This paper reviews the dramatic and widely noted developments in the German labor market in the past decade and surveys the most plausible reasons for these changes. Alternative hypotheses are compared and contrasted. I argue that the labor market reforms associated with the Agenda 2010 – the...

The supply and demand framework of Katz and Murphy (1992) provides new evidence on the source of changes in socially insured full-time and part-time employment in years preceding and following the implementation of the landmark Hartz reforms in Germany. Our findings are consistent with a stable...

In this paper I analyze the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) on compensation shares of high-, medium-, and low-skilled workers. Com- pared to other studies, I investigate this question using a considerably richer data set with respect to the length of time series, set of...

I explore the aggregate effects of micro lumpy labor adjustment in a prototypical RBC model, which embeds a stochastic labor duration mechanism in the spirit of Calvo(1983), and it extends this approach by introducing a Weibull-distributed labor adjustment process to capture the increasing...

I explore the implications of the lumpy labor adjustment as a propagation mechanism for aggregate dynamics. The model I use nests the basic RBC model with a staggered-job-turnover in the spirit of Taylor (1980) and Calvo (1983). It extends this approach by introducing a Weibull-distributed labor...