After 16 years of conservative-liberal rule, a social democratic-green coalition cameinto office in 1998. Though having declared the successful combating of unemploymentthe principal yardstick for his government’s performance, Chancellor Schröder actuallystood back until mid-2001, expecting...

This study focuses on productive activities that are legal in principlebut which are not declared to the authorities. In the debate inGermany various terms are used to describe these activities, themost common being Schwarzarbeit (clandestine employment),Schattenwirtschaft (underground economy)...

The extent of low-wage work in Germany is hotly debated. In international comparisons fromthe mid-90s, Germany is often classified as a country with a low wage dispersion. Comparedto the USA and UK, Germany has a relatively equal income structure and a small proportionof low-paid workers (OECD 1996;...

The European Council held in Lisbon in March 2000 was a turning point of the evolution ofEuropean employment policies. The ‘Open Method of Coordination’ (OMC) comes into forcewithin the framework of the European Strategy for employment. This method will justify thechoice and the implementation...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workersby imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This papertakes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclicalvariations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

Standard models of equilibrium unemployment assume exogenous labour market institutions and flexible wage determination. This paper models wage rigidity and collective bargaining endogenously, when workers differ by observable skill and may adopt either individualised or collective wage...

We analyse the effect of skill mismatch in a search model of equilibrium unemployment with risk-neutral agents, endogenous job destruction, and two-sidedex-ante heterogeneity. First, we examine the interaction of labour market institutions and skill mismatch. We find that skill mismatch changes...

We analyze the impact of short-run economic fluctuations on age-specific mortality usingBayesian time series econometrics and contribute to the debate on the procyclicality ofmortality. For the first time, we examine the differing consequences of economic changesfor all individual age classes....