The end of communism in the 1990s probably is the most fundamental restructuring of institutions witnessed in recent history. At its core was the large-scale redistribution of previously state-owned companies. We construct a unique firm-level dataset to study this redistribution in East Germany...

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information. -- minimum wages ; unemployment ; asymmetric...

Though a lot of work has been done on the distribution of job tenures, we are still uncertain about its main determinants. In this paper, we stress random shocks to match productivity after the start of an employment relation. The specificity of investment makes hiring and separation decisions...

The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed...

This paper considers the optimal level of firm-specific training by taking into account the positive effect of training on the expected duration of workers current employment. In the framework of an efficiency wage model, a short expected job tenure represents a disamenity that reduces the...

Average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. We document this fact for thirteen countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia). We develop a measure of human capital that accounts for the selection of workers with different unobserved...

"The prospects for Germany's economic development are good at present. Nonetheless there are also uncertainties and downsides. For this reason our labour market forecast for 2000 is based on a range of assumptions for the actual economic growth. The overview includes the basic data of these...

"The strong external demand, combined with favourable supply conditions in Germany, has set in motion an economic recovery. There is reason to believe that the upswing will become stronger and more widespread in 1998. For this reason in the middle Variant II of the IAB alterna-tive calculations...

"Der Aufsatz präsentiert Ergebnisse einer Befragung zu Unterschieden der Arbeitsproduktivität in 104 mittelständischen Betrieben Ost- und Westdeutschlands. Im Mittel beträgt die Arbeitsproduktivität der ostdeutschen Betriebe derzeit etwa 45% des westdeutschen Niveaus; berücksichtigt man...