It is commonplace in the debate on Germany’s labor market problems to argue that high unemployment and low wage dispersion are related. This paper analyses the relationship between unemployment and residual wage dispersion for individuals with comparable attributes. In the conventional...

This book explores empirically for West Germany whether a decline in the relative demand for less skilled workers resulted in increased unemployment. Using up-to-date econometric techniques, a balanced mixture between descriptive evidence and structural estimation is provided, and there are...

In 2003, Germany moved from a system in which participants in training programs for the unemployed are assigned by caseworkers to an allocation system using vouchers. Based on the rich administrative data for all vouchers and on actual program participation, we provide inverse probability...

The recent economic policy debate in Germany emphasizes the impact of globalization of the world economy on the German labor market. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between trade and the labor market in West Germany for the period from 1970 until German...

Based on social security data, this paper analyzes wage trends for full employed males by estimating (censored) quantile regressions as functions of age, cohort, education, and year. We test whether a parsimonious specification separating life cycle effects from macroeconomic effects can...