Radical labour market reforms were implemented in Germany between 2002 and 2005, reforms that overturned the received idea that Germany was suffering from "reform paralysis". However, the part of these reforms that specifically concerned labour law was very small; their main purpose was to...

In our era of "shareholder value", news of redundancies in leading global companies is good news for the stock market. The coincidence of this kind of news with growing unemployment creates the impression of a direct and simple relationship between the two developments. In this paper, we use...

After 16 years of conservative-liberal rule, a social democratic-green coalition cameinto office in 1998. Though having declared the successful combating of unemploymentthe principal yardstick for his government’s performance, Chancellor Schröder actuallystood back until mid-2001, expecting...