Anja Heinze

Deregulating Job Placement in Europe: A Microeconometric Evaluation of an Innovative Voucher Scheme in Germany

Job placement vouchers can be regarded as a tool to spur competition between public and private job placement activities. The German government launched this instrument in order to end the public placement monopoly and to subsidize its private competitors. We exploit very rich administrative data provided for the first time by the Federal Employment Agency and apply propensity score matching as a method to solve the fundamental evaluation problem and to estimate the effect of the vouchers. We find positive treatment effects on the employment probability after one year of 6.5 percentage points in Western Germany and give a measure for deadweight loss.

Gender Earnings Gap in German Firms: The Impact of Firm Characteristics and Institutions

Most existing analyses on the gender wage gap (GWG) have neglected the establishment as a place where inequality between male and female employees arises and is maintained. The use of linked employee-employer data permits us to move beyond the individual and consider the importance of the workplace to explain gender pay differentials. That is, we first provide a comprehensive study on the effects of various firm characteristics and the institutional framework on the GWG in Germany. The innovation of our research is that we do not just compare average male and female wages (of specific groups of employees), but look at within-firm gender wage differentials. Our results indicate that the mean GWG within firms is smaller than the average overall GWG. Furthermore, we can show that firms with formalized co-determination (works council) and those covered by collective wage agreements are more likely to have smaller GWG. It is also interesting to note that the wage differential between men and women decreases with firm size and increases with the wage level.

How to Limit Discrimination? Analyzing the Effects of Innovative Workplace Practices on Intra-Firm Gender Wage Gaps Using Linked Employer-Employee Data

This paper provides a new approach to assess the impact of organisational changes fostering employee involvement, performance related pay schemes and other relevant trends in personnel policy on the gender wage gap. Our results indicate that innovative human resource practices tend to limit the wage differential between men and women. The innovation of this study is that we use linked employer-employee data to look at within-firm gender wage differentials. To investigate the theoretical hypotheses regarding the effect of selected human resource measures on gender wage inequality, we calculate a firm-specific gender wage gap accounting for differences in individual characteristics.

Beyond the mean gender wage gap: Decomposition of differences in wage distributions using quantile regression

Using linked employer-employee data, this study measures and decomposes the differences in the earnings distribution between male and female employees in Germany. I extend the traditional decomposition to disentangle the effect of human capital characteristics and the effect of firm characteristics in explaining the gender wage gap. Furthermore, I implement the decomposition across the whole wage distribution with the method proposed by Machado and Mata (2005). Thereby, I take into account the dependence between the human capital endowment of individuals and workplace characteristics. The selection of women into less successful and productive firms explains a sizeable part of the gap. This selection is more pronounced in the lower part of the wage distribution than in the upper tail. In addition, women also benefit from the success of firms by rent-sharing to a lesser extent than their male colleagues. This is the source of the largest part of the pay gap. Gender differences in human capital endowment as well as differences in returns to human capital are less responsible for the wage differential.

Should Low-Wage Workers Care About Where They Work? Assessing the Impact of Employer Characteristics on Low-Wage Mobility

This paper studies the importance of employer-specific determinants in escaping low earnings in Germany. To address the initial conditions problem and the endogeneity of employer retention, we model (intra-firm) low-pay transitions using a multivariate Probit model that accounts for selection into low-wage employment and non-random employer drop-out. Using data from the LIAB Linked Employer–Employee panel, our results indicate that for male workers from the service sector the probability of escaping low-pay increases with employer size. This contrasts with female workers from the service sector, who rather benefit from collective bargaining coverage and local works councils. These findings are consistent with internal labour markets being an important ingredient of male within-firm wage growth, whereas the removal of asymmetric information appears to be more relevant in explaining female workers’ wage transitions.

Earnings of Men and Women in Firms with a Female Dominated Workforce: What Drives the Impact of Sex Segregation on Wages?

This study analyzes the relationship between the segregation of women across establishments and the salaries paid to men and women. My aim is to separate the impact the proportion of women working within an establishment has upon individual wages. For this purpose hypotheses are formulated as to what drives this impact: sex-specific preferences, lower qualifications among women or discrimination against women. To investigate this issue empirically, I use matched employer-employee data from Germany. My results indicate that an increasing proportion of women in an establishment reduces wages for males and females in both western and eastern Germany. Furthermore the empirical analysis shows that by successively including worker and establishment characteristics, the number of females in an establishment has a severely detrimental effect upon the salaries paid to both sexes.