"In this study we present insights from the practical implementation of a reform of the start-up subsidy for unemployment insurance recipients (Gründungszuschuss). New rules of allocation came into force at the turn of the year 2011 to 2012. Looking at the number of entrants not only reveals a...

"Germany is facing an increasing number of persons applying for asylum. The Federal Employment Agency, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and XENOS - a program sponsored by the European Social Fund providing labour market related support to refugees - launched a pilot project. This...

"In Germany, overtime work is a well-established instrument for varying working hours of employees and is of great importance for establishments as a measure of internal flexibility. However, not all employees are affected to the same degree by a variation of the work effort through overtime...

"Job mobility offers opportunities for workers to obtain wage increases, but returns to job changes differ considerably. We argue that parts of this inequality result from a trade-off between occupational and regional mobility. Both mobility types offer alternative strategies to improve one's...

"This paper addresses the 'Jack-of-all-Trades' hypothesis, which presumes that it is individuals' variety of competencies/experience that drives entrepreneurship instead of their level of productivity (Lazear, 2005). The analysis focuses on two related dimensions of this variety argument: taste...

"The paper analyses movements in the unemployment rate of West German districts in the period 1992-2004 by the chain reaction theory of unemployment (CRT). The estimations show that unemployment movements are generated together by lagged adjustment processes and by exogenous shocks. We find that...

"The study explores the way out of benefit receipt by labour market integration of young adults in Germany. Under 25-year-olds are a target group of the German social policy. If they rely on the payment of social benefits a prompt integration into employment or training is the main priority. The...

"Differences in regional labour market conditions are still pronounced in Germany, especially between the Eastern and the Western part. Traditional neoclassical models imply that labour mobility should reduce disparities. In contrast, models that include externalities or selective migration...

"Event history calendars (EHC) have proven to be a useful tool to collect retrospective autobiographic life course data. One problem is that they are only standardized to some extent. This limits their applicability in large-scale surveys. However, in such surveys a modularized retrospective...

"Recent labour market reforms in Germany introduced a workfare programme called One-Euro-Jobs with roughly 700,000 means-tested benefit recipients participating per year. In programme design leeway is given to local actors to respond to regional and individual factors. The legislature has set...