Recent labor market reforms in Germany aim, among other things, at reducing unemployment by restricting passive unemployment measures, emphasizing local labor market policies and re-structuring public employment services. This paper uses extensive individual administrative and regional aggregate...

Using different regional data sources for East Germany the three largest active labour market policy (ALMP) programmes - job creation schemes (JCS), structural adjustment schemes (SAS) and public training (PT) - are evaluated. After addressing the regional allocation rule of the funding of ALMPs...

Prior to the introduction of mother tongue based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia's primary schools was the official language (Amharic) - the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses the variation in individual's exposure to...

The aim of this paper is to introduce a new model selection mechanism for cross sectional spatial models. This method is more flexible than the approach proposed by Florax et al. (2003) since it controls for spatial dependence as well as for spatial heterogeneity. In particular, Bayesian and...

The question whether agglomeration externalities arise either from specialization or diversification of economic activity has since long been a major topic in the analysis of factors determining economic growth. In this paper we analyze whether a more specialized or a more diverse skill...

Concerns have been raised that demographic ageing may weaken the competitiveness of knowledge-based economies and increase regional disparities. The age-creativity link is however far from clear at the aggregate level. Contributing to this debate, we estimate the causal effect of the workforce...

By examining the destination choice patterns of heterogenous labor, this paper tries to explain the skill composition of internal job matching flows in Germany. Estimates from a nested logit model of destination choice suggest that spatial job matching patterns by high-skilled individuals are...

On the basis of a theoretical model, we argue that higher aggregate unemployment affects individual returns to education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education level in a standard Mincer equation. Our results show...