Empirical Essays on Occupations, Reallocation and Wage Differentials

Abstract

In this thesis I aim to contribute to the labor economics literature by casting more light on i) measurement errors regarding data on occupational affiliations, ii) worker mobility across occupations and iii) wage differentials between part-time and full-time workers with comparable skills. Throughout, I focus on German labor markets. Germany is one of the major economies in the world and the most important one in Europe. I employ individual level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The GSOEP has started in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1984 with around 12,000 respondents representative of the entire residential population. Since then, several samples are added occasionally to reflect the changing population structure of the Germany, like the expansion of the GSOEP to the former German Democratic Republic in June 1990. GSOEP has several advantages as it is based on a rather stable set of questions regarding the demographics, education, earnings and labor market dynamics. Due to its panel data structure, individuals can be followed over time. Together with recently developed econometric methods for panel data, this allows for analyzing the importance of dynamics in individual’s decisions.