The following paper attempts to trace the construction of the standard employment contract in Germany from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. It was from this point in time that wage labour slowly came into being and later on developed more broadly. At first, state regulations were...

A Trial Introduction Program (TIP) for newly-arrived immigrants to Sweden was implemented from October 2006 to June 2008 in order to meet the main criticisms directed at existing introduction programs. Two primary innovations were introduced, flexible language instruction parallel with other...

Many Western economies have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of activating welfare recipients by increasing welfare-to-work programmes and job search enforcement. We evaluate the three most important German welfare-to-work programmes implemented after a major reform in January 2005...

In this paper we evaluate the impact of the old-age part-time scheme (OAPT) on the Austrian labour market which was a policy to allow flexible retirement options for the elderly with an aim to increase labour supply. According to our matching estimates employment probability increases slightly,...

To reduce unemployment targeted hiring subsidies for long-term unemployed are often recommended. To explore their effect on employment and wages, we devise a model with two types of unemployed and two methods of search, a public employment service (PES) and random search. The eligibility of a...

This paper studies the role of training vouchers and caseworkers in public training programs. Using a rich administrative data set, we apply matching and regression methods to measure the effect of the Hartz reform in Germany, which introduced training vouchers and imposed more selective...

The paper challenges the widespread view that Bismarckian countries with a strong role of social insurance and labor market regulation are less successful than other employment regimes and hard to reforms. This has been true about a decade ago. But both the institutional set-up and the...

The trend towards activation has been one of the major issues in recent welfare and labour market reforms in Europe and the US. Despite considerable initial variation across national models with respect to the scope and intensity of activation, redefining the link between social protection and...

This paper uses ECHP and OECD data for 14 EU countries to explore the role of labour market factors in explaining cross-national differences in the dynamic structure of earnings: in permanent inequality, transitory inequality and earnings mobility. Based on ECHP, minimum distance estimator is...

We analyse the effects of government-sponsored training for the unemployed conducted during East German transition. For the microeconometric analysis, we use a new, large and informative administrative database that allows us to use matching methods to reduce potential selection bias, to study...