Germany, as most other European countries, has been plagued by a persistently high level of long-term unemployment since the early 1980's. In contrast, long-term unemployment is much less of a problem in the United States. One potential reason for the different structure of unemployment relates...

Unemployment duration data derived from retrospective surveys often show an abnormal concentration of responses at certain durations. This common kind of measurement error is known as "heaping" in the statistical literature. Although heaping effects may lead to severe biases in estimated...

It is often claimed that growing labor market imperfections and maladjustments can be blamed for the increase and persistence of unemployment in the Federal Republic of Germany. This paper attempts to marshall the empirical importance of these factors. Higher structural unemployment seems to be...