This paper reviews the dramatic and widely noted developments in the German labor market in the past decade and surveys the most plausible reasons for these changes. Alternative hypotheses are compared and contrasted. I argue that the labor market reforms associated with the Agenda 2010 – the...

We evaluate the quantity-quality trade-off on the labor market by estimating an augmented matching function weighting the matches by quality measures. We use the approach to evaluate the German labor market reforms conducted between 2003 and 2005. Indeed, we find a significant quantity-quality...

We use linked longitudinal data on employers and employees to estimate how the 2003-2005 Hartz reforms affected the wages of displaced German workers after they returned to work. We also present a simple new method to decompose the wage effects into components attributable to selection on...