The study provides a comparative empirical analysis of the dynamics of unemployment in the United States and West Germany. Based on longitudinal data and recent microeconometric methods, the analysis discusses different explanations for both the higher inflow into as well as the higher outflow...

Education is the main resource of young people entering the labour market for securing employment, in competing for adequate employment contracts and to fulfill their occupational aspirations. As European countries differ widely in the institutional structure of their education and training...

The paper addresses the effects of employment protection legislation on job mobility and status attainment among young people entering the labour market. Given that strict employment protection legislation (EPL) has often been shown to reduce the dynamics of labour markets in general, resulting...

Self-employment still forms an important element in the social structure of modern societies. However, the group of the self-employed has experienced an enormous economic and social change. After a long term decline until the beginning of the 1970s in almost all industrialised countries,...

The paper addresses the issue of the driving forces behind recent changes in labour market entry outcomes in Europe. Based on data for 12 European countries from the 1988-1997 European Community Labour Force Survey, the empirical analyses estimate panel data models to assess the effects of...

The nature of the linkage of education and training systems to the labour market is often claimed to crucially affect labour market integration in modern economies. More specifically, most current comparative research assumes a more strongly qualification-based allocation in training systems...

Having close linkages with the counterfactual concept of causality, nonparametric matching estimators have recently gained in popularity in the statistical and econometric literature on causal analysis. Introducing key concepts of the Rubin causal model (RCM), the paper discusses the...

"Over the last two decades, youth unemployment emerged as one of the major problems of many contemporary European societies. As educational achievement is regularly claimed to prevent labour market exclusion, this paper explores the educational stratification of unemployment in early labour...

European unification represents major challenges to national institutional frameworks as well as significant pressures for institutional convergence. So far, labour markets have actually seen relatively little convergence, and national institutions have remained highly distinct. Against this...