This book was accepted in 1999 as doctoral thesis (Dr. oec. publ. ) by the faculty of economics of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich. It won the diss

In 2005 the German government implemented the so-called Hartz IV reform, which amounted to a complete overhaul of the German unemployment insurance system and r

In writing this book, I increasingly became aware of the extent to which much of the finest social science research has been devoted to the issue of unemploymen

In 2003–05, Germany undertook extensive labor market reforms which were followed by a large and persistent decline in unemployment. Key elements of the reform