Around the world many countries are about to break apart, stay together, join in federations or build supranational organisations. The political debate of the European constitution is embedded in this context. The question arises which policies have to be shifted to the central European level...

The paper shows that a more flexible labor market is unequivocally necessary for a lasting and substantial reduction of unemployment. It furthermore points out that a more flexible labor market is even beneficial from a long-run distributional point of view. Hence, the key to liberalizing the...

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job-creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run...

This paper deals with the much discussed question how to design labor market policy in a global economy. The starting point of the paper is the fact that national unemployment rates differ greatly, which alludes to country-specific institutional factors being the most plausible culprit for...