Germany1, as most other European countries, has been plagued by a persistently high level of long?term unemployment since the early 1980's. In contrast, long? term unemployment is much less of a problem in the United States. One potential reason for the different structure of unemployment...

Nach der Bundestagswahl schlägt die Stunde der finanzpolitischen Wahrheit. Wer auch immer die nächste Bundesregierung stellt: Der Kassensturz nach der Wahl wird zeigen, dass kaum noch finanzpolitischer Handlungsspielraum besteht. Die öffentlichen Haushalte haben sich im Zuge der Rezession...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at significant tax relief for households. We analyze the effects of this reform on the distribution of household incomes using a behavioral microsimulation model based on representative...

We evaluate the effect of the German Federal Educational Assistance Act (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates in higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. While up to 1990, students receiving assistance had to repay their loans...

Vor dem Hintergrund der wachsenden Bedeutung der privaten Altersvorsorge gewinnt die private Vermögensbildung im Lebenszyklus in Deutschland seit einigen Jahren auch an wirtschaftspolitischer Relevanz. Eine neue Studie des DIW Berlin zeigt erhebliche Unterschiede in den Vermögensstrukturen...

This paper studies the stability and dynamic properties of labor demand in West German manufacturing with output, an index of total factor productivity, and relative factor prices as independent variables. Several integration tests for seasonal time series are performed allowing for a mixture of...

The authors test the hypothesis of a negative long-term trend and/or a structural break in total factor productivi ty after the first oil price shock for West German manufacturing industries within an econometric model based on a flexible cost function with capital as a quasi-fixed factor. After...

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age and year effects in the returns....

"The development of the western German wage structure in the 1980s has been analysed on the basis of the socio-economic panel (SOEP) and the IAB employment sample (IABS). We demonstrate that the large increase in inequality which was ascertained by previous studies on the basis of the IABS can...

"The first IABS user workshop jointly organised by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) took place in Mannheim on 7 - 8 Fe-bruary 1997. The aim of the event was to bring together the users of the employment sample of the Institute for...