While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

A growing body of programme evaluation literature recognises immigrants as a disadvantaged group on European labour markets and investigates the employment effects of Active Labour Market Pro-grammes (ALMPs) on this subgroup. Using a meta-analysis, we condense 93 estimates from 33 empir-ical...

This paper presents a methodology to identify net demand shocks as well as wage rigidities in heterogeneous labor markets on the basis of nonparametric regression. We show how this approach can be used to make suggestions for immigration policy in economies with labor market rigidities. In an...

I extend the model-based literature on spillover effects of labour market reforms on foreign (un-)employment by allowing for third-country effects. When the workhorse two-country model is enlarged to include a third country, a reform causes an additional indirect effect through a terms-of-trade...

Die Bekämpfung der Arbeitslosigkeit genießt oberste wirtschaftspolitische Priorität - dieser Feststellung wird kaum jemand widersprechen wollen. Eher scheiden sich die Geister an der Frage nach dem "wirklichen" quantitativen Ausmaß der Unterbeschäftigung, ihren Ursachen und welche...

We focus on the influence of institutional variables on business cycle synchronisation for 20 OECD countries from 1979 to 2003. More precisely, this paper derives measures for similarity of institutions and structural reforms, and investigates direct and delayed reform effects on synchronisation...

Dieser Beitrag bietet eine Darstellung der Arbeitsmarktanalysen und der daraus abgeleiteten wirtschaftspolitischen Vorschläge des Sachverständigenrates zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (SVR). Arbeitsmarktthemen nahmen vor dem Hintergrund der hohen und persistenten...

Isolated effects of labor and product market institutions as well as the interaction between both aforementioned categories on unemployment have been extensively discussed in the empirical literature. However, interaction effects between individual labor market institutions have been widely...

Total employment in Germany is supposed to increase if people could realize their desired working hours. However, this back-of-the-envelope calculation overestimates the effect of loosening hours constraints, because even in a very flexible labor market there will exist hours restrictions for...

We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with employment risk and labor market search in order evaluate the effects of labor market reform on unemployment, growth, and welfare. The model has a large number of risk-averse households who can invest in risk-free physical capital and risky human...