By how much does an increase in operating effectiveness of a public employment agency (PEA) and a reduction of unemployment benefits reduce unemployment? Using a recent labour market reform in Germany as background, we find that an enhanced effectiveness of the PEA explains about 20% of the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the U.S. economy and labor market. We assess the initial spike in unemployment due to the virus response and possible paths for the official unemployment rate through 2021. Substantial uncertainty surrounds the path for measured unemployment, depending on the...

Short-time work programs were revived by the Great Recession. To understand their operating mechanisms, we first provide a model showing that short-time work may save jobs in firms hit by strong negative revenue shocks, but not in less severely-hit firms, where hours worked are reduced, without...

India experienced one of the strictest lockdowns during COVID-19 and sections of the workforce seemed overwhelmingly disadvantaged. Given substantial poverty still, marginalized daily wage labor and gendered outcomes in the context of India, economic shocks are expected to have disparate...

In this paper we investigate Oswald's hypothesis according to which higher homeownership rates increase aggregate unemployment rates. To this end, we develop a matching model à la Pissarides (2000) in which homeowners are assumed to be less mobile than tenants. Based on numerical simulations,...

The Spanish labour market disproportionately booms in expansions and bursts in recessions; meanwhile, its regions' relative position persists: those with the highest unemployment rates in 1996 were also in the worse position in 2012. To examine this twofold feature, we apply Blanchard and Katz's...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

We examine the effect of immigration on the host country in the dynamic model that can deal with secular unemployment. Immigration has contrasting effects, depending on the economic state of the host country. If there is unemployment, immigration worsens unemployment and decreases consumption by...

We analyze the employment effects of immigration within a model that accounts for several stylized facts of the German labor market. The co-existence of positive wage spans and unemployment is explained by wage rigidities that are simultaneously caused by effciency-wage setting and minimum...

While integration policies typically focus on labor market entry, we present evidence showing that immigrants from low‐income countries tend to have more precarious jobs, and face more severe consequences of job loss, than natives. For immigrant workers in the Norwegian private sector, the...