A casual look at regional unemployment rates reveals that there are vast differences which cannot be explained by different institutional settings. Our paper attempts to trace these differences in the regions' labour market performance back to the regions' specialisation in products that are...

The labour-market policy-mix in Germany is increasingly being decided on a regional level. This requires additional knowledge about the regional development which (disaggregated) national forecasts cannot provide. Therefore, we separately forecast employment for the 176 German labour- market...

We propose a model where imperfect matching between firms and workers on local labor markets leads to spatial agglomeration. We show that the occurrence of spatial agglomeration depends on initial size differences in terms of both number of workers and firms. We analyse the effect of different...

The findings of recent studies on adjustment processes suggest that regional labour markets in the EU and the US differ significantly. Low wage flexibility and limited labour mobility in European countries involve persistent unemployment differentials across regions. However, the spatial...

In this paper we find evidence that the new economic geography approach is able to describe and explain the spatial characteristics of an economy, in our case the German economy. Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by...

We analyze determinants of regional industry mix and focus especially on the influence of labor market characteristics. By combining a labor market pooling argument with an argument involving the cost of switching a worker from one firm to another, we show that in the presence of product market...

The extremely large disparities in employment rates across Italian regions, and the bad performance of the Italian economy in terms of job creation in the 80´s and early 90´s make job creation a top-priority in the economic policy agenda. This paper uses data on employment from 784 Local Labor...

Main topics of the following analysis are the development of spatial structure and the question whether the economic disparities between agglomerations and peripheral areas will con- or diverge. Frequently, economic disparities are measured by per capita i ncome. Because of the relationship...

Using different regional data sources for East Germany the three largest active labour market policy (ALMP) programmes – job creation schemes (JCS), structural adjustment schemes (SAS) and public training (PT) – are evaluated. After addressing the regional allocation rule of the funding of...