A key question in labor market research is how the unemployment insurance system affects unemployment rates and labor market dynamics. We revisit this old question studying the German Hartz reforms. On average, lower separation rates explain 76% of declining unemployment after the reform, a fact...

The paper develops an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status matter...

Persistently high unemployment, tight government budgets and the growing scepticism regarding the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) are the basis for a growing interest in evaluating these measures. This paper intends to explain the need for evaluation on the micro- and...

A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-time unemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as they prefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

We analyze the following question associated with flexible outsourcing under imperfect domestic labour market: How does the implementation of profit sharing influence flexible outsourcing? We show that in general profit sharing has a negative effect on low skilled wage and thus an outsourcing...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep the relative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case of heterogenous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor and perfect competition in high-skilled...

We combine profit sharing and outsourcing, if the wage for worker is decided by a labor union to analyze how does the implementation of profit sharing affect individual effort and the bargained wage and thus outsourcing? We find that profit sharing and the wage level have an individual...

We analyze the impact of international outsourcing on income, if the domestic labor market is imperfect. We distinguish in our analysis between the case where the parties negotiate over the wage only and where they negotiate over both wage and profit share. We find that in the first case...