Two or three decades from now, economic historians will note that a hallmark of successful transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was the speed in which it became a non-issue for the body politic. A corollary of this is the expectation that, as formerly centrally planned economies...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers' reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to 40...

This paper reviews the dramatic and widely noted developments in the German labor market in the past decade and surveys the most plausible reasons for these changes. Alternative hypotheses are compared and contrasted. I argue that the labor market reforms associated with the Agenda 2010 – the...