"This paper addresses the 'Jack-of-all-Trades' hypothesis, which presumes that it is individuals' variety of competencies/experience that drives entrepreneurship instead of their level of productivity (Lazear, 2005). The analysis focuses on two related dimensions of this variety argument: taste...

"The paper analyses movements in the unemployment rate of West German districts in the period 1992-2004 by the chain reaction theory of unemployment (CRT). The estimations show that unemployment movements are generated together by lagged adjustment processes and by exogenous shocks. We find that...

"The study explores the way out of benefit receipt by labour market integration of young adults in Germany. Under 25-year-olds are a target group of the German social policy. If they rely on the payment of social benefits a prompt integration into employment or training is the main priority. The...

"Differences in regional labour market conditions are still pronounced in Germany, especially between the Eastern and the Western part. Traditional neoclassical models imply that labour mobility should reduce disparities. In contrast, models that include externalities or selective migration...

"Event history calendars (EHC) have proven to be a useful tool to collect retrospective autobiographic life course data. One problem is that they are only standardized to some extent. This limits their applicability in large-scale surveys. However, in such surveys a modularized retrospective...

"Recent labour market reforms in Germany introduced a workfare programme called One-Euro-Jobs with roughly 700,000 means-tested benefit recipients participating per year. In programme design leeway is given to local actors to respond to regional and individual factors. The legislature has set...

"Using the IAB Employment Sample (IABS) covering 1980-2001 we investigate what impact the fall of the Iron Curtain has had on the skill structure of employment and wages in the western German districts neighbouring the Czech Republic. The introduction of free trade in this region, which has one...

"Hardly noticed in Western Europe the fall of the Iron Curtain had also effects on the regional structures of the labour markets in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC). I analyse whether during the undoubtedly increasing integration of markets the Czech border region close to the...

"We test the theoretical claim that coordination and centralisation in wage setting reduce strike activity by estimating nonlinear regression models using a dataset of 17 OECD countries for the period 1972-2000. We find moderating effects of coordination on strike activity but the effects are...

"Between 2005 and 2007 the German government raised a per-capita amount of around 10.000 Euros for each transition out of unemployment benefit receipt into basic social care, to be paid by the unemployment insurance. The so called 'Aussteuerungsbetrag' set strong incentives that investments in...