Unemployment Durations in West Germany Before and After the Reform of the Unemployment Compensation System during the 1980s

Fitzenberger Bernd and Ralf Wilke
Additional contact information
Fitzenberger Bernd: Albert Ludwigs-University Freiburg,Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

German Economic Review, 2010, vol. 11, issue 3, 336-366

Abstract: This paper analyzes empirically the distribution of unemployment durations in West Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. It therefore covers periods before and after the changes during the mid-1980s in the maximum entitlement periods for unemployment benefits for older unemployed. The analysis is based on the IAB employment subsample containing administrative data for about 500,000 individuals. Since these data only partly reveal the unemployment duration in an economic sense, we use a narrow and a wide proxy for unemployment. Our empirical analysis finds significant changes in the distribution of non-employment durations for older unemployed. At the same time, the distribution of unemployment durations between jobs remained unchanged after the reforms. Our findings clearly show that many firms and workers used the more beneficial laws as a part of early retirement packages. Surprisingly, for those workers who found and accepted a new job, we do not observe a prolongation of their search periods to a sizeable extent.

Keywords: Definition of unemployment; duration analysis; unemployment insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2009.00479.x (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment Durations in West Germany Before and After the Reform of the Unemployment Compensation System during the 1980s (2010)
Working Paper: Unemployment Durations in West-Germany Before and After the Reform of the Unemployment Compensation System During the 1980s (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:germec:v:11:y:2010:i:3:p:336-366

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0475.2009.00479.x

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().