Since the so-called Hartz IV reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008/2009, the German labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this...

In a New Keynesian DSGE model with labor market frictions and liquidityconstrained consumers aggregate unemployment is likely to increase due to a non-persistent government spending shock. Furthermore, the group of asset-holding households reacts very differently from the group of...