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...

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...

Population aging in many developed countries has motivated some governments to provide wage subsidies to employers for hiring or retaining older workers. The subsidies are intended to compensate for the gap between the pay and productivity of older workers, which may discourage their hiring. A...

Als Reaktion auf die hohe und persistente Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland wurde zwischen 2003 und 2005 die umfangreichste Reform des Arbeitsmarktes und der Sozialordnung seit Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland umgesetzt. In der Studie analysieren wir, ob die Reformen und ihr Zusammenwirken...

Targeted wage subsidies paid to employers are an important element of active labour market policies in Germany. This paper uses propensity score matching to investigate their effect on subsidised hard-to-place workers. In a first scenario, we estimate the average treatment effect of a subsidy on...

We empirically investigate how two-tier unemployment compensation schemes affect the profile of re-employment hazards. We exploit the aggravation of an existing two-tier scheme in Germany in 2005 and estimate its impact on re-employment rates at different durations. For the short-term...