This paper presents a methodology to identify net demand shocks as well as wage rigidities in heterogeneous labor markets on the basis of nonparametric regression. We show how this approach can be used to make suggestions for immigration policy in economies with labor market rigidities. In an...

Folklore has it that the comparatively low proportion of self-employed in Germany is in part due to a habit that might be termed 'stigmatisation of failure': taking a second chance to build one's own firm after failing as a self-employed is said to be much more difficult here than in other...

In a sharp break with past German research, some recent estimates have suggested that plants with work councils have 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than their works-councilfree counterparts. Such findings can only serve to buttress the strong theoretical and policy interest in the German...

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an...

In the absence of closed-shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We describe a model, incorporating institutional features of the German labour market, which explicitly allows for social custom effects in the determination of...

Using a large recent representative sample of the German population this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing the hypothesis that young and small firms are hothouses for nascent entrepreneurs. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of...

In this paper we use a reform in the applicability of the Protection Against Dismissal Act or Kündigungsschutzgesetz in Germany to identify employment effects of the legislation for small establishments. Using a panel of establishments for the period 1997-2001, we find some evidence that a...

We develop a simple model which determines the optimal timing of school tracking as the outcome of the trade off between the advantages of specialization, which call for early tracking, and the costs of early selection, which lead to later tracking. We calibrate the model for Germany and study...

We analyze the effects of regional structures on both females? willingness to work and the probability of being employed for those willing to work. Special permission was granted to link regional data to individual respondents in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Results of a bivariate...

Based on a large employer-employee matched data set, the paper investigates the effects of variable enforcement of German dismissal protection legislation on the employment dynamics in small establishments. Specifically, using a difference-in-differences approach, we study the effect of changes...