High and persistent unemployment has been a major problem in Germany for decades. This article presents the theoretical reasons as well as individual and macroeconomic consequences of long-term unemployment. The so called Hartz Reforms aimed at reducing unemployment by reducing inflows and...

"In the last years the analysis of flow figures turned out to highly informative for labour market research and policy advice. Among researchers it is a well known fact that cross-sectional information about labour market is not sufficient to understand ungoing development. A pure sequence of...

"This paper shows that the German labor market is more volatile than the US labor market at the business cycle frequency. Specifically, the volatility of the cyclical component of several labor market variables (e.g., the job-finding rate, the labor market tightness and vacancies) divided by the...

"In the last years the analysis of flow figures turned out to highly informative for labour market research and policy advice. Among researchers it is a well known fact that cross-sectional information about labour market is not sufficient to understand ungoing development. A pure sequence of...

"This paper investigates the time-varying relationship between German output and employment growth, in particular their decoupling in recent years. We estimate a correlated unobserved components model that allows for both persistent and cyclical time variation in the employment impact of GDP as...

"Between 1979 and 2009, the German labour market moved along a Beveridge curve with changing slope that usually shifted outwards but once inwards. We employ an unobserved components model to simultaneously disentangle permanent and transitory components of matching efficiency and separation rate...