Over the past 25 years, unemployment has been growing continuously in West Germany. In this study one of the reasons … for growing unemployment is analysed: unemployment of older people in their transition from employment to retirement … unemployment sub-sample. It will be shown that - due to the long duration of these unemployment episodes - early retirement …

. The coincidence of this kind of news with growing unemployment creates the impression of a direct and simple relationship … between the two developments. In this paper, we use official data on employment and unemployment and exploit a number of …-average unemployment inflows. We find also that among samples of unemployed persons the percentage of those who lost their last job due to …