Short-term training has recently become the largest active labor market program in Germany regarding the number of participants. Little is known on the effectiveness of different types of short-term training and on their long-run effects. This paper estimates the effects of short-term training...

"The education variable in the IAB employment subsample has two shortcomings: missing values and inconsistencies with the reporting rule. We propose several deductive imputation procedures to improve the variable. They mainly use the multiple education information available in the data because...

"Flexibility and heterogeneity are important topics in labour market research. Since 2004 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has funded a research network addressing the issue of 'Flexibility in Heterogeneous Labour Markets', which intends to uncover possibilities for fostering...

"This study examines empirically the relationship between employment and wage structures between and within qualification and age groups. First, the substitution elasticities between qualification and age groups are estimated and the changes in wages are determined that would have been necessary...

"The paper gives an overview of the more recent scientific literature on the evaluation of Germany's active labour market policy (ALMP). The basic problem of microeconomic evaluation is estimating the control group for non-participation, whether on the basis of a comparable control group of...

Equilibrium search theory suggests that the wage distribution in a cross section of workers is closely related to labor market transitions and associated wage changes. Accordingly, job-to-job transitions are central in explaining the wage distribution. This paper uses the IAB employment...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to distinguish explicitly union...

In order to reduce unemployment, it is often recommended that industry-level wage bargaining in Germany should be replaced by a more decentralized system. This paper provides a critical assessment of the current wage bargaining institutions and re-examines the case for a more decentralized...

A comprehensive descriptive analysis of gender wage differences over a long time period does not exist for West Germany. Using an empirical approach which explicitly takes into account changes of wage distributions for both males and females as well as life-cycle and birth cohort effects, we go...