Not only the level of aggregate unemployment but also the properties of its dynamics are an important topic in macroeconomics and labor economics. Several models like e.g. matching models with endogenous job destruction explicitly predict an asymmetric pattern in the evolution of unemployment,...

The diffusion of Temporary Work Agency (TWA) jobs originated a harsh policy debate and ambiguous empirical evidence. Results for the US, based on quasi-experimental evidence, suggest that a TWA assignment decreases the probability of finding a stable job, while results for Europe, based on the...

The debate in Australia on the (constant-output) elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages has wrongly sidelined the role of capital stock as a determinant of employment (Webster, 2003). As far back as 1991, Pissarides had argued that the influence of capital stock on the performance of...

Labor markets in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent a dramatic transformation. Notably, this transformation took place within just a few years. Until the mid-2000s job opportunities were scarce and unemployment was high. But since then labor demand has picked up and...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual?s employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

This paper tests whether amnesty, a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), affected the labor market outcomes of the legalized population. Using the Legalized Population Survey (LPS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1987-1992, a...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labor market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

In this study we examine the contribution of severance pay to employment and unemployment development using data on industrialized OECD countries. Our starting point is Lazear?s (1990) empirical dictum that severance payment requirements adversely impact the labor market. We extend his sample...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

In this paper, a survey on theoretically expected and empirically proved impacts of exchange rate volatility is given. With regard to the West German unemployment, the effects of volatility are empirically analysed using three different volatility measures and four country groups. In...