This paper shows that earnings losses after unemployment increase with age. First, older employees start out with relatively high earnings in comparison to employees without employment interruptions several years before the non-employment spell. This earnings advantage turns into a strong...

We present evidence for a highly significant interaction between state dependence in individual unemployment risk and the business cycle. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller in times of relatively high unemployment and larger in times of low...

With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

This paper analyses whether wages in Germany respond to firm-specific profitability conditions. Particular emphasis lies on the question of whether the extent of rent-sharing varies across different systems of wage determination. Those may be categorised into sector-specific wage agreements,...

On the basis of a theoretical model, we argue that higher aggregate unemployment affects individual returns to education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education level in a standard Mincer equation. Our results show...

Empirical work on continuing training in Germany provides surprisingly divergent evidence on the incidence of training. This makes comparison of econometric analyses of the impact of training on labour market outcomes di±cult. Three large German data sets are used here to bring to light the...

Wage and productivity effects of training are compared to study how the training rent is shared between employers and employees. With panel data from 1996-2002, I analyse the impact of continuing training on wages and productivity in a Cobb-Douglas production framework. Using system GMM...