Transitions in the German Labor Market: Structure and Crisis

By Michael U. Krause, Harald Uhlig. Social Science Research Network, 2011

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the so-called Hartz IV reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008/2009, the German labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this performance. Calibrating unemployment benefits to approximate legislation before and after the reforms, we find a large reduction in unemployment and its duration, with the transition concluding after about three years. During the crisis, the extended use of short-time labor subsidies that prevent jobs from being destroyed is likely to have prevented strong increases in unemployment.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a460d62667fe96225f76b892be622bf31ce4e235

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Claire E. Crawford
2. Richard Blundell
3. Xiaohong Chen
4. Ian Crawford
5. M. Brewer
6. C. O'Dea

Citations in the corpus

• What can wages and employment tell us about the UK's productivity puzzle? (2013, background): “The reforms are considered to have reduced unemployment (Dlugosz et al., 2013; Krause and Uhlig 2012).”
• Macroeconomic Evaluation of Labor Market Reform in Germany (2013, unknown): “suggests that Krause and Uhlig (2012) put a large weight on those groups of longterm unemployed that were heavily affected by Hartz IV, whereas Launov and Waelde (2013) emphasize much more the groups of long-term unemployed that were barely affected.”