The secular rise of European unemployment since the 1960s is hard to explain without reference to structural change. This is especially true in Germany, where industrial employment has declined by more than 30% and service sector employment has more than doubled over the past three decades....

A common explanation of low unemployment rates in the Czech Republic (CR) is the stance of active labour market policies (ALMPs), in particular the extensive use of ALMP instruments and an effective delivery system. Using a large panel of quarterly data from employment office districts, we...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

Using time-diary data from four countries we show that the unemployed spend most of the time not working for pay in additional leisure and personal maintenance, not in increased household production. There is no relation between unemployment duration and the split of time between household...

This paper investigates the effect of displacement on wages of socially insured German workers, who became unemployed in 1986. Because detailed information on job loss is unavailable, displacement status is predicted using a probit, estimated on the German Socioeconomic Panel. In contrast to US...

The increase in dispersion of regional unemployment in the Czech Republic, despite low overall joblessness, is suggestive of low labour mobility. At the same time, standard matching functions estimated with district level panel data exhibit spatial instability. A simple model of non-sequential...

The purpose of this paper is to establish some stylized facts on gross labor market flows - using mostly new data from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States - which any theory of unemployment ought to explain. The regularities on gross labor market flows that we isolate are...

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day—the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents there is no...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to...

The rapid wage increases observed in Eastern Germany over the past two years have important implications for the direction taken by structural change in this region. These implications are not solely negative, and remain controversial in the public debate. This paper discusses four aspects of a...