"A major unemployment and welfare benefit reform took place in Germany in 2005. One objective of this reform was to more strongly encourage an adult worker model of the family, with an emphasis on activating the formerly inactive. Our hypothesis is, however, that assignments to activation...

"We revisit the puzzling finding that labour market performance appears to deteriorate, as suggested by negative time trends in empirical matching functions. We investigate whether these trends simply arise from omitted variable bias. Concretely, we consider the omission of job seekers beyond...

"The beginning of the employment career is often associated with phases of unemployment. We argue that unemployment has different implications for different educational groups on future employment career depending on institutional settings in the UK and Germany. While search and matching models...

"The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

"We perform a comprehensive analysis of the stepping-stone effect of temporary agency employment on unemployed workers. Using the timing-of-events approach, we not only investigate whether agency employment is a bridge into regular em-ployment but also analyze its effect on post-unemployment...

"Wage subsidies are a major instrument of active labor market policies in Germany. This paper analyses for West Germany, if tenure differs across individuals taking up a subsidized or unsubsidized job, respectively, during the second quarter of 2003. The study is based on process generated data...

"Die aktive Arbeitsmarktpolitik nach dem Sozialgesetzbuch III wird aus Mitteln des Europäischen Sozialfonds im Rahmen des so genannten ESF-BAProgramms in der Zeit von 2000 bis 2008 ergänzt. Das Programm setzt bei verschiedenen Lücken der gesetzlichen Arbeitsförderung an. Im Bereich der...

"This paper investigates how founders' experience and professional background affect the duration of periods of self-employment, and to what extent the duration is affected by a balanced skill set in particular. In this context, an occupational choice framework based on a competing risk setting...

"Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

"In this paper we analyse the health effects of fixed-term contract status for men and women in West-Germany and Spain using panel data. This paper asks whether changes in the employment relationship, as a result of the liberalisation of employment law, have altered the positive health effects...