Abstract
Over the past three decades the German economy has been characterized by persistently high and even increasing levels of unemployment. Moreover, aggregate unemployment data suggest that the problem of persistent unemployment has aggravated substantially since the mid-70s. The standardized rate of German unemployment is now at about 9.6 percent while it was less than one percent at the beginning of the 70s. A similar development can be observed for most OECD countries. The unemployment time series plotted in figure 1 supports the view that the unemployment rate has increased over the last 30 years. In recent years, a number of different explanations were developed, most of them attributable to New Keynesian Economics: models of implicit contracts1, efficiency wage models2, union models3, insider-outsider models4, or hysteresis5, just to mention a few. Even though the rise and the persistence of (aggregate) unemployment can be explained by these theories, they cannot be used in this paper, because ITs are not considered explicitly as a reason for unemployment.
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© 1999 Betriebswirtschaftlicher Verlag Dr. Th. Gabler GmbH, Wiesbaden, und Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag GmbH, Wiesbaden
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Gries, T., Meyer, H. (1999). Information Technology, Endogenous Human Capital Depreciation and Unemployment. In: Gries, T., Suhl, L. (eds) Economic Aspects of Digital Information Technologies. Deutscher Universitätsverlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-85190-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-85190-1_3
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