Essays in Labor and Public Economics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three independent essays in labor and public economics. Chapter 1 presents evidence on how exogenous worker exits affect a firm’s demand for incumbent workers and new hires. Using matched employer-employee data based on the universe of German social security records, I analyze the effects of unexpected worker deaths and show that these worker exits affect the remaining workers’ wages and retention probabilities. Chapter 2 (with Peter Ganong) proposes a permutation test for the Regression Kink (RK) design. As a complement to standard RK inference, we propose that researchers construct a distribution of placebo estimates in regions with and without a policy kink and use this distribution to gauge statistical significance of RK estimates. Chapter 3 (with Johannes Abeler) analyzes a laboratory experiment to study how tax complexity affects the reaction to tax changes.