We study the implications of product and labor market imperfections for equilibrium unemployment under both exogenous and endogenous capital intensity. With endogenous capital intensity, stronger labor market imperfections always increase equilibrium unemployment. The relationship between the...

The average height of children is an indicator for the quality of nutrition and health care. Heights have never declined over longer time spans in Eastern Germany since 1880 - except for the most recent period 1997-2006. In the Eastern German Land of Brandenburg, a data set of 253,050 pre-school...

We reassess the scarring" hypothesis by Clark et al. (2001), which states that unemployment experienced in the past reduces a person's current life satisfaction even after the person has become reemployed. Our results suggest that the scar from past unemployment operates via worsened...

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...

We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are...

Germany is the laggard of Europe, yet the country is world champion in merchandise exports. The paper tries to solve this theoretical and empirical puzzle by diagnosing a "pathological export boom" and a "bazaar effect". Excessively high wages defended by unions and the welfare state against the...

The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays a time-varying exit rate. Building on Semi-Markov processes, we translate these exit rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation...