Europe’s labor is not competitiveness taking unemployment as the relevant indicator. The paper looks at other indicators such as job creation, productivity and unit labor costs and skills. It analyzes the reasons for the lack of competitiveness including a low degree of wage differentiation,...

The paper introduces the concept of a firm's normal employment level as a weighted average of past employment levels and it analyzes the impact of an incentive scheme in which a firm receives a reward (or pays a penalty) when it deviates above (below) its normal employment level. The result is...

This paper discusses the goal conflict between social protection and economic growth as well as employment. Taking the German economy as an example for the large continental economies of Old Europe, it analyzes twenty mechanisms that affect the fundamentals of the economy negatively and imply...