This paper deals with the labor market entrance of young people in the Federal Republic" of Germany. The main focus is on failures during this stage. First, an overview of the youth" labor market in Germany is given. Then, the transition from vocational training to work is" analyzed: The...

The evolution of unemployment in West Germany and the U. S. stands in sharp contrast, with German unemployment much lower from 1960 to the early 19705 but substantially higher from 1984 to 1988. This paper provides a framework for examining the relationship between inflation and unemployment...

This study examines the determinants of the reservation wage of unemployed persons in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1976. The theoretical section presents the derivation of an optimal reservation wage and shows the source of an ambiguity of some explanatory variables. The data basis are...

This paper presents a theoretical model dealing with the duration of youth unemployment in West Germany. Duration can be expressed in terms of the underlying hazard function. After a brief discussion of a reasonable shape of the hazard function a distinction is made with respect to the...

We estimate the effects of a mandate allocating a third of corporate board seats to workers (shared governance). We study a reform in Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for certain firms incorporated after August 1994 but locked it in for the older cohorts. In sharp contrast to the...

The job finding rate of Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients declines in the initial months of unemployment and then exhibits a spike at the benefit exhaustion point. A range of theoretical explanations have been proposed, but those are hard to disentangle using data on job finding alone. To...

We estimate how exogenous worker exits affect firms' demand for incumbent workers and new hires. Drawing on administrative data from Germany, we analyze 34,000 unexpected worker deaths, which, on average, raise the remaining workers' wages and retention probabilities. The average effect masks...

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses...