The objective of our analysis is to find out whether an increase in working time without pay compensation can be considered an adequate policy to reduce unemployment. From the perspective of economic theory, the outcome is in general ambiguous: On the one hand, as the increase in working time...

We estimate the effects of hiring subsidies for older workers on transitions from unemployment to employment in Germany. Using a natural experiment, our first set of estimates is based on a legal change extending the group of eligible unemployed persons. A subsequent legal change in the opposite...

In this paper, we analyze oil price impacts on unemployment for Germany. Firstly, we survey theoretical and empirical literature on the oil-unemployment relationship and relate them to the German case. Secondly, we illustrate this issue within the framework of a vector autoregression (VAR)...