Each year Germany and many other developed economies spend tens of billions of Euros on active measures of employment promotion with the explicit aim of contributing to the reduction of unemployment. Yet, high unemployment has universally been a persistent problem throughout the last two...

This paper tests the theory recently put forward by Edward Lazear that individuals with competence in many skills should have a higher probability of being self-employed than others. The empirical results for Germany support this jack-of-all-trades view.

This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to test the hypothesis that the increase in the per-shipment costs of imports from Japan due to the Fukushima disaster in 2011 lead to an increase in the lumpiness of imports from Japan. Using China and the USA as control groups it is found...