A casual look at regional unemployment rates reveals that there are vast differences, which appearently cannot be explained by different institutional settings. Our paper attempts to trace the these differences in the regions' labor market performance back to the regions' specialization in...

The extent to which workers are threatened by unemployment differs considerably e.g. across branches of industry, age education, and regions. Nonetheless, it is customary to levy obligatory contributions to unemployment insurance UI) regardless of a worker´s specific risk of becoming...

This study examines in which cases economic forces or historical singularities prevail in the determination of the spatial distribution of retail shops. We develop a relatively general model of location choice in discrete space. The main force towards an agglomerated structure is the reduction...

The process of unification of Germany 1989/90 was accompanied by a transformation crisis in the East which severely affected the labour market. Although in East Germany the average loss of employment between October 1989 and June 1993 was 37.7% there were marked re-gional differences. In rural...

This study presents results about wage effects of unemployment in eastern Germany. The standard approach to analyse the wage curve takes no account of the spatial relationship among regions. Ignoring this relationship may seriously bias the results. To investigate this, the East German wage...

In many countries labour market policy has to deal with fairly large and persistent regional labour market disparities. In the case of Germany, parts of the country are affected by a deep unemployment crisis whereas others show nearly full employment. Since these disparities cannot be reduced to...

This paper examines the development of regional employment in eastern Germany. An approach introduced by Patterson and suggested by Möller/Tassinopoulos is extended for the analyses. This approach uses a generalisation of an econometric analogue of the common shift-share method, which is...

An in-depth analysis of regional labour markets requires information not only on stocks but also on flows. As a tool for detailed flow analysis the Multi Account System (MAS) has been developed at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) which uses fine grained transition matrices as basic...

This paper presents an outline of the so-called Shift-Share Regression and an application of this method to the analysis of employment development. The method used is not a deterministic decomposition such as the classical Shift-Share-Analysis, but a powerful, yet simple and flexible econometric...

One of the key issues in economics is the explanation of unemployment and its variation across different economies. Doing so, modern mainstream macroeconomics refers to the effects of financial crises and to institutional structures and their variation across countries. However, unemployment...