German and European immigration policies have only recently begun to cope with the inevitable: growing labor demand in the face of high unemployment and a shrinking labor force due to demographic change. Despite the implementation of Germany's first immigration act and several European initiatives towards legal harmonization at the EU level, an actively controlling immigration policy, which would be needed to master the challenges ahead, is not yet in sight. Against this background, the book draws conclusions from the German history of immigration policy. It analyzes the country's future demand for immigration and develops an economic model for the effective selection and integration of labor migrants that could provide the foundation for a joint European immigration strategy.

A historically unique experiment is about to enter its second decade - German unification. Early hopes for a rapid and smooth economic transformation soon turned out to be overly optimistic. Despite massive financial transfers, the political promise of a "blooming landscape" remains a vision. Actual developments have left deep scars on the labor market, and the effects will be felt for decades to come. Was this outcome to be expected, perhaps even inevitable? What went wrong, and what were the available options? Or is the current state of Eastern German labor market in fact better than is commonly assumed?

 During the last decades the appearance of a family has changed substantially. Not long ago a typical family consisted of an employed man and a home-managing woman living together for their whole life times, and having one or more children, which primarily were raised by the wife.  Today differing living models are much more common than before. House husbands, late motherhood, and a delayed work entry of the children are some of the related phenomena, which at the same time are reasons for and consequences of the changed view on the favorite family. Not surprisingly, this change has provoked much scientific interest. In this book we present a collection of recent economic research work on the resources management and development of families and households respectively. Assorting three general topics, we focus on the time allocation within the household, the family structure and development, and the transition to work of young adults. 

Selected by Princeton University as Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics for 2010.

Are immigrants from the new EU member states a threat to the Western welfare state? Do they take jobs away from the natives? And will the source countries suffer from severe brain drain or demographic instability? In a timely and unprecedented contribution, this book integrates what is known about post-enlargement migration and its effects on EU labor markets. Based on rigorous analysis and hard data, it makes a convincing case that there is no evidence that the post-enlargement labor migrants would on aggregate displace native workers or lower their wages, or that they would be more dependent on welfare. While brain drain may be a concern in the source countries, the anticipated brain circulation between EU member states may in fact help to solve their demographic and economic problems, and improve the allocative efficiency in the EU. The lesson is clear: free migration is a solution rather than a foe for labor market woes and cash-strapped social security systems in the EU.

Economic Theory, academic policy analysis and public policy design are becoming more interdependent. Hence, the demands for close interactions between the policy community and the research community have been rising significantly. This book assesses how recent economic thinking has advanced under these influences. Furthermore, it evaluates the important contribution economics can add to the design and evaluation of public policy, now more than ever before. The study is of interest to policy makers, policy analysts, researchers and students of economics at all levels. The authors, which include many of Germany's most eminent economists, draw on their wide experience in research and consultancy to present a coherent view of where European economic theory stands today and how it can play a role in the management of the economy of the new millennium.

Klaus F. Zimmermann Migration has become a topic of substantial interest in Europe in recent years. Part of this interest is driven by the important political changes in East Europe and the potential threat of large East-West migration waves. However, due to the large differences in economic development a substantial migration pressure is also expected from the South of Europe as of other parts of the world. The global migration potential towards the higher developed areas has reached about 80 to 100 million people. Thereof, about 60 million would like to move permanently, 20 million temporarily and about 15 million are refugees and asylum seekers and approximately 30 million are iIIegals. The book consists of eight papers which are allocated to five parts: Theoretical Models (Part I), Performance of Migrants (Part 11), Migration Within Developing Countries (Part IV) and Immigration Policy (Part V)' Each paper begins with a brief summary of its content. Part I, Theoretical Models, contains first "A Microeconomic Zlmm.r-mann VI Model of Migration" by Siegfried Berninghaus and Hans-GUnther Seifert-Vogt. They study migration decision making under incomplete information and apply it to empirically relevant phenomena. The second paper by Gerhard Schmitt-Rink "Migration and International Factor Price Equalization" demonstrates that international migration tends to equalize national factor prices and factor shares even in the absence of international trade. In Part II, Performance of Migrants, Lucie Merkle and Klaus F.

