What Accounts for the German Labor Market Miracle? A Structural VAR Approach

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Mathias Klein ◽  
Stefan Schiman

Abstract This study examines the driving forces behind the strong decline in German unemployment from 2005 onwards and the exceptionally small increase during the Great Recession. Structural vector autoregressions (VARs) with sign restrictions show that wage moderation in the aftermath of labor market reforms was the dominant factor of the unemployment decline, and that improved matching and shrinking labor supply also contributed to it. The adjustment to business cycle shocks (Great Recession), on the other hand, is to a large extent borne by the intensive margin, which can be explained by institutional aspects of the German labor market.

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-260
Author(s):  
Almut Balleer ◽  
Britta Gehrke ◽  
Brigitte Hochmuth ◽  
Christian Merkl

Abstract This article argues that short-time work stabilized employment in Germany substantially during the Great Recession in 2008/09. The labor market instrument acted in timely manner, as it was used in a rule-based fashion. In addition, discretionary extensions were effective due to their interaction with the business cycle. To ensure that short-time work will be effective in the future, this article proposes an automatic facilitation of the access to short-time work in severe recessions. This reduces the likelihood of a too extensive use at the wrong point in time as well as structural instead of cyclical interventions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-138
Author(s):  
Xiana Bueno ◽  
Elena Vidal-Coso

One of the outcomes of the Great Recession has been the emerging pattern of households maintained exclusively by women. The analysis of intracouple characteristics is crucial in the context of job segregation by gender and by immigrant origin, such as in Spain. Using the panel version of the Spanish Labor Force Survey from 2008 to 2015, we analyze the transition of dual-earner couples to female-earner couples among Latin American and Spanish-born households. Our results suggest that migrant vulnerability is not only a consequence of a segregated labor market by gender and origin but is also the result of the partners’ relative occupational and family characteristics. We show that, unlike Spanish-born couples, the risk of Latin American families becoming female-headed is higher for those couples in which the female partner has the weakest position in the occupational scale and for those with children in the household.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tapas Paul

This dissertation addresses labor market issues. The first two chapters deal with employment issues during the great recession using nationally representative data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The first chapter looks at the added worker effect in the great recession, the wife's labor market response to a husband loss of job. The second chapter investigates the impact of a wife's labor market participation on family poverty. The third chapter examines employment opportunities in the economics discipline using journal publication records from IDEAS/RePEc. It looks at the effect of new journal entry on the distribution of publicati


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Shandra

Internships have become a ubiquitous component of the college-career transition, yet empirical evidence of the internship market is limited. This study uses data from 1.3 million internship postings collected between 2007-2016 in the United States to (1) identify trends in internship education, experience, and skill requirements over the Great Recession and recovery periods; (2) evaluate how these trends correspond to those observed in the traditional labor market; and (3) assess robustness across labor market sectors. Results indicate that internship education and skill requirements increased substantially throughout the recession and recovery periods, indicative of a longer-term structural shift in employer expectations about internship hiring. Additionally, growth in internship education and skill requirements largely outpaced growth in non-internship education and skill requirements over the same period, suggesting potential substitution of non-interns with interns. Post-recession employers still consider internships to be entry-level positions—yet now expect interns to have skills in hand.


SERIEs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafuente ◽  
Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis ◽  
Ludo Visschers

AbstractWe investigate the behavior of aggregate hours supplied by workers in permanent (open-ended) contracts and temporary contracts, distinguishing changes in employment (extensive margin) and hours per worker (intensive margin). We focus on the differences between the Great Recession and the start of the COVID-19 Recession. In the Great Recession, the loss in aggregate hours is largely accounted for by employment losses (hours per worker did not adjust) and initially mainly by workers in temporary contracts. In contrast, in the early stages of the COVID-19 Recession, approximately sixty percent of the drop in aggregate hours is accounted for by permanent workers that do not only adjust hours per worker (beyond average) but also face employment losses—accounting for one-third of the total employment losses in the economy. We argue that our comparison across recessions allows for a more general discussion on the impact of adjustment frictions in the dual labor market and the effects policy, in particular the short-time work policy (ERTE) in Spain.


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