"Some 20 years after German reunification, living conditions and the economic base in East Germany are approaching that of West Germany in many areas. In view of this anniversary and against the backdrop of the global financial crisis that intensified in autumn 2008, this research report uses...

What type of disaggregation should be used to analyse heterogeneous labour markets? How granular should that disaggregation be? Economic theory does not currently tell us; perhaps data can. Analyses typically split labour markets according to top-down classification schema such as sector or...

U.S. CPS gross flows data indicate that in recessions firms actually increase their hiring rates from the pools of the unemployed and out of the labor force. Why so? The paper provides an explanation by studying the optimal recruiting behavior of the representative firm. This behavior is a...

Online job vacancies from a Ukrainian website were explored to assess the skills that employers look for among their new hires. The demand for cognitive, socioemotional, and technical skills across a range of medium- and high-skilled occupations were assessed. Most employers highly demand all...

We investigate employer recruiting behavior, using detailed firm-level data from a national survey of employers hiring recent college graduates. We show employers adjust recruiting effort, hiring standards, and compensation with the business cycle, beliefs about tightness, and their own hiring...