The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact on national labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also varied greatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurance benefits and minimum...

The paper takes a comparative perspective on the labour market impact on G20 and EU countries of the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008. It starts from the observation that the decline in employment and rise in unemployment in relation to output or GDP reductions varies...

The paper challenges the widespread view that Bismarckian countries with a strong role of social insurance and labor market regulation are less successful than other employment regimes and hard to reforms. This has been true about a decade ago. But both the institutional set-up and the...

Joint expertise with NIRAS Consultants and AMS for the European Commission, Bonn 2008 (159 pages)

Study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2010 (151 pages)

Study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2010 (135 pages)

The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to...

Germany has always been one of the prime examples of institutional complementarities between social insurance, a rather passive welfare state, strong employment protection and collective bargaining that stabilize diversified quality production. This institutional arrangement was criticized for...

Report based on a study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2011 (87 pages)

This study gives a comparative overview of labor market dynamics and institutional arrangements in Germany and Brazil with particular emphasis on industrial relations, wage setting, unemployment benefits, employment protection and vocational training. The paper shows that institutions determine...