Documents Weber, Enzo 38 results

"This paper analyses the relationship between wage inequality and labour market development. Relevant economic theories are ambiguous, just as public debates. We measure the effects of wage inequality, skill-biased and skill-neutral technology on hours worked, productivity and wages in a novel structural vector error correction framework identified by non-recursive long-run restrictions. Results show that skill-biased technology shocks reduce hours worked but increase inequality, productivity and wages. Structural inequality shocks also have a negative impact on hours worked, but additionally reduce productivity. We find relevant effects of inequality both above and below the median wage."

"Modern working societies face the challenge to combine the establishments' with the employees' needs for working-time flexibility. The authors investigate the determinants of overtime and different working hours' arrangements using the German Linked Employer-Employee Study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LEE) and logistic regression models. The results show that employer and job characteristics are most important for determining overtime and the different working hours' arrangements, underlining the power of employers with regard to working-time flexibility. Employee characteristics play the least important role, although employees can flexibly organize their working times and can benefit from certain arrangements, such as self-determined working hours and flexitime within a working hours account. The study provides evidence that working-time flexibility in Germany is mainly employer-oriented. However, through demographic changes and a possible lack of qualified personnel, employee- friendly arrangements are likely to gain importance."

"In the recent years an intensive discussion in politics, research, business and society on the influence of digitalisation on the working world has evolved. This development is expected to exert profound effects on the use of human labour. However, judgements widely diverge. The comprehensive debates on 'industry 4.0' and 'labour 4.0' in Germany are concerned with influences of digitalisation on the economy and the labour market, substitutability of jobs as well as conditions, qualifications and regulations for a new world of employment. Thereby, the discussions are characterised by large uncertainty regarding the future development and thus often focus more on exploration rather than on confronting firmly established positions. This in particular makes it valuable to feed additional information into the national debates. In this, it is worth looking into other countries: Which is the stance of digitalisation, how is the influence on the working world evaluated? Which political positions and measures are discussed? Which programmes and projects were established, are results already conceivable? The underlying report gives an overview for several European countries and for the level of the European Union. Regarding digitalisation, it considers the areas of economic developments, tasks and competences as well as working conditions and changes of the world of employment." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

"We sharpen tests for 'discouragement' and 'added worker' effects by splitting the explanatory variable - the unemployment rate - into a short-term and a long-term component. While short-term unemployment might not result in additional workers on a large scale, long-term unemployment reduces household income more, increasing the need for additional income. On the other hand, it may discourage older workers for psychological and sociological reasons. Applying our model to the German labor market, these hypotheses could be confirmed. Even for men, about whom only few empirical studies on this issue are available, distinguishing between short-term and long-term unemployment reveals discouragement effects."

"We construct a new Markov-switching unobserved components framework for the analysis of hysteresis effects. Our model unifies the ingredients of trend-cycle decomposition, identification of spillovers between the components and asymmetry over the business cycle. Employing the model for Germany and the U.S. over 55 years, we find that the decades-long upward trend in German unemployment is fully explained by hysteresis. The Great Recession was well absorbed because both hysteresis effects and structural unemployment were substantially reduced after institutional reforms. In contrast, U.S. unemployment did not evolve according to hysteresis, not even during the Great Recession."

"This paper investigates the time-varying relationship between German output and employment growth, in particular their decoupling in recent years. We estimate a correlated unobserved components model that allows for both persistent and cyclical time variation in the employment impact of GDP as well as an autonomous employment component capturing other factors than real output. As one result, we measure a permanent decline in Verdoorn's coefficient as well as pronounced effects of the autonomous employment component in the recent years. The development of the estimated impact parameters is shown to crucially depend on structural change, but also on labour availability and business expectations."

"The paper investigates the predictive power of a new survey implemented by the Federal Employment Agency (FEA) for forecasting German unemployment in the short run. Every month, the CEOs of the FEA's regional agencies are asked about their expectations of future labor market developments. We generate an aggregate unemployment leading indicator that exploits serial correlation in response behavior through identifying and adjusting temporarily unreliable predictions. We use out-of-sample tests suitable in nested model environments to compare forecasting performance of models including the new indicator to that of purely autoregressive benchmarks. For all investigated forecast horizons (1, 2, 3 and 6 months), test results show that models enhanced by the new leading indicator significantly outperform their benchmark counterparts. To compare our indicator to potential competitors we employ the model confidence set. Results reveal that models including the new indicator perform very well."

"Using the example of short-term forecasts for German employment figures, the article at hand examines the question whether the use of disaggregated information increases the forecast accuracy of the aggregate. For this purpose, the out-of-sample forecasts for the aggregated employment forecast are compared to and contrasted with forecasts based on a vector-autoregressive model, which includes not only the aggregate but also the numbers of gainfully employed people at the industry level. The Clark/West test is used in the model comparison. It becomes evident that disaggregation significantly improves the employment forecast. Moreover, fluctuation- window tests help identify the phases during which disaggregation increases forecast accuracy to the strongest extent."

"This paper studies the patterns of unemployment dynamics in Germany. To provide a deeper insight into the margins of unemployment adjustment, we employ a structural VAR model and identify the effects of a technology shock as well as two policy shocks. We find that the worker reallocation process varies substantially with the identified shocks. The job finding rate plays a larger role following a technology shock and a monetary policy shock, while the separation rate appears as the dominant margin after a fiscal policy shock. Technology shocks are relatively important for variations in the transition rates, though they do not seem to trigger the high volatilities of German labor market variables. Considering policy shocks, our results point towards fiscal interventions as a promising instrument, but with several limitations."