In this article, we estimate the structure of costs of hiring, terminating, and retiring employees in France. We use a representative panel data set of French establishments that contains direct measures of these various costs as well as measures of entries and exits for the years 1992 and 1996....

Often the high level of unemployment in Germany is explained by a lack of flexibility, over-regulation in the labour market and disincentives of the social security system. However, these institutional effects are difficult to test by means of data from only one country. Cross-country...

Using a fixed-effects panel-estimation of the years 2004 and 2005 of the IAB Establishment Panel, this article tries to answer the following question: Do the so-called One-Euro-Jobs have an effect on the growth rate of regular employment, covered by the social security system? The analysis finds...

While the volatility of job creations has been studied extensively, the survival chances of new jobs are less researched. The question when and how to expand a firm is of importance, both from the firm’s and from a macro perspective. Adjustment cost theories and arguments about option values...

The objective of this article is to study the behavior of German HR managers in the wake of the global crisis. Some criticize them as humble hangmen who simply execute the orders of top management—killing jobs and laying off people. Others praise them as intelligent problem solvers who did an...

Das ifo Institut befragte im Auftrag der WirtschaftsWoche rund 600 Manager aus den Wirtschaftsbereichen Industrie, Bau, Handel und Dienstleistung nach ihren Einschätzungen der konjunkturellen Entwicklung im Jahr 2013 sowie zu ihren Investitions- und Beschäftigungsplänen für das neue Jahr....

We study whether older workers are costly to firms. Our estimation equations are derived from a variant of the decomposition methods frequently used for measuring micro-level sources of industry productivity growth. By using comprehensive linked employeremployee data from the Finnish business...