This volume extends and deepens our knowledge about cross-border mobility and its role in an enlarged EU. More specifically, its main purpose is to enlighten the growing and yet rather uninformed debate about the role of post-enlargement migration for economic adjustment in the crisis-stricken labor markets of the Eurozone and the EU as a whole. The book addresses the political economy aspects of post-enlargement migration, including its broader political contexts, redistributive impacts, but also nationalization of the enlargement agenda. It also covers the experience of receiving and sending countries with post-enlargement migration and its role during the current crisis. Renowned experts in the field study, whether and how post-enlargement mobility has enabled the EU to absorb asymmetric economic shocks, how it has affected the European welfare systems, and whether it has contributed to the sustainability of the Eurozone. The authors also evaluate brain circulation as a sought-after vehicle of improved allocative efficiency of EU labor markets and propose a policy agenda for mobility in an enlarged EU.

This book consists of four parts: I. Labour demand and supply, II. Productivity slowdown and innovative activity, III. Disequilibrium and business cycle analysis, and IV. Time series analysis of output and employment. It presents a fine selection of articles in the growing field ofthe empirical analysis of output and employment fluctuations with applications in a micro-econometric or a time-series framework. The time-series literature recently has emphasized the careful testing for stationarity and nonlinearity in the data, and the importance of cointegration theory. An essential part of the papers make use of parametric and non-parametric methods developed in this literature and mostly connect their results to the hysteresis discussion about the existence of fragile equilibria. A second set of macro approaches use the disequilibrium framework that has found so much interest in Europe in recent years. The other papers use newly developed methods for microdata, especially qualitative data or limited dependent variables to study microeconomic models of behaviour that explain labour market and output decisions.

In the age of globalization, the importance of migration for the industrialized countries has increased. Inflows of migrants have steadily risen in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Yet while the public debate about policy responses to these developments continues unabated, research findings of economists are often ignored. In this four-volume collection the editors have selected some of the most significant contributions on the economics of migration, which provide an overview of the present state of empirical migration research. Topics covered include the migration decision, the integration of immigrants into the labor market and society, their economic behavior, empirical and theoretical contributions to migration policy, and the effects of immigrants on the native population.

This volume presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labor markets and public policy reforms. Professor Blundell's hugely influential work has enhanced greatly our understanding of how individuals' behavior on the labor market respond to taxation and social policy influence. Edited by IZA, this volume brings together the author's key papers, some co-authored and some unpublished, with new introductions and an epilogue. It covers some of the main research insights in the study of labor supply. The question of how individuals adapt their behavior in response to policy changes is one of the most investigated topics in empirical labor and public economics. Do people reduce their working hours if governments decide to raise taxes? Might they even withdraw completely from the labor market? Labor supply estimations are extensively used for various policy analyses and economic research. Labor supply elasticities are key information when evaluating tax-benefit policy reforms and their effect on tax revenue, employment, and redistribution. The chapters cover empirical and theoretical developments as well as applications to tax and welfare reform, and each represents a substantive research contribution from Blundell's publications in top research outlets.

In all Western societies women earn lower wages on average than men. The gender wage gap has existed for many years, although there have been some important changes over time. This volume of collected papers contains extensive research on progress made by women in the labor market, and the characteristics and causes of remaining gender inequalities. It also covers other dimensions of inequality and their interplay with gender, such as family formation, wellbeing, race, and immigrant status. The author was awarded the 2010 IZA Prize in Labor Economics for this research. Part I comprises an Introduction by the Editors. Part II probes and quantifies the explanations for the gender wage gap, including differential choices made in the labor market by men and women as well as labor market discrimination and employment segregation. It also delineates how the gender wage gap has decreased over time in the United States and suggests explanations for this narrowing of the gap and the more recent slowdown in wage convergence. Part III considers international differences in the gender wage gap and wage inequality and the relationship between the two. Part IV considers a variety of indicators of gender inequality and how they have changed over time in the United States, painting a picture of significant gains in women's relative status across a number of dimensions. It also considers the trends in female labor supply and what they indicate about changing gender roles in the United States and considers a successful intervention designed to increase the relative success of academic women. Part V focuses on inequality by race and immigrant status. It considers not only race difference in wages and the differential progress made by African-American women and men in reducing the race wage gap, but also race differences in wealth which are considerably larger than differences in wages. It also examines immigrant-native differences in the use of transfer payments, and the impact of gender roles in immigrant source countries on immigrant women's labor market assimilation in the U.S. labor market.

