Despite the importance of business creation for the economy and a relevant share of new firms being started out of unemployment, most research has focused on analyzing the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) policies on reemployment outcomes that ignore self-employment. In this paper, we...

Do investment programs create more jobs in tight or in slack labor markets? We study this question using data from a large, long-term photovoltaic invest scheme in Germany. Comparing counties with high and low unemployment both over time and across space, we find that photovoltaic installations...

Industrial prices of goods and services are a function of costs of production and of the mark-up that firms apply on those costs. If these prices relate to goods that are traded internationally, they will also be influenced by the price at which those goods are exchanged in international...

Estimating the returns to migration from East to West Germany, this paper focuses on pre-migration employment dynamics, earnings uncertainty, and job change in the source region. Migrants are found to be negatively selected with respect to labor market outcomes, with a large drop in earnings and...

We apply a monopoly trade union model and analyze employment, wage and budgetary effects of (i) an inflow of migrant workers and (ii) an increase in the labor market participation rate of migrants. Per assumption, natives and migrants solely differ with respect to the level of benefit claims in...

The paper exploits a simulation environment and its output indicators to compare the performance of "ex-ante" policy instruments across housing and social welfare domains. We create a progressive score to contrast six single and mixed policy instruments against a no-policy baseline. The multiple...

We discuss how cross-country unemployment insurance can be used to improve international risk sharing. We use a two-country business cycle model with incomplete financial markets and frictional labor markets where the unemployment insurance scheme operates across both countries. Cross-country...

I calculate unemployment multipliers of fiscal consolidation policies in a standard, closed-economy New Keynesian framework with search and matching frictions, and, as an innovation, in the presence of sectoral heterogeneity. Family and non-family firms behave differently in the labor market and...

As skills of labor-market entrants are usually not directly observed by employers, individuals acquire skill signals. To study which signals are valued by employers, we simultaneously and independently randomize a broad range of skill signals on pairs of resumes of fictitious applicants among...

This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by decreasing returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, computerization improved the access to technologyadopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents,...