Contributions published at Empirical Research in Business, Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management (Uschi Backes-Gellner)

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We study the causal effects of negative and positive demand shocks on the returns to specific skills by using variation from international trade shocks. To measure specific skills, we use task information from an o cial data set for career guidance and merge this information with a large register data set. Our results show that negative demand shocks result in larger earnings losses for workers with specific skills than for those with general skills, but workers with specific skills also profit much more from positive demand shocks. Thus, demand shocks lead to risk-return trade-offs for workers with specific skills.

Since the 1990s, research on publication outputs in business and economics has almost exclusively focused on journal articles. While earlier work has shown that journal articles and other publications were indeed complements in the 70s and 80s, we find that this is no longer the case when we include the most recent decades. Apparently, the notable shift in the scientific community’s attention in the 90s on journal articles and the corresponding incentives towards publications in internationally highly ranked journals on average led researchers to focus one-sidedly on journal publications at the expense of other publication forms. To see whether the aggregate result also holds for individual researchers, we perform a cluster analysis and find four different types of individual researchers: “Journal Specialists”, “Book-Based Publishers”, a small group of “Highly Productive All-round Publishers” and a large group of what we call “Inconspicuous” researchers, with a very modest publication productivity in all forms. In addition, we find that researchers’ age matters for their publication patterns: in our sample, more experienced researchers are less productive with respect to journal articles, but more productive with respect to other publication forms. This, however, is not the result of an individual career effect. Rather, it can be attributed to a cohort effect: among today’s active researchers, the younger cohorts are more productive in journal articles than the older ones. Our explanation is as follows: the younger cohorts were still in their socialization and hiring phase and were more strongly affected by the newly introduced incentives towards international journal publications—and have thus reacted more strongly to the “regime change” resulting from the scientific community’s one-sided attention to publications in internationally highly ranked journals.

This paper investigates the role of occupational tasks in driving changes in the West German wage structure. Using administrative wage data matched with task data, we run RIF regression-based decompositions to quantify the contribution of cognitive, interactive, and manual tasks to changes in wage inequality from 1978 to 2006. We find that until the 1990s, changing returns to education and experience were driving wage inequality. Occupational tasks started playing a role only in the 1990s. During this period, increasing returns to cognitive tasks widened both upper-tail and lower-tail inequality. Conversely, decreasing returns to manual tasks were uniformly decreasing inequality. Furthermore, in the 2000s, we find an important role for interactive tasks in driving lower-tail inequality.