Each year Germany and many other developed economies spend tens of billions of Euros on active measures of employment promotion with the explicit aim of contributing to the reduction of unemployment. Yet, high unemployment has universally been a persistent problem throughout the last two...

Using a large panel data set we investigate whether works councils act as sand or grease in the operation of German firms. Stochastic production frontier analysis indicates that establishments with and without a works council do not exhibit significant differences in efficiency.

We here use the employment-history data from the British Cohort Study to calculate an individual's total experience of unemployment from the time they left school up to age 30. We show that this experience is negatively correlated with the life satisfaction that the individual reports at age 30,...

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show...

To equalize differences in health plan premiums due to differences in risk pools, the German legislature introduced a simple Risk Adjustment Scheme (RAS) based on age, gender and disability status in 1994. In addition, effective 1996, consumers gained the freedom to choose among hundreds of...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...

Auswertungen repräsentativer Daten des IAB-Betriebspanels für Westdeutschland von 1993 bis 1998 zeigen, dass nur zwischen 20 und 30 Prozent aller Betriebe bezahlte Überstunden einsetzten. In diesen Betrieben fielen im Durchschnitt 1,6 bezahlte Überstunden pro abhängig Beschäftigten und...

We estimate the effects of works councils on productivity, 1997-2000, using the IAB Establishment Panel, a nationally representative German data set. We recoup the works council effect by estimating translog production functions, stochastic frontier production functions, and a model in first...