The second and third generation of immigrants have been the centre of a lively debate about the economic integration of immigrants into their host societies, but there is little empirical evidence on the German case. In this study I comprehensively portray the labour market outcomes of second generation immigrants in Germany. Special attention is attributed to observable heterogeneity in terms ...

The natural rate of unemployment can be measured as the time-varying steady state of a structural vector autoregression. For post-War US data, the natural rate implied by this approach is more volatile than most previous estimates, with its movements accounting for the bulk of the variation in the unemployment rate, as well as substantial portions of the variation in aggregate output and inflat...

Labor markets in all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies are under stress. Two main factors generate the pressure, although the precise contributions of these factors to unemployment and wage growth remain to be determined. The first factor is an apparent shift in the bias of technology toward skilled-labor-intensive methods of production. The second factor is...

The existing macroeconometric evidence lends support to the wage Phillips curve by showing a negative relation between the rate of change in wages and the unemployment rate, conditional on lagged price inflation. Most theoretical models of wage setting, however, generate a “wage curve,” described by a negative relation between the level of the real wage and unemployment. Real wage dynamics have...

This study investigates whether and to what extent further unemployment experience for youths who are already long-term unemployed imposes a penalty on subsequent labour market outcomes. We propose a flexible method for analysing the effect on wages aside of transitions from unemployment and employment within a multivariate duration model which controls for selection on observables and unobserv...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search and matching model. This paper provides an alternative perspective on the wage flexibility puzzle, explaining why the canonical model can only match the observed cyclicality of wages if the repla...

To study the impacts of reductions in employer’s social security contributions, we construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model with different types of workers (and wages), search unemployment and endogenous job destruction rates. Our model reproduces the empirical evidence that the impacts on employment, of reductions in contributions at the minimum wage level, go through a decrease in...

This paper uses longitudinal data from the Dutch OSA Labor Supply Panel (1980-2000) to examine the phenomenon of unemployment scarring in the Netherlands. The study extends current research by not only asking if earlier unemployment damages subsequent employment careers and wages but also explores variation by the level of unemployment insurance benefits and key individual characteristics such ...