In 1997, the German government enacted a reform of the unemployment insurance system which lead to a reduction of the … maximum entitlement length for unemployment benefits. The paper analyses the effects of this reform on the risk of … unemployment and on unemployment duration of the older unemployed aged 54-56. This group lost a smooth early retirement path via …

Unemployment information in individual level register data depends on institutional settings, administrative procedures … German legal unemployment definitions for the Sample of the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEBS). The IEBS belongs to a … show large differences in the number of spells and the unemployment duration across implementations. This suggests that …