Does the low wage sector serve as a stepping stone towards integration into better-paid jobs or at least towards integration of jobless people into employment? There is evidence for a "low-wage trap" and for a high risk of low-wage earners to get unemployed, but this may also be due to sorting...

Different models of protection against labor market risks are associated with diverging models of economic performance. Historically established institutional complementarities between labor market regulation, unemployment protection, and vocational training tend to mirror specific national...

We develop a structural multi-factor labour demand model which distinguishes between eight labour categories including non-standard types of employment such as marginal employment. The model is estimated for both the number of workers and total working hours using a new panel data set. For...

Many empirical studies point towards an increase in non-standard employment. The reasons for this rise are mainly seen in the increasing economic internationalization or the rapid technological changes which raise the need for both flexibility and cost-cuts on behalf of firms. Yet, only little...

Labour market developments in Germany can be separated into two major shocks: German reunification in the early 1990s, and the Hartz reforms in the early 2000s. In this paper it is argued that these two shocks divide the German wage bargaining system into the old labour market system, which is...