Although explanations of the persistence of high unemployment in Germany, in particular long-term unemployment, have increasingly focused on structural factors, there is only very limited evidence on their empirical importance so far. In this paper, these factors are analyzed based on a...

Unemployment duration data derived from retrospective surveys often show an abnormal concentration of responses at certain durations. This common kind of measurement error is known as "heaping" in the statistical literature. Although heaping effects may lead to severe biases in estimated...