We present a new and simple empirical methodology to identify relative wage rigidity dynamics. The methodology is applied to data from the Polish Labour Force Survey for the period 1994 to 1998. We estimate ceteris paribus changes in relative wage and unemployment differentials for various...

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been ?rigid? in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying...

Short-term training measures are the most important intervention of German active labor market policy in terms of persons promoted. However, evidence on the impacts of programs is missing. This study analyzes the effects of these programs on the individual unemployment duration in West Germany....

Recent labor market reforms in Germany aim, among other things, at reducing unemployment by restricting passive unemployment measures, emphasizing local labor market policies and re-structuring public employment services. This paper uses extensive individual administrative and regional aggregate...

We estimate the effects of hiring subsidies for older workers on transitions from unemployment to employment in Germany. Using a natural experiment, our first set of estimates is based on a legal change extending the group of eligible unemployed persons. A subsequent legal change in the opposite...

In light of nonstationary search theory (van den Berg, 1990), this paper estimates the effects of benefit entitlement periods and the size of unemployment benefits on unemployment durations and post{unemployment earnings in West Germany. For the unemployment duration, we estimate censored...

Unemployment information in individual level register data depends on institutional settings, administrative procedures and which registers are merged. In this paper we suggest different implementation strategies for common international and German legal unemployment definitions for the Sample...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of different macro and micro variables on thedistribution of unemployment duration in West Germany using censored quantile regressions. We analyze unemployment periods of more than 91,000 observations from the years 1981 to 1997 drawn from the IAB employment...

m Jahr 1997 wurden die maximalen Anspruchsdauern auf Arbeitslosengeld für ältere Beschäftigte verkürzt. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden die Auswirkungen dieser Reform auf Übergänge von Beschäftigung in Arbeitslosigkeit und Verweildauern in Arbeitslosigkeit der 54-56jährigen untersucht....

We present evidence for a highly significant interaction between state dependence in individual unemployment risk and the business cycle. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller in times of relatively high unemployment and larger in times of low...