Structure - ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-081 (with Christina Gathmann)

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

A Novel Approach to Estimate Labor Supply Elasticities: Combining Data from Actual and Hypothetical Choices (with Christina Gathmann)

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.

Work in progress

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• Low Barriers, High Stakes: Formal and Informal Diffusion of AI Skills in the Workplace (with M. Arntz, M. Baum, R. Dorau, M. Hartwig, F. Lehmer, B. Matthes, S.-C. Meyer, O. Schlenker, A. Tisch and S. Wischniewski)
• Breaking Free from the Not-So-Golden Cage: The Missed Opportunities of Low Job Mobility (with Melanie Arntz, Sarra Ben Yahmed and Michael Stops)
• Keeping the Doctor Away (with Davud Rostam-Afschar and Oliver Schlenker )

Other publications

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• Betriebliche Diversitätsstrategien in Deutschland, BMAS Forschungsbericht 603 (with Patrick Kampkötter)
• Der Arbeitsmarkt in Deutschland - Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Deutschland und Europa 83, 28-41. (with Christina Gathmann, Boris Ivanov and Lukas Riedel)
• Die Entwicklung der ostdeutschen Lohnstruktur, ifo Dresden berichtet, 26 (06), 12–16.
• Analyse der Einkommens- und Beschäftigungswirkungen einer Einführung des CDU-Konzepts der „Aktiv-Rente“ (with Nicolas Ziebarth and Friedhelm Pfeiffer)
• Digitalisierung und Wandel der Beschäftigung (DiWaBe 2.0): Eine Datengrundlage für die Erforschung von Künstlicher Intelligenz und anderer Technologien in der Arbeitswelt, Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, Dortmund, 2025. Verfasst von: M. Arntz, M. Baum, E. Brüll, R. Dorau, M. Hartwig, F. Lehmer, B. Matthes, S.-C. Meyer, O. Schlenker, A. Tisch, S. Wischniewski. Projektnummer: F 2573, F 2601, Seiten: 48.