Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for lower income classes and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes how work...

Short answer: It helps a lot when other important variables are excluded from the information set. Longer answer: We revisit claims in the literature that money growth is Granger-causal for inflation at low frequencies. Applying frequency-specific tests in a comprehensive system setup for...

Individual labour productivities are often unobservable for firms when hiring new workers. Job protection may prevent firms ex post from using information about labour productivities. We show that a binding minimum wage introduced in the presence of job protection will lead to lower unemployment...

Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...

After an expansionary monetary policy shock employment increases and unemployment falls. In standard New Keynesian models the fall in aggregate unemployment does not affect employed workers at all. However, Lüchinger, Meier and Stutzer (2010) found that the risk of unemployment negatively...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in...

German panel data is used to show that the decrease in life satisfaction caused by an increase in the probability of losing work is higher when self-employed than when paid employed. Further estimations reveal that becoming unemployed reduces self-employed workers´ satisfaction considerably...