In economic development, long-run structural change among the three main sectors of an economy follows a typical pattern with the primary sector (agriculture, mining) first dominating, followed by the secondary sector (manufacturing) and finally by the tertiary sector (services) in terms of...

We analyse the decline in output volatility in Germany. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the...

Based on a Cox Proportional Hazard analysis of German unemployment spells, structural change of the production process is identified as a major explanation for long-term unemployment. Other important covariates capture labor market institutions, macroeconomic stress factors, and individual...

This paper compares the aggregate effects of sectoral reallocation in the United States and Western Germany using a stochastic volatility model of sectoral employment growth. Reallocative shocks have no effect on the natural rate of unemployment in either country, and there is mild evidence that...

Short Time Compensation [STC] was a key program in Germany to fight the crisis. However, STC is quite an old tool: in the past 100 years it has been used quite often and is very multifunctional. It stabilized employment in every kind of macroeconomic shock. After a brief look into the...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...