Publications of the Research Unit Labour Markets and Social Insurance

  1. ZEW policy brief No. 24-14 // 2024

    Digitale Transformation auf Sparflamme: Weniger 4.0-Investitionen in der Pandemie

    Während der Covid-19-Pandemie kam es entgegen der öffentlich herrschenden Meinung zu keiner Beschleunigung der digitalen Transformation in Deutschland. Das zeigen Ergebnisse der neuen Betriebsbefragung…

  2. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 24-057 // 2024

    Firm-Level Technology Adoption in Times of Crisis

    This study investigates how crises affect firms’ adoption of frontier technologies using the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study. The analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations of…

  3. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 24-027 // 2024

    Are We Yet Sick of New Technologies? The Unequal Health Effects of Digitalization

    This study quantifies the relationship between workplace digitalization, i.e., the increasing use of frontier technologies, and workers’ health outcomes using novel and representative German linked…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 24-044 // 2024

    Expertise at Work: New Technologies, New Skills, and Worker Impacts

    We study how new digital technology reshapes vocational training and skill acquisition and its impact on workers’ careers. We construct a novel database of legally binding training curricula and changes therein,…

  5. Refereed Journal // 2024

    Long-run consequences of informal elderly care and implications of public long-term care insurance

    We estimate a dynamic structural model of labor supply, retirement, and informal caregiving to study short and long-term costs of informal caregiving in Germany. Incorporating labor market frictions and the…

  6. Refereed Journal // 2024

    Getting the Right Tail Right: Modeling Tails of Health Expenditure Distributions

    Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values, implying that the underlying distribution has heavy tails. This may result in infinite variances as well as higher-order moments and bias the…

  7. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 24-035 // 2024

    Do Politicians Affect Firm Outcomes? Evidence from Connections to the German Federal Parliament

    We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset to measure connections between politicians and the universe of firms. To identify the causal…

  8. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 24-011 // 2024

    Sick Leave and Medical Leave in the United States: A Categorization and Recent Trends

    This article reviews the current debate about sick pay mandates and medical leave in the United States. The United States is one of three industrialized countries that do not guarantee access to paid sick leave…