This paper analyzes the dynamic effects of different macroeconomic shocks on unemployment in Germany. In a first step, a cointegration analysis of productivity, prices, real wages, employment, and the unemployment rate reveals two long run relationships, interpreted as a labor demand and a wage...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

The paper investigates whether (unsubsidised) fixed-term contracts (FTCs) are a means of integration for the unemployed in the West German labour market. This is done by analysing whether entering into an FTC improves the employment opportunities of an unemployed person in terms of the...

This paper analyses the effects of a social assistance reform in Germany. In contrast to studies which are based on microsimulation methods we use a computable general equilibrium model which incorporates a discrete choice model of labour supply to simulate a variety of reform scenarios. The...

The paper presents a model that allows a unified analysis of sickness absence and search unemployment. Sickness appears as random shocks to individual utility functions, interacts with individual searchand labor supply decisions and triggers movements across labor force states. The employed...

This paper presents a reappraisal of unemployment movements in the European Union. Our analysis is based on the chain reaction theory of unemployment, which focuses on (a) the interaction among labor market adjustment processes, (b) the interplay between these adjustment processes and the...

We present an applied general equilibrium modelling approach to analyse employment and unemployment effects of labour tax cuts in an economy where wages are determined through firm-union bargaining at the sectoral level. In such a labour market regime, simulations for Germany show that labour...

There are few studies on unemployment duration in developing countries. This is the first study on duration aspect of unemployment in Turkey. We use the results of the Household Labor Force Surveys of 2000 and 2001 to construct a cross-section of durations of unemployment spells. We analyze the...

This paper provides some of the first empirical evidence on the psychological impact of past unemployment. Using eleven waves of the German socio-economic panel (GSOEP) data set, we show, as is now standard, that those currently unemployed have far lower life satisfaction scores than do the...