While policymakers in Europe were busy implementing EMU during the past decade, persistently high unemployment, which should have been the main policy issue from a normative point of view, was essentially left untackled in most continental European countries. This poses the urgent question which...

We evaluate the effects of the most frequently used German welfare-to-work program on the employment chances of immigrant welfare recipients. In particular, we investigate whether program effects differ between immigrants and natives and what might cause these potential differences. Our results...

This paper assesses the dynamics of treatment effects arising from variation in the duration of training. We use German administrative data that have the extraordinary feature that the amount of treatment varies continuously from 10 days to 395 days (i.e. 13 months). This feature allows us to...

Die Weltwirtschaftskrise trifft den Kern des deutschen Arbeitsmarktes. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser globalen Krise analysiert das Diskussionspapier zunächst die Situation am deutschen Arbeitsmarkt. Auf der Grundlage dieser Analyse werden dann einige zentrale Maßnahmen beschrieben, die geeignet...

La première affirmation résume de manière péremptoire la description d'une France où le quart de la population active travaillerait pour un service public pléthorique incapable de se réformer, où les salaires sont fixés par une grille rigide et le statut « privilégié », une France...

While much empirical research has been done on the labour market consequences of unemployment benefits, there is remarkably little evidence on the forces determining benefits. The paper presents a simple model where workers desire insurance against the possibility of unemployment and...