Starting in January 2003, Germany implemented the first two socalled Hartz reforms, followed by the third and fourth packages of Hartz reforms in January 2004 and January 2005, respectively. The aim of these reforms was to accelerate labor market flows and reduce unemployment duration. Without attempting to evaluate the specific components of these Hartz reforms, this paper provides a first att...

We review and evaluate some recent contributions on modeling entrepreneurship within a neoclassical framework, analyzing how and to what extent the fundamental ingredients suggested in the social science literature were captured. We show how these approaches are important in stressing the main elements of a complex picture without being able to fully describe it. Each modeling attempt focuses o...

Recent empirical work on the e ects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment. We develop a model of monopsonistic competition with free entry to analyze the e ects of minimum wages, and our predictions t the empirical results closely. Under monopsonistic competition, we nd that a rise in the minimum wage a) raises employme...

The Economics of Employment Protection Empirical investigation of the labor market consequences of employment protection has mushroomed since Lazear's (1990) pioneering study. Having sketched the theoretical background, we chart the course of the modern empirical literature. We focus mainly on dismissals protection, distinguishing between the themes of employment and unemployment development an...

This paper exploits the differential timing of the introduction of a labor market program across areas as well as agerelated eligibility rules to identify the treatment effect of a targeted active labor market program. We are especially concerned about substitution and equilibrium wage effects. The program studied is the “New Deal for the Young Unemployed” in the UK and uses an administrative p...

Does International Outsourcing Really Lower Workers’ Income? We analyze the impact of international outsourcing on income, if the domestic labor market is imperfect. We distinguish in our analysis between the case where the parties negotiate over the wage only and where they negotiate over both wage and profit share. We find that in the first case outsourcing will reduce (increase) workers’ inc...

The Effect of Worker Representation on Employment Behavior in Germany: Another Case of -2.5% Despite recent changes in the relationship between unionism and various indicators of firm performance, there is one seeming constant in the Anglophone countries: unions at the workplace are associated with reduced employment growth of around -2.5% a year. Using German data, we examine the impact of the...

Accounting for Labor Demand Effects in Structural Labor Supply Models When assessing the effects of policy reforms on the labor market, most studies only focus on labor supply. The interaction of supply and demand side is not explicitly modeled, which might lead to biased estimates of potential labor market outcomes. This paper proposes a straightforward method to remedy this shortcoming. We us...

We study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors adjust their labor supply through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We show that investing for early retirement tends to increase savings and reduce an agent’s effective relative risk aversion, thus increasing her stock market exposure. Contrary to common intuition, an investor might find it optimal ...

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of labor demand with adverse selection. Firms learn the quality of newly hired workers after a period of employment. Adverse selection makes it costly to hire new workers and to release productive workers. As a result, firms hoard labor and under-react to labor demand shocks. The adverse selection problem also creates a market for temporary workers. In equ...