While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

A growing body of programme evaluation literature recognises immigrants as a disadvantaged group on European labour markets and investigates the employment effects of Active Labour Market Pro-grammes (ALMPs) on this subgroup. Using a meta-analysis, we condense 93 estimates from 33 empir-ical...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors,...

This paper investigates regional or international transfers as a means to prevent immigration into unemployment. We analyze a two-country model with free migration in which the rich country is characterized by minimum wage unemployment. Matching grants for investment in infrastructure are...

This paper investigates the statistical features and the macroeconomic determinants of youth unemployment in a number of European countries. First, it explores its short and long memory properties by estimating both autoregressive and fractional integration models. This type of analysis sheds...

This paper follows up recent work on the relationship between (un-)employment and wage effects of social security financing undertaken by the OECD Jobs Study. Based on a simple macroeconometric model of the labour market, I investigate whether the peculiar OECD results for Germany on the...

Dieser Beitrag stellt ausgew ahlte Ergebnisse des vom Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW) im Auftrag des IAB und des Ministeriums für Arbeit und Soziales Rheinland-Pfalz bearbeiteten Forschungsprojekts "Arbeitsplatzeffekte gemeinnütziger Arbeitnehmerüberlassungen in...

With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

In recent years, coinciding with the discussion led in many OECD countries, Germany has started to contract out placement services for the unemployed to private agencies. Whereas in the Netherlands and Australia the whole system of employment services was reorganized at once, making an...