After the Hartz reforms of 2003-2005, unemployment in Germany has gone down significantly. Using a structural … less than 0.1 percentage point of the decline in the observed unemployment rate. A substantial degree of influence, to the … contrary, is attributed to the preceding Hartz III reform. Thus, the reduction of unemployment compensation could have been …

considerably increased inflows from employment into unemployment, and 33 percent of the reduced outflows from unemployment to … unemployment in the short run by 80,000 persons. …