Many studies point to a connection between voluntary activities, social connectedness, and social capital. Social capital has been defined in various ways in social sciences, but the important common aspect of the definitions is that extensive social relations are valuable to the individual?s...

There is little evidence as to the effectiveness of incentives for the conversion of fixed-term contracts into permanent jobs. We aim at filling this gap by studying a recent Italian program which provides benefits for employers who convert contracts for workers in specific demographic groups...

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title 1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the...

This paper revisits the dynamics of unemployment rate for 29 OECD countries over the period of 1980-2013. Numerous empirical studies of the dynamics of unemployment rate are carried out within a linear framework. However, unemployment rate can show nonlinear behaviour as a result of business...

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of the needs of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close...

In this paper, the authors present a new approach to estimate the impact of a minimum wage on the labor market of the construction sector in Germany. Instead of estimating the effect on employment, the authors focus on the change of prices on a firm level in order to differentiate between a...

Since mid-2000s, Ethiopia has been one of the fastest growing countries in the world. However, productive entrepreneurship in high-value added activities has made limited contributions to this growth, in part because of a weak business environment. Moreover, the low-productive firms in the...

The paper was produced as a background paper on labor issues for the UNDP study Convergence to the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities. It first looks at the issue of how the labor market institutions of an acceding country like Macedonia should be shaped to further the integration of...

Mit der Einführung von Arbeitslosengeld II wurde auch die behördliche Zuständigkeit für die Grundsicherung einer grundlegenden Reorganisation unterzogen. Während in der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Kommunen in Form der sogenannten Arbeitsgemeinschaften eine Mischverwaltung aus Bundesagentur...