I develop an agent-based computational economics (ACE) model with which I evaluate the aggregate impact of labor market policies. The findings are that government-financed training measures increase the outflow rate from unemployment to employment. Although the overall effect is positive this...

A striking feature of OECD labor markets in the 1990s has been the very rapid increase of temporary agency work. We augment the equilibrium unemployment model as developed by Pissarides and Mortensen with temporary work agencies in order to focus on their role as matching intermediaries and to...

We review the literature on agent-based labor market models by tracing its roots to the microsimulation literature, and surveying a selection of contributions made since the work by Bergmann (1974) and Eliasson (1976). Agent-based models have been applied to explain stylized facts of labor...

Economic theory suggests that incentives matter for people’s decisions. This paper investigates whether this also holds for less self-evident areas of life such as the timing of births. We use a natural experiment when the German government changed its parental benefit system on January 1,...

A model of interactions of marriage and labor markets, taking into account a feedback process from aggregate divorce rates on individuals' decisions, explains why small changes in men's attitudes towards sharing the breadwinner role with their wives may change female labor force participation...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

Many tasks require the input by more than one person very often with members of the team contributing sequentially. However, team production is plagued by disincentive problems. We investigate individual incentives to team production with sequential contributions and competing teams. We show...