Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-businessassistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. Oneimportant concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is moreeffective and for whom...

This paper analyses theoretically and empirically how employment subsidies should betargeted. We contrast measures involving targeting workers with low incomes/abilities andtargeting the unemployed under the criteria of "approximate welfare efficiency" (AWE)...

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...

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 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...

In Germany, the employment response to the post-2007 crisis has been muted compared toother industrialized countries. Despite a large drop in output, employment has hardlychanged. In this paper, we analyze the determinants of German firms’ labor demand duringthe crisis using a firm-level panel...

Using a linked employer-employee dataset and taking the perspective of individuals rather than firms, this paper analyzes some effects of joining start-ups. We show that entrants in new firms differ from those joining incumbent firms, and we use a matching approach to compare a group of...