This book explores empirically for West Germany whether a decline in the relative demand for less skilled workers resulted in increased unemployment. Using up-to-date econometric techniques, a balanced mixture between descriptive evidence and structural estimation is provided, and there are...

It is commonplace in the debate on Germany's labor market problems to argue that high unemployment and low wage dispersion are related. This paper analyses the relationship between unemployment and residual wage dispersion for individuals with comparable attributes. In the conventional...

The job finding rate declines with the duration of unemployment. While this is a well established fact, the reasons are still disputed. We use monthly search diaries from Swiss public employment offices to shed new light on this issue. Search diaries record all applications sent by job seekers,...

Building on non-stationary search theory (Mortensen, 1977; Van den Berg, 1990), this article estimates the effects of UB on unemployment durations and future earnings using unique administrative data in Germany. We apply censored Box–Cox quantile regression. Our results imply that the length of...

So far economic analysis of unemployment has neglected social norms to a large extent. Here the empirical relevance of the social norm to live off one's own income is studied with regard to unemployed people's behaviour and subjective well-being. The strength of the social work norm is measured...