RWI and RUB

The current economic crisis, which started in 2008, led to high and persistent unemployment rates across European labour markets. The initial impact of this economic shock on European labour markets was very strong: Between 2008 and 2010, four million persons lost their jobs within the EMU region (ECB 2012). Furthermore, there is evidence from aggregate data that specific worker groups were particularly strongly hit by the crisis, namely men and young persons. Finally, the type of employment contract seems to have had an important influence on the labour market effects of the economic crisis, which becomes particularly evident when comparing France, a country with very few fixed-term contracts, with Spain, where the opposite is the case. As a consequence, during the crisis, unemployment rose much more strongly in Spain than in France (Bentolila et al., 2012). In the analysis of labour market dynamics, the relative importance of inflows into and outflows from unemployment for the cyclicality of unemployment has attracted a great deal of attention (Shimer, 2012). Recent articles have mainly found a relatively balanced role for inflows into and outflows from unemployment (Elsby et al. 2009, Fujita and Ramey, 2009). These studies hav