How immigrants and their descendants fare in the host society and in particular in the labor market is a very important question. While differences among ethnicities have been found to be marked and persistent within many host countries, and while the labor market consequences of diversity have been recognized, they have not been sufficiently examined. This volume contains fresh knowledge to help better understand the complex relationship between ethnic or minority groups, the role of ethnic identity and their disparate economic performance; 12 papers that individually and collectively go to the heart of this question. Offering a new paradigm, they tackle and interlink four important themes of immigrants' integration: ethnic identity, citizenship, interethnic marriages, and immigrant entrepreneurship. These papers offer insights and answers to challenging questions for six different immigration countries while they study countless different ethnic and immigrant groups. It is the aim of this volume to bring the role of ethnic identity in the forefront of scientific and political discussion and provide a link among these themes, anticipating new trends and directions in this area. An anthology of these questions is: Does ethnic identity affect the employment and earnings of immigrant groups and in what way? Does dual nationality affect assimilation? To what extent do social interactions determine the employment outcomes of ethnic minorities? Why do Mexican-Americans exhibit low self-employment rates? Which are the factors that influence the composition of the workforce in terms of ethnic-background? Do interethnic marriages influence transitions into and out of ethnic self-employment? And, are interethnic marriages a guarantee to high human capital achievement of their offsprings?

 In the globalized economy, labor migration has become of central importance. A key issue in the analysis of immigration is how the migrants fare in the economy in which they migrate, and how they assimilate towards the behavior of the natives. Using data from the United States, Canada, many European countries, Australia and New Zealand, the chapters study the developments of earnings, employment, unemployment, self-employment, occupational choices and educational attainment after migration. The book also investigates the role of language in labor market integration and examines the situation of illegal, legalized and unwilling migrants. Policy effects are also studied: Among those are the effects of selection criteria of labor market success and the effects immigrants have on the public sector budget of the receiving country. Hence, the book provides a broad picture of the performance of migrants.

'As immigration has spread from traditional receiving nations to developed countries throughout the world, the economics of migration has become a burgeoning field of research. Amelie Constant and Klaus Zimmermann's International Handbook offers an excellent, state-of-the-art guide to the rapidly changing intellectual terrain, providing comprehensive coverage of the topics necessary to comprehend patterns and processes of migration in the world today. It will be an indispensable guide to scholars and policy-makers for years to come.' - Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University, USMigration economics is a dynamic, fast-growing research area with significant and rising policy relevance. While its scope is continually extending, there is no authoritative treatment of its various branches in one volume. Written by 44 leading experts in the field, this carefully commissioned and refereed Handbook brings together 28 state-of-the-art chapters on migration research and related issues. Well-written and highly accessible, each chapter comprises a critical assessment of the status quo and presents challenges to the traditional economics of migration by addressing taboo issues. Topics explored include: child labor migrants; immigrant educational mismatch; ethnic hiring; immigrants, wages and obesity; ethnic identities and the nation-state; natural disasters and migration; immigration-religiosity intersections; immigration and crime; immigrants' time use; happiness and migration; diaspora resources and policies; and the evaluation of immigration policies. Forging new foundations in the field of migration and providing areas for future research, this Handbook will prove a seminal reference for academics and students with an interest in international and labor economics, and in regional studies. Social psychologists and behavioral scientists, as well as practitioners in political, cultural, social, demographic, environmental and healthcare arenas, will find the ethnic identities coverage and analysis of methods for studying ethnic identities an invaluable reference tool. Contributors: F.M. Antman, L.M. Argys, S.L. Averett, A. Aydemir, A.R. Belasen, B. Bell, A.F. Constant, D.J. DeVoretz, E.V. Edmonds, G.S. Epstein, R.W. Fairlie, G. Friebel, D. Furtado, T. Garcia-Munoz, C. Giulietti, M. Grignon, S. Guriev, T.J. Hatton, M. Kahanec, J. Kennan, J.L. Kohn, S. Machin, S. Neuman, D. Neumark, O. Nottmeyer, P.M. Orrenius, Y. Owusu, K. Patel, M. Piracha, S. Plaza, S.W. Polachek, D.C. Ribar, U. Rinne, Y. Savchenko, M. Shrestha, N.B. Simpson, A. Sweetman, S.J. Trejo, F. Vadean, F. Vella, J. Wahba, J.R. Walker, M. Zavodny, K.F. Zimmermann

