The EU’s largest economy, Germany, has managed to find an effective and unique combination of flexibility and rigidity in its labor market. Institutions that typically characterize rigid labor markets are effectively balanced by flexibility instruments. Important developments since 2000...

Vom Flüchtlingszustrom erhoffen sich viele vor allem eine Linderung des Fachkräftemangels und eine Entlastung der sozialen Systeme. Die Integration der Flüchtlinge sollte also nicht als "Belastung", sondern als Zukunftsinvestition verstanden werden. Langfristig gibt es gute Aussichten, dass...

France and Germany are two polar cases in the European debate about rising youth unemployment. Similar to what can be observed in Southern European countries, a lost generation may arise in France. In stark contrast, youth unemployment has been on continuous decline in Germany for many years,...

This chapter summarizes the literature on the evaluation of immigration policies. It brings together two strands of the literature dealing with the evaluation of labor market programs and with the economic integration of immigrants. Next to immigrant selection and settlement policies, there are...

This paper assesses the importance of reverse causality when evaluating the impact of training duration for unemployed workers. We use planned duration as an instrumental variable for actual duration. Our results suggest that the potential endogeneity of exits seems to be only relevant in the...

Discrimination in recruitment decisions is well documented. Anonymous job applications may reduce discriminatory behavior in hiring. This paper analyzes the potential of this approach in a randomized experiment with fresh Ph.D. economists on the academic job market using data from a...

The mild response of the German labor market to the worst global recession in post-war history appears as an economic miracle. In response to the crisis, Germany has shown to be a strong case of internal flexibility. We argue that important factors that have contributed to this development...

We investigate second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained....

In this paper we study the economic effects of risk attitudes, time preferences, trust and reciprocity while we compare natives and second generation migrants. We analyze an inflow sample into unemployment in Germany, and find differences between the two groups mainly in terms of risk attitudes...

This paper analyzes the reservation wages of first and second generation migrants. Based on recently collected and rich survey data of a representative inflow sample into unemployment in Germany, we empirically test the hypothesis that reservation wages increase from first to second generation...