Social assistance and unemployment assistance, which provide means tested income support (social welfare) without pre-specified time limits, are viewed as one important reason for the persistently high level of unemployment in Germany by many economists. In order to increase work incentives and,...

This paper analyses the effects of a social assistance reform in Germany. In contrast to studies which are based on microsimulation methods we use a computable general equilibrium model which incorporates a discrete choice model of labour supply to simulate a variety of reform scenarios. The...

Germany1, as most other European countries, has been plagued by a persistently high level of long?term unemployment since the early 1980's. In contrast, long? term unemployment is much less of a problem in the United States. One potential reason for the different structure of unemployment...

We analyze the effectiveness of publicly financed training and retraining programs in east Germany as measured by their effects on individual re-employment probabilities after training. These are estimated by discrete hazard rate models on the basis of individual-level panel data. We account for...

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....

In the paper we simulate a revenue-neutral cut in the social security contribution rate using five different types of macro- / microeconomic models, namely two models based on time-series data where the labour market is modelled basically demand oriented, two models of the class of computable...

This paper analyses the developments in the returns to education in West Germany for the period from 1984 to 1997. Based on simple Mincer-type wage equations, we estimate a return of about 8% for men and 10% for women, and these returns have remained remarkably stable over the period. On the...

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age effects in the returns. For women,...

In this paper we estimate the employment effects of a reduction in weekly normal hours in West German manufacturing on the basis of an econometric models using industry panel data. We distinguish between unskilled, skilled and high-skilled workers and show that labor demand elasticities with...