This study surveys the development of the East German labor market after the unification of Germany. We explain that in the last decade, East Germans were faced with very high levels of joblessness that considering labor market exits and active labor market policy, are only partly reported as...

The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which an individual's use of unemployment insurance (UI) as a young adult is influenced by past experience with the program, and by having had a parent who also collected UI. A major methodological challenge is to determine the extent to...

Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual's employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

High unemployment in many OECD countries is often attributed, at least in part, to the generosity and long duration of unemployment compensation. It is therefore instructive to examine a country where high unemployment exists despite the near complete absence of an unemployment insurance system....

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...

Working through Barriers deals with the role host countries’ institutional characteristics play in the labour market integration of immigrants in the European Union. Drawing on existing research it develops a comprehensive conceptual framework of factors (and underlying mechanisms) affecting...