"The labor markets of most industrialized countries are polarized. This means that employment has grown in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has stagnated or declined. However, there exists no measure that allows a...

"The Vocational and Career Psychology Service (BPS) of the German National Employment Agency has developed four new services for competence assessment. They can be used by job placement officers and case workers to better identify soft skills of their customers and use the results for job search...

"Do firms in developing countries shift trade towards developed economies as a result of high economic growth? The matched customs-manufacturing firm data used in this study confront this hypothesized link with empirical evidence. Our analysis reveals a rising low-income country trade share...

"From a social policy perspective, single parents - for the most part single mothers - are an important target group. Being solely in charge of both providing for the family's livelihood as well as parental care, the extent to which they can be gainfully employed is often restricted. Their...

"In 2003, Germany moved from a system in which participants in training programs for the unemployed are assigned by caseworkers to an allocation system using vouchers. Based on the rich administrative data for all vouchers and on actual program participation, we provide inverse probability...

"Unions are often stigmatized as being a source of inefficiency due to higher collective bargaining outcomes. This is in stark contrast with the descriptive evidence presented in this paper. Larger firms choose to export and are also more likely to adopt collective bargaining. We rationalize...

"In Germany, so-called 'integration agreements' between labor market agencies and job seekers stipulate placement efforts of the Employment Agency as well as the job search requirements of the job seekers. A pilot project examines the effectiveness of such integration contracts. In this project,...

"A major unemployment and welfare benefit reform took place in Germany in 2005. One objective of this reform was to more strongly encourage an adult worker model of the family, with an emphasis on activating the formerly inactive. Our hypothesis is, however, that assignments to activation...

"Questions on income in surveys are prone to two sources of errors that can cause bias if not addressed adequately at the analysis stage. On the one hand, income is considered sensitive information and response rates on income questions generally tend to be lower than response rates for other...

"Dissolved training contracts are an important indication of problems within the vocational education and training system; even if such contract solutions mostly do not lead to dropouts, but rather a change of training company or the profession. Even if contract solutions sometimes lead to an...