"Up until now, our knowledge on the consumption patterns of recipients of Unemployment Benefit II, the means tested basic security system for employable persons in Germany, is rather restricted. This comes somewhat as a surprise, since analyses of consumption are highly relevant for setting...

"In 2010, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) declared the level of social assistance according to the Second and Twelfth Book of the Social Code (SGB II and SGB XII) in its form at that time as non-constitutional. In response to the verdict the...

"Methods for the analysis of linked employer-employee data are not yet available in standard econometrics packages. In this paper, we make the fixed-effects methods developed orginally by Abowd, Kramarz, Margolis and others more accessible, where possible, and show how they can be implemented in...

"In many large data sets of economic interest, some variables, as wages, are top-coded or right-censored. In order to analyze wages with the German IAB employment sample we first have to solve the problem of censored wages at the upper limit of the social security system. We treat this problem...

"This paper makes three contributions to the literature on the effects of collective bargaining on the performance of German establishments. We include the analysis of firms' efficiency and we model productivity and efficiency simultaneously. Confronted with 25 % observations with missing...