This paper provides a critical overview and a detailed research agenda for scholarsinterested in regional studies with a special focus on old and new European Union memberstates. The focus is on the microeconomic foundations of structural change and its spatiallyasymmetric impact on labour...

Firms select not only how many, but also which workers to hire. Yet, in standard searchmodels of the labor market, all workers have the same probability of being hired. We arguethat selective hiring crucially affects welfare analysis. Our model is isomorphic to a searchmodel under random hiring...

The mild response of the German labor market to the worst global recession in post-warhistory appears as an economic miracle. In response to the crisis, Germany has shown to bea strong case of internal flexibility. We argue that important factors that have contributed tothis development include...

Die Arbeitsmarktreformen der letzten Jahre haben die strukturellen Anpassungsproblemedes deutschen Beschäftigungsmodells zum Teil gelindert - allerdings sind noch längst nichtalle Schwierigkeiten überwunden...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large andpersistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regionsof four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and weexplore potential explanations for this...

We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assistcaseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour marketprogrammes for their unemployed clients. This statistical support system predicted the labourmarket outcome for each...

We evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation andequilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market, where wages are determinedby a monopoly labour union. We find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion betweenthe high-skilled and low-skilled workers...

We study both the various consequences and the incentives of outsourcing. We argue thatthe wage elasticity of labour demand is increasing as a function of the share of outsourcing,which is importantly a result consistent with existing empirical research...

We document the nature of structural changes in employment to understand “jobless” growthin Irish Manufacturing in the aftermath of EEC/EU membership, 1972-2003. By 1972, fortyyears of protectionism and fifteen years of export promotion induced the coexistence of largeexporting plants with...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkablywell in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simplerank-size rule known as Zipf´s law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is thechurning of industries...