The paper examines severance pay programs around the world by providing the first ever overview of existing programs, examining their historic development, assessing their economic rationale and describing current reform attempts. While a significant part of the paper is devoted to a...

Severance pay mandates are an appealing job displacement insurance strategy in developing countries, which have only modest government administrative capacities, but they carry the threat of adverse indirect effects. A critical review of the empirical literature reveals that severance benefit...

In the past years biofuels have received increased attention since they were believed to contribute to rural development, energy security and to fight global warming. It became also clear, though, that bioenergy cannot be evaluated independently of the rest of the economy and that national and...

This contribution describes the linkage of microsimulation models and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models using two already established models called “STSM” and “PACE-L” used by the Centre for European Economic Research. This state of the art research method for applied policy...

This paper gives an overview of different methodologies related to value chain analysis in the context of environment and trade research. Four major fields of methodologies are identified: Accounting of input-output flows, general computable equilibrium models, econometrics, and global commodity...

Der Beitrag gibt einen ergebnisorientierten Überblick über den Stand der Evaluation der aktiven Arbeitsmarktpolitik in Deutschland. Die Befunde weisen darauf hin, dass keine der bisherigen Instrumentengruppen überflüssig ist. Die meisten Maßnahmen können die Beschäftigungschancen...

With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

This paper provides a survey of the recent literature about firing costs and discusses the transmission channels of firing costs in a partial equilibrium context. In addition, we expand our analysis two types of firing costs in a New Keynesian model with purely endogenous separations. We further...

This paper provides a new perspective in classifying ALMPs depending on their main objective, also in light of their relevance and cost-effectiveness during normal times, during a crisis, and during recovery. We distinguish ALMPs that provide incentives for retaining employment, incentives for...

This paper provides a new perspective by classifying active labor market programs (ALMPs) depending on their main objectives and their relevance and cost-effectiveness during normal times, during a crisis, and during recovery. We distinguish ALMPs that provide: (i) incentives for retaining...