"A major unemployment and welfare benefit reform took place in Germany in 2005. One objective of this reform was to more strongly encourage an adult worker model of the family, with an emphasis on activating the formerly inactive. Our hypothesis is, however, that assignments to activation...

"We revisit the puzzling finding that labour market performance appears to deteriorate, as suggested by negative time trends in empirical matching functions. We investigate whether these trends simply arise from omitted variable bias. Concretely, we consider the omission of job seekers beyond...

"Using a search theoretical model, we analyse the effects of the information flow via social networks (friends, relatives and other personal contacts) by comparing monetary and non-monetary outcomes in obtaining jobs via networks versus formal methods. Propensity-score matching on survey data...

"Many labor market models use both idiosyncratic productivity and a vacancy free entry condition. This paper shows that these two features combined generate an equilibrium comovement between matches on the one hand and unemployment and vacancies on the other hand, which is observationally...

"The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

"This paper analyses theoretical effects of minimum wages on employment and the wage distribution under a frictional setting. I review new developments in search theory and discuss the influence of minimum wages on wages and employment under each setting. Thereby, a major theoretical focus of...

"Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

"In this paper we analyse the health effects of fixed-term contract status for men and women in West-Germany and Spain using panel data. This paper asks whether changes in the employment relationship, as a result of the liberalisation of employment law, have altered the positive health effects...

"Die Arbeit untersucht, wie stabil die Ergebnisse der jüngst vom Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung veröffentlichten Berechnungen zur Stillen Reserve für den Zeitraum von 1970 bis 2002 hinsichtlich der zentralen Modellannahme über die Höhe der Vollbeschäftigung sind. Dazu...

"In 2005, benefit sanctions in Germany were tightened with the introduction of the new means-tested unemployment benefit II (UB II), codified in Social Code (SC) II. This study analyzes the effect of benefit sanctions on the reservation wage of sanctioned unemployment benefit II recipients. The...