Germany has always been one of the prime examples of institutional complementarities between social insurance, a rather passive welfare state, strong employment protection and collective bargaining that stabilize diversified quality production. This institutional arrangement was criticized for...

Report based on a study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2011 (87 pages)

We examine rational learning among expert chess players and how they update their beliefs in repeated games with the same opponent. We present a model that explains how equilibrium play is affected when players change their choice of strategy when receiving additional information from each...

A substantial number of young unemployed participate in active labor market programs (ALMP) in Germany each year. While the aims of these programs are clear – a fast re-integration into employment or enrollment in further education – a comprehensive analysis of their effectiveness has yet to...

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become an increasingly important part of active labor market policies (ALMP) in many OECD countries. Germany is a good example where the spending on start-up subsidies for the unemployed accounted for nearly 17% of the total spending on ALMP in 2004....

Report based on a study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2010 (95 pages)

The paper takes a comparative perspective on the labour market impact on G20 and EU countries of the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008. It starts from the observation that the decline in employment and rise in unemployment in relation to output or GDP reductions varies...

More than 70% of global e-mail traffic consists of unsolicited and commercial direct marketing, also known as spam. Dealing with spam incurs high costs for organizations, prompting efforts to try to reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters. Using modern econometric methods to reduce...

This paper uses a social experiment in labour market policy – providing early and intensive monitoring and programme participation in unemployment spells – to assess the nature of labour market policy effectiveness. The experiment was conducted in two counties in Denmark during the winter of...

The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to...