Summary The paper provides empirical evidence for the question whether firms’ IT-enabled labour productivity is affected by the age structure of the workforce. We apply a production function approach with heterogenous labour to firm-level data from German manufacturing and services industries....

Summary Since Germany’s social assistance reform (“Hartz-IV-Reform”) in 2005 there has been a strong increase in the number of working poor and long-term unemployed. This development is often attributed to the remaining disincentives of the reformed social assistance to take up a low-paid...