High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular, job security, in workers' well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences...

The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays a time-varying exit rate. Building on Semi-Markov processes, we translate these exit rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation...

Since the labor market reforms around 2005, known as the Hartz reforms, Germany has experienced declining unemployment rates. However, little is known about the reforms' effect on individual life satisfaction of unemployed workers. This study applies difference-in-difference estimations and...

This paper quantifies the impact of the Hartz reforms on matching efficiency, using monthly SOEP gross worker flows (1983-2009). We show that, until the early 2000s, close to 60% of changes in the unemployment rate are due to changes in the inflow rate (job separation). On the contrary, since...

We analyse benefit-entitlement effects and the likely impact of the recent reform of the unemployment compensation system on the duration of unemployment in Germany on the basis of a flexible discrete-time hazard rate model estimated on pre-reform data from the German Socioeconomic Panel. We...

It is puzzling that people feel quite unhappy when they become unemployed, while at the same time active labor market policies are needed to bring unemployed back to work more quickly. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigate whether there is indeed such a puzzle. First,...

While many previous studies on temporary work have found disadvantages for temporary workers as compared to workers with a permanent contract, this study compares temporary work to the alternative of unemployment. Specifically, this paper investigates the potential integrative power of taking up...

We use the panel data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) to investigate whether risk attitudes have primary (exogenous) determinants that are valid in different stages of economic development and in a different structural context,...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that paternal unemployment has a surprisingly positive causal effect on the "Big 5" personality traits of children aged 17 to 25. In particular, our results from longitudinal value-added models for personality suggest...

In the case of collective redundancies, employers are forced to regard certain characteristics when deciding who is going to be dismissed. This paper develops a procedure to derive an empirical based weighting scheme between the characteristics relevant for this selection (age, disability,...