To which extent does an increase in operating effectiveness of public employment agencies on the one hand and a reduction of unemployment benefits on the other reduce unemployment? Using the recent labour market reform in Germany as background we find that the role of unemployment benefit...

Member countries of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) initiated wide-ranging labour market reforms in the last decade. This process is ongoing as countries that are faced with serious labour market imbalances perceive reforms as the fastest way to restore competitiveness within a currency...

“Race-to-the-bottom” deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern...

This paper provides a critique of Faccini (2014) that allegedly shows that temporary contracts lead to lower unemployment in Europe. Using Faccini's data and his estimation methods, we show that the Fixed Effects estimation results collapse when we make slight alterations in the sample size or...

We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with employment risk and labor market search in order evaluate the effects of labor market reform on unemployment, growth, and welfare. The model has a large number of risk-averse households who can invest in risk-free physical capital and risky human...