Taking a European cross-country perspective, this paper addresses the most important issues in the nexus of population ageing and labor markets. We start from a descriptive overview of the demographic change currently shaping European societies. The subsequent section intensively discusses the...

Welfare benefits in the Nordic countries are often tied to employment. We argue that this is one of the factors behind the success of the Nordic model, where a comprehensive welfare state is associated with high employment. In a general equilibrium setting, the underlining mechanism works...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

This paper analyses the link between educational attainment and unemployment risk in a French-German comparison, based on a discrete time competing risks hazard rate model applied to comparable microdata sets. The unemployment risk is broken down into the risk of entering unemployment and the...

The paper investigates whether (unsubsidised) fixed-term contracts (FTCs) are a means of integration for the unemployed in the West German labour market. This is done by analysing whether entering into an FTC improves the employment opportunities of an unemployed person in terms of the...

This contribution is concerned with the spread of new products in small and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing sector. Based on an empirical study it is analyzed according to which factors planned product launches are either genuine market novelties or products that are new from the...

Diese Arbeit soll einen ersten Einblick in die Sanktionsinstrumente Sperrzeit und Säumniszeit für Leistungsempfänger der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit geben. Die Forschung basiert auf umfangreichen Individualdatensätzen der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, der IAB-Beschäftigtenstichprobe und...

This paper analyses the effects of a social assistance reform in Germany. In contrast to studies which are based on microsimulation methods we use a computable general equilibrium model which incorporates a discrete choice model of labour supply to simulate a variety of reform scenarios. The...

This paper analyzes changes in the risk of unemployment and changes in the distribution of unemployment duration for the 26 to 41 years old working population in West-Germany during the 1980ties and 1990ties. The comprehensive IAB employment subsample 1975- 1997 is used for the analysis. It...