"This paper summarises, explains and evaluates the most important findings on the scale and causes of structural unemployment in Europe against the background of a standardised theoretical frame of reference. In literature, structural unemployment is usually interpreted as the unemployment that...

The paper contributes to the globalization debate by scrutinizing the international spillover effects which are provoked if a single country reduces the generosity of the unemployment compensation system or weakens labor union power. For this purpose a two-country model with imperfect...

Focusing on the cost-reducing motive behind the use of temporary agency employment, this paper aims at providing a better theoretical understanding of the effects of temporary agency work on the wage-setting process, trade unions' rents, firms' profits and employment. It is shown that trade...

A usual interpretation of the high performance of the German economy since 2005 is that the Hartz labour market reforms have boosted German competitiveness, resulting in higher exports, higher production and lower unemployment. This explanation is at odds with the sequence of observed facts. We...

"This paper summarises, explains and evaluates the most important findings on the scale and causes of structural unemployment in Europe against the background of a standardised theoretical frame of reference. In literature, structural unemployment is usually interpreted as the unemployment that...

A usual interpretation of the high performance of the German economy since 2006 is that the Hartz labour market reforms have boosted German competitiveness, resulting in higher exports, higher production and lower unemployment. We start from the diagnosis that this explanation is at odds with...

Focusing on the compression of wage cuts, many empirical studies find a high degree of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). However, the resulting macroeconomic effects seem to be surprisingly weak. This contradiction can be explained within an intertemporal framework in which DNWR not only...

We consider a theoretical model in which unions not only take the outside option into account, but also base their wage-setting decisions on an internal reference, called the fairness reference. Wage and employment outcomes and the shape of the aggregate wagesetting curve depend on the weight...