During the crisis (2008-09) Germany experienced a huge decrease in GDP. Employment, however, remained surprisingly stable. A whole strand of literature has aimed at quantifying the contribution of short-time work to the German labour market miracle. In the course of this literature we estimate...

Our study uses 24 waves of the survey Establishments in the COVID-19 crisis (BeCOVID), a high-frequency dataset collected at monthly intervals by the Institute for Employment Research during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate the behaviour of establishments with respect to the dynamics of...

An increase in the minimum wage in immigrant destination countries raises the earnings that low-skilled migrants could expect to attain if they were to migrate. While some studies for the US indicate that a higher minimum wage induces immigration, contrasting evidence shows that immigrants are...

Minimum wage increases are not an effective mechanism for reducing poverty. And there is little causal evidence that they do so. Most workers who gain from minimum wage increases do not live in poor (or near-poor) families, while some who do live in poor families lose their job as a result of...

Long-term unemployment can lead to skill attrition and have detrimental effects on future employment prospects, particularly following periods of economic crises when employment growth is slow and cannot accommodate high levels of unemployment. Addressing this problem requires the use of active...

We analyze the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and...

This is a study of the link between taxes and youth self-employment, using a Swedish reform implemented in 2007–09 which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run...

Am 1. Januar 2015 wurde in Deutschland der allgemeine gesetzliche Mindestlohn eingeführt. Wir identifizieren Beschäftigungseffekte des Mindestlohns durch Variation in der Betroffenheit von Betrieben. Das IAB-Betriebspanel ermöglicht uns dabei, antizipierende Lohnanpassungen und...

The paper examines the relative effectiveness of two policy proposals in reducing unemployment and working poverty: unemployment vouchers and low-wage subsidies. The unemployment vouchers are targeted exclusively at the unemployed (especially the longterm unemployed) and are provided only for a...