This paper studies the effect of labor market reform on the welfare cost of business cycles. Motivated by the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, the paper focuses on two labor market institutions: the unemployment insurance system determining search incentives...

cover -- Contents -- Series Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction -- A Simple Model of Unemployment and Inflation Dynamics -- Unemployment, the Output Gap, and the Welfare Costs of Economic Fluctuations -- Unemployment and Monetary Policy Design in the New Keynesian Model -- Concluding Remarks and...

Counter-cyclical variation in individuals' idiosyncratic labor income risk could generate substantial welfare costs. Following past research, we infer income volatility - the variance of permanent income shocks, a standard proxy for income risk - from the rate at which cross-sectional variances...

Economists have recently been interested to study the long-run effect of recession on job entrants. Some papers find that those who enter the labor market during a recession earn a lower income in the subsequent years, but that negative effect on income disappears over time. On the other hand,...