International Outsourcing effects on labor markets are mostly analyzed within flexible wage settings. Using a modern duality approach, this paper formally investigates differences occurring in industries with low skilled wage rigidity and, for the first time in literature, presents empirical...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

Das Diskussionspapier thematisiert die objektive und subjektive Lebenslage von Arbeitslosen in Deutschland im Vergleich zur Gesamtbevölkerung. Die Ergebnisse indizieren eine deutlich schlechtere materielle, d. h. objektive Lebenslage der Arbeitslosen. Dies reflektiert sich in den auf...

Inflation-targeting central banks have only imperfect knowledge about the effect of policy decisions on inflation. An important source of uncertainty is the relationship between inflation and unemployment. This paper studies the optimal monetary policy in the presence of uncertainty about the...

Under the conditions of the global financial and economic crisis restructuring undertaken by companies often is associated with the optimization of operating costs in the dimension of human capital. Relatively little popular technique is responsible outplacement, which can reduce the risk of...

We set up a two-country general equilibrium model, in which heterogeneous firms from one country (the source country) can offshore routine tasks to a low-wage host country. The most productive firms self-select into offshoring, and the impact on welfare in the source country can be positive or...

Empirical studies find that the age-variance profile of wages is U-shaped. The objective of this paper is to explore the driving forces of the U-shape in a model with search frictions. I introduce endogenous search effort and a fixed retirement age into Cahuc, Postel-Vinay, and Robin s (2006)...

In this paper I analyze the relationship between unemployment and criminal activity. Using a unique panel data set on German counties covering the years 2003 to 2009, I estimate the effect of unemployment on crime rates for different kind of offenses. I extensively control for potential...

This paper quantifies the impact of the Hartz reforms on matching efficiency, using monthly SOEP gross worker flows (1983-2009). We show that, until the early 2000s, close to 60% of changes in the unemployment rate are due to changes in the inflow rate (job separation). On the contrary, since...

Quantifying the welfare effects of trade liberalization is a core issue in international trade. Existing frameworks assume perfect labor markets and therefore ignore the effects of aggregate employment changes for welfare. We develop a quantitative trade framework which explicitly models labor...