After the Hartz reforms of 2003–2005, unemployment in Germany has gone down significantly. Using a structural evaluation, it is shown that the contribution of the Hartz IV reform to this decrease was extremely modest. Hartz IV explains less than 0.1 percentage point of the decline in the...

Social and private returns to education are computed using the structural estimates of an extended Burdett-Mortensen search equilibrium model. The extension includes different skill groups linked via a production function with variable degree of homogeneity, allowing thereby for a unimodal...

There is an ongoing debate among researchers and policy makers, whether informal sector employment is a result of competitive market forces or labor market segmentation. More recently it has been argued that none of the two theories sufficiently explains informal employment, but that the...