"Cross-sectional studies show that in West Germany women with different levels of educational attainment participate differently in the labor market. In this paper, I examine one potential underlying mechanism: the re-entry of mothers in the labor market after a period of inactivity. I argue...

"Labour markets in most highly developed countries are marked by rising levels of skill segregation in the production process and increasing inequalities in skill-specific employment prospects. Local human capital has a likely effect on skill specific productivity levels and employment growth....

"In this paper we study the effect of small labor market entry cohorts on (un)employment in Western Germany. From a theoretical point of view, decreasing cohort sizes may on the one hand reduce unemployment due to 'inverse cohort crowding' or on the other hand increase unemployment if companies...

"The results for labour demand shocks at the place of residence for German Federal States and districts according to the model of regional adjustment developed by Blanchard/Katz (1992) are in line with other studies in this field. They suggest that adjustment to region-specific shocks in the...

"This paper studies the impact of the local industrial structure on employment dynamics in Western Germany. Following an approach of Combes/Magnac/Robin (2004) for France, local employment growth is decomposed into internal growth resulting from employment changes in existing plants and into...

"In 2005 a major reform of the German means-tested unemployment benefit system came into force. The reform aimed at activating benefit recipients, e.g., by a workfare programme, the so-called One-Euro-Job. This programme was implemented at a large scale. Participants receive their means-tested...

"The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

"The advent of the New Economic Geography has spawned a renewed interest in questions of agglomeration. The work expands the research on the impact of agglomeration economies on employment growth by connecting two strands of the empirical literature. A localization index and a cluster index are...

"Theories in regional science predict that related establishments benefit from their mutual proximity due to forward-backward linkages, labor market pooling and knowledge spillovers (the Marshallian forces). While the existence of these externalities as a whole is well supported by the empirical...

"Focusing on the compression of wage cuts, many empirical studies find a high degree of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). However, the resulting macroeconomic effects seem to be surprisingly weak. This contradiction can be explained within an intertemporal framework in which DNWR not only...