The number of long-term unemployed in Germany has stagnated at around one million for several years. Despite excellent labour market conditions, the long-term unemployment rate is well above the OECD average. Therefore, the "carrot and stick" principle of Hartz reforms is in clear need of...

This text focuses on long-term unemployment in the German labor market caused by insufficient work skills capabilities and discusses the deficits of the current policy in improving the situation of job seekers who are repeatedly rejected in their efforts to find a job. For both the German...

Does regional unemployment increase or rather decrease entrepreneurial activity? Although this question has been hotly debated among researchers for decades the answers yielded so far are ambiguous and inconclusive. The paper proposes an innovative approach that takes not only interregional...

This paper estimates the causal effect of long-term unemployment on wages. Job search theory implies that if Unemployment Insurance (UI) extensions do not affect wages conditional on the month of unemployment exit, then reservation wages do not bind on average. Then, UI extensions affect mean...

Individual unemployment spells are frequently interrupted by short casual employment, by participation in active labour market policy (ALMP) measures or by periods outside the labour force. Such episodes end unemployment spells but afterwards the person gets often unemployed again, and the...

Overcoming long-term unemployment is a challenging task in which trust of the long-term unemployed in their caseworkers is a key issue. However, research about drivers of this trust is a white spot in the literature. The paper closes this gap. Embedded in a theoretical model at the...