At the start of the German unification process it was a commonly held view that east German living conditions will converge to west Geman levels within a few years. This view was not only held by notoriously optimistic politicians but also by a great many of professional economists. With...

We analyze the dramatic decline of the employment share of unskilled labor in the West German economy, in particular its relation to the relatively rigid earnings structure. We find that the substitution elasticity between unskilled and skilled labor is rather low in most sectors of the economy....

A dynamic random effects probit model is estimated on the first six waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to test for state dependence effects in male unemployment behaviour. Estimation of the model is based on the marginal likelihood approach. In the model an individual's unemployment...