'As immigration has spread from traditional receiving nations to developed countries throughout the world, the economics of migration has become a burgeoning field of research. Amelie Constant and Klaus Zimmermann's International Handbook offers an excellent, state-of-the-art guide to the rapidly changing intellectual terrain, providing comprehensive coverage of the topics necessary to comprehend patterns and processes of migration in the world today. It will be an indispensable guide to scholars and policy-makers for years to come.' - Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University, USMigration economics is a dynamic, fast-growing research area with significant and rising policy relevance. While its scope is continually extending, there is no authoritative treatment of its various branches in one volume. Written by 44 leading experts in the field, this carefully commissioned and refereed Handbook brings together 28 state-of-the-art chapters on migration research and related issues. Well-written and highly accessible, each chapter comprises a critical assessment of the status quo and presents challenges to the traditional economics of migration by addressing taboo issues. Topics explored include: child labor migrants; immigrant educational mismatch; ethnic hiring; immigrants, wages and obesity; ethnic identities and the nation-state; natural disasters and migration; immigration-religiosity intersections; immigration and crime; immigrants' time use; happiness and migration; diaspora resources and policies; and the evaluation of immigration policies. Forging new foundations in the field of migration and providing areas for future research, this Handbook will prove a seminal reference for academics and students with an interest in international and labor economics, and in regional studies. Social psychologists and behavioral scientists, as well as practitioners in political, cultural, social, demographic, environmental and healthcare arenas, will find the ethnic identities coverage and analysis of methods for studying ethnic identities an invaluable reference tool. Contributors: F.M. Antman, L.M. Argys, S.L. Averett, A. Aydemir, A.R. Belasen, B. Bell, A.F. Constant, D.J. DeVoretz, E.V. Edmonds, G.S. Epstein, R.W. Fairlie, G. Friebel, D. Furtado, T. Garcia-Munoz, C. Giulietti, M. Grignon, S. Guriev, T.J. Hatton, M. Kahanec, J. Kennan, J.L. Kohn, S. Machin, S. Neuman, D. Neumark, O. Nottmeyer, P.M. Orrenius, Y. Owusu, K. Patel, M. Piracha, S. Plaza, S.W. Polachek, D.C. Ribar, U. Rinne, Y. Savchenko, M. Shrestha, N.B. Simpson, A. Sweetman, S.J. Trejo, F. Vadean, F. Vella, J. Wahba, J.R. Walker, M. Zavodny, K.F. Zimmermann

Why in 2015 are there still large gender differences in economic success? This volume consists of a set of state of the art research articles to answer this question. Focus areas include educational attainment, financial risk management, bargaining power, social mobility, and intergenerational transfers in the US and abroad.

For most countries, women's labor force participation and hours of work has risen while men's have fallen. Concomitantly, men's and women's wages and occupational structures have been converging. This volume contains new and innovative research on issues related to gender convergence in the labor market. Topics include patterns in lifetime work, earnings and human capital investment, the gender wage gap, gender complementarities, career progression, the gender composition of top management and the role of parental leave policies. Among the questions answered are: Do the levels of and returns to human capital change over the last 50 years in the US? Can the shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) explain the division of labor in the home and the resulting wage gap? Does skill-biased technological change favor women's wages more than men's? Do care sector jobs incur a wage penalty? What impact does this have on firm and employee outcomes? Does the glass-ceiling faced by women in top management relate to fertility and parental leave policies and having children? And finally, are men and women complements or substitutes in the labor market?

