Often the high level of unemployment in Germany is explained by a lack of flexibility, over-regulation in the labour market and disincentives of the social security system. However, these institutional effects are difficult to test by means of data from only one country. Cross-country...

Using a linked employer-employee data set for Germany, this paper analyzes labour fluctuation and wage setting in a cohort of newly founded and other establishments from 1997 to 2001. We show empirically that start-ups tend to have higher labour turnover rates, ceteris paribus. Moreover,...

In this paper, stochastic production frontier models are estimated with IAB establishment data from waves 2002 and 2003 to find important determinants of productivity and ineffciency. The data suffer from nonresponse in the most important variables (output, capital and labor) leading to the loss...

We analyse the effects of public sector sponsored training for the unemployed in the transition process in East Germany. For the microeconometric analysis, we use a new, large and informative administrative database that allows us to use matching methods to reduce potential selection bias,...

Since the early 90's the West German firms have to deal with sharp changes of economic environment: the German Unification, the emerging competitors in the east European countries and the deregulation of several labour market institutions. We analyse the wage structure, the wage changes and the...