"Almost twenty years after German reunification there are still huge income disparities between western and eastern regions in Germany. The main purpose of the paper is to show how social transfer payments reduce these inter-regional disparities. In a first step we examine inequalities in the...

"In 2008, the joint task force 'Improvement of Regional Economic Structure' commissioned the Institute for Employment Research in cooperation with the Steinbeis Transfer Centre Applied System Analysis (STASA), Stuttgart, to produce an expert report. This paper presents the results of this report...

"We analyse the role that education signals play in the transition rates from unemployment to finding a job. We compare the results for Ethnic Germans with those for foreigners from the same origin countries and Native Germans. In the first case, the two have the same labour market access but...