Suppose insiders use their market power to push up their wages, while entrants receive their reservation wages. How will employment be affected? In addressing this question, we focus on the role of on-the-job training. We show that an insider wage hike reduces recession-time employment but, in...

Empirically, not much is known about the mechanisms how labor market programs like job search assistance and training operate to support finding a job. This paper provides novel evidence to open the "blackbox": it causally links the program interventions to the dynamics of search behavior,...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model – even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the...

This paper deals with the hypothesis of mismatch unemployment in West Germany by calculating skills-specific Beveridge curves. The results show that the mismatch for the group of unskilled is much higher than for the group of skilled and that this mismatch has increased in the last years. The...

This paper investigates the reservation wages of unemployed persons on the basis of a job-search model with non-static reservation wages using panel data from Germany from 1987 to 1998. The results suggest that reservation wages are relatively high in Germany compared to other countries....

This paper studies the reservation wages of unemployed persons and the wages offered them in Germany from 1987 to 1998, whereby special focus is placed on unemployment duration. The results of the study indicate that in contrast to reservation wages, offered wages decline considerably with...

This study examines the relationship between individual risk aversion and reservation wages using a novel set of direct measures of individual risk attitudes from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that risk aversion has a significantly negative impact on the level of reservation...