The assumption that national labor markets are homogenous across tradable and non-tradable goods is common in multisector (open-economy) macro models and crucial for the prominent Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis. This study tests it with a novel method to distinguish the tradable and non-tradable...

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...