It is frequently argued that unemployment plays a crucial role for the occurrence of right-wing extremist crimes. We empirically test this hypothesis using data from Germany. We find that right-wing criminal activities occur more frequently when unemployment is high. The big difference in...

We examine the labour market experience of the UK and the US in the recessions of the early 1920s and the early 1930s and the subsequent recoveries. These were deep recessions, comparable to that of 2008-9, but the recoveries were very different. In the UK the recovery of the 1920s was...

Short-time work was the 'German answer' to the economic crisis. The number of short-time workers strongly increased in the recession and peaked at more than 1.5 million. Without the extensive use of short-time work, unemployment would have risen by approximately twice as much as it actually did....

The potential distortions of job-search incentives caused by unemployment benefits and their financing are well known. However, a benefit-tax scheme also provides insurance having direct utility effects as well as indirect effects on risk taking. The latter mitigates or may even dominate...

With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

Some existing welfare programs (“work-first”) require participants to work in exchange for benefits. Others (“job search-first”) emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. This paper studies the optimal design of welfare programs...

We structurally estimate a novel job search model with endogenous job search effort, job quality dispersion, and effort monitoring, taking into account that monitoring effects may be mitigated by on-the-job search and search channel substitution. The data are from a randomized experiment...

All OECD countries have either legally mandated severance pay or compensations imposed by industry-level bargaining in case of employer initiated job separations. According to the extensive literature on Employment Protection Legislation (EPL), such transfers are either ineffective or less...

This paper offers quasi experimental evidence of the existence of spillover effects of UI extensions using a unique program that extended unemployment benefits drastically for a subset of workers in selected regions of Austria. We use non-eligible unemployed in treated regions, and a...

Short-time work compensation aims at reducing lay-offs by allowing employers to temporarily reduce hours worked while compensating workers for the induced loss of income. These programs are now widespread in the OECD countries, notably following the 2008-2009 crisis. This paper discusses the...