Sebastian Otten

Linguistic Distance and the Language Fluency of Immigrants

We use a newly available measure of linguistic distance developed by the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to explain heterogeneity in language skills of immigrants. This measure is based on an automatical algorithm comparing pronunciation and vocabulary of language pairs. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the period from 1997 to 2003, the linguistic distance measure is applied within a human capital framework of language acquisition. It is shown that linguistic distance is the most important determinant for host country language acquisition and that it explains a large fraction of language skill heterogeneity between immigrants. By lowering the effi ciency and imposing higher costs of language learning, the probability of reporting good language skills is decreasing by increasing linguistic distance.

Husband’s Unemployment and Wife’s Labor Supply – The Added Worker Effect across Europe

This paper investigates the responsiveness of women’s labor supply to their husband’s loss of employment – the so-called added worker effect. While previous empirical literature on this topic mainly concentrates on a single country, we take an explicit internationally comparative perspective and analyze whether the added worker effect varies across the European countries. In doing so, we use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) covering the period 2004 to 2011. For our pooled sample of 28 European countries, we find evidence for the existence of an added worker effect, both at the extensive and at the intensive margin of labor supply. Women whose husbands become unemployed have a higher probability of entering the labor market and changing from part-time to full-time employment than women whose husbands remain employed. However, our results further reveal that the added worker effect varies over both the business cycle and the different welfare regimes within Europe.

Getting what (employers think) you’re worth: Evidence on the gender gap in entry wages among university graduates

Since the early 1970s, wage differentials between men and women have attracted the research interest of labor economists. However, up to now empirical evidence on gender differentials of labor market entrants and the determinants of their starting wages is scarce. To fill this gap, we make use of a unique dataset on graduates in economics from a large representative German university, to investigate whether – even for such a homogeneous group of labor market entrants – a gender gap in earnings exists. Concentrating on a highly homogeneous sample limits the problem of unobserved heterogeneity, which results in an overestimation of the unexplained component of standard decompositions analyses. The results reveal that women’s entry wages are significant lower than those of their male counterparts. Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions suggest that the major part of this gap remains unexplained by gender differences in observable characteristics.

Husband’s Unemployment and Wife’s Labor Supply: The Added Worker Effect across Europe:

This paper investigates the responsiveness of womens labor supply to their husbands job loss – the so-called added worker effect. We contribute to the literature by taking an explicit internationally comparative perspective and analyze the variation of the added worker effect across welfare regimes. Using longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) covering 28 European countries from 2004 to 2013, we find evidence for the existence of an added worker effect. However, our results also reveal that the added worker effect varies over both the business cycle and the different welfare regimes within Europe.

Getting what (employers think) you’re worth

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the gender wage differential of labor market entrants and the determinants of their starting wages. Design/methodology/approach – The paper makes use of a unique data set on graduates in economics from a large German university that contains detailed information on the graduates’ course of study, their additional qualifications and their transition from university to the labor market. Based on these data, Mincer-type earnings functions as well as wage decompositions as proposed by Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) are performed. Findings – The paper finds a significant gender wage differential of 7 percent. Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions suggest that the major part of this gap remains unexplained by gender differences in observable characteristics. Research limitations/implications – The main feature of our analysis – having a highly homogeneous sample of graduates from a single university – comes at the costs of reduced ability to draw...

Remittances and the Brain Drain: Evidence from Microdata for Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract Based on unique microdata from five Sub-Saharan African countries that contain comprehensive information on both migrants and their households at the origin country, we investigate the effect of migrants’ education on their remittance behaviour. Our results reveal that migrants’ education has no impact on the likelihood of sending remittances, but a positive effect on the amount of money sent, conditional on remitting. The latter effect holds for internal migrants and migrants in non-OECD countries, while it vanishes for migrants in OECD destination countries once characteristics of the origin household are controlled for.

The Effect of Gender Equality on International Soccer Performance

In this paper, we propose a new estimation strategy that uses the variation in success between the male and the female national soccer team within a country to identify the causal impact of gender equality on womens soccer performance. In particular, we analyze whether within-country variations in labor force participation rates and life expectancies between the genders, which serve as measures for the countryOs gender equality, are able to explain differences in the international success of male and female national soccer teams. Our results reveal that differences in male and female labor force participation rates and life expectancies are able to explain the international soccer performance of female teams, but not that of male teams, suggesting that gender equality is an important driver of female sport success.