This volume extends and deepens our knowledge about cross-border mobility and its role in an enlarged EU. More specifically, its main purpose is to enlighten the growing and yet rather uninformed debate about the role of post-enlargement migration for economic adjustment in the crisis-stricken labor markets of the Eurozone and the EU as a whole. The book addresses the political economy aspects of post-enlargement migration, including its broader political contexts, redistributive impacts, but also nationalization of the enlargement agenda. It also covers the experience of receiving and sending countries with post-enlargement migration and its role during the current crisis. Renowned experts in the field study, whether and how post-enlargement mobility has enabled the EU to absorb asymmetric economic shocks, how it has affected the European welfare systems, and whether it has contributed to the sustainability of the Eurozone. The authors also evaluate brain circulation as a sought-after vehicle of improved allocative efficiency of EU labor markets and propose a policy agenda for mobility in an enlarged EU.

This highly accessible book illustrates how policy makers can address and nurture the effects of growing ethnic diversity in European labor markets. The contributors present an unprecedented large-scale study on ethnic diversity in European labor markets via a combination of hard data analysis with expert evaluation of integration practices and policy options. Key questions explored include: - Does ethnic diversity in European labor markets lead to poor socio-economic outcomes for some ethnic groups in the face of fierce competition for jobs and welfare? -Can labor immigration and improved integration of all ethnic groups provide a solution to the challenges posed by a shrinking population, an aging workforce, skill shortages and other bottlenecks that constrain the innovative potential of the EU? -What can policy makers do to nurture and encourage the benefits of ethnic diversity in the EU? This indispensable guide will be warmly welcomed by academics, students, policy makers, analysts and researchers with an interest in economics, European studies and labor studies. It will be especially insightful for those with a particular commitment to managing ethnic diversity in European labor markets. Contributors: A.F. Constant, S. de la Rica, D. Fougere, V. Ghetau, T.J. Hatton, M. Hazans, M. Kahanec, Z. Kantor, P.J. Pedersen, M. Vasecka, H.D. von Loeffelholz, A. Zaiceva, K.F. Zimmermann

Selected by Princeton University as Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics for 2010. Are immigrants from the new EU member states a threat to the Western welfare state? Do they take jobs away from the natives? And will the source countries suffer from severe brain drain or demographic instability? In a timely and unprecedented contribution, this book integrates what is known about post-enlargement migration and its effects on EU labor markets. Based on rigorous analysis and hard data, it makes a convincing case that there is no evidence that the post-enlargement labor migrants would on aggregate displace native workers or lower their wages, or that they would be more dependent on welfare. While brain drain may be a concern in the source countries, the anticipated brain circulation between EU member states may in fact help to solve their demographic and economic problems, and improve the allocative efficiency in the EU. The lesson is clear: free migration is a solution rather than a foe for labor market woes and cash-strapped social security systems in the EU.

A historically unique experiment is about to enter its second decade - German unification. Early hopes for a rapid and smooth economic transformation soon turned out to be overly optimistic. Despite massive financial transfers, the political promise of a "blooming landscape" remains a vision. Actual developments have left deep scars on the labor market, and the effects will be felt for decades to come. Was this outcome to be expected, perhaps even inevitable? What went wrong, and what were the available options? Or is the current state of Eastern German labor market in fact better than is commonly assumed?

During the last decades the appearance of a family has changed substantially. Not long ago a typical family consisted of an employed man and a home-managing woman living together for their whole life times, and having one or more children, which primarily were raised by the wife. Today differing living models are much more common than before. House husbands, late motherhood, and a delayed work entry of the children are some of the related phenomena, which at the same time are reasons for and consequences of the changed view on the favorite family. Not surprisingly, this change has provoked much scientific interest. In this book we present a collection of recent economic research work on the resources management and development of families and households respectively. Assorting three general topics, we focus on the time allocation within the household, the family structure and development, and the transition to work of young adults.