Die Arbeitsmarktpolitik auf europäischer Ebene hat durch die Krisen der letzten Jahre wiederholt neue Impulse erhalten. Mit den Initiativen für eine europäische Arbeitslosenrückversicherung, einen europäischen Mindestlohn, eine europäische Jugendgarantie und - vor kurzem - Europäische...

With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

Starting with Krugman (1980), much literature has analyzed how trade liberalization affects the economy based on the notion that trade is motivated by consumer's love of variety. In this paper, I augment these preferences by the determinants of demand for heterogeneous products. The model...

This paper starts by showing that in the European car industry, there exist cross-country taste differences along the product attribute dimension that significantly drive net trade patterns and reduce the volume of trade. Further it is shown that, after the creation of the European common...

This paper aims at establishing the existence of systematic differences in the nature of competitive strategies available to individual firms across industries. By means of qualitative content analysis, we extracted a matrix of 76 industries times 12 strategies reported as being characteristic...

I study the labor market risks associated with being self-employed. I document that the self-employed are subject to larger earnings fluctuations than employees and that they frequently transition into unemployment. Given the self-employed are not eligible to unemployment insurance, I analyze...

We derive the shape of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) contracts when agents can exert search effort but face different search costs and have private information about their type. We derive a recursive solution of our dynamic adverse selection problem with repeated moral hazard. Conditions...

The issue of whether unemployment benefits should increase or decrease over the unemployment spell is analyzed in a tractable model allowing moral hazard, adverse selection and hidden saving. Analytical results show that when the search productivity of unemployed is constant over the...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...