Examining the roots of homelessness: The impact of regional housing market conditions and the social environment on homelessness in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
09 May 2012
Despite large-scale governmental efforts to combat homelessness, homelessness rates can only be reduced but not eliminated completely by the measures usually applied. Hence, there is an obvious need to investigate additional factors which contribute to homelessness and gain insights on how to further reduce homelessness.
IAB-Discussion Paper 13/2012
Income: Do sons have similar ones to their fathers?
08 May 2012
From dishwasher to millionaire – hardly anyone manages that, either in the United States or Germany. And it is even more difficult for people whose parents already had low earnings. Social advancement from the parental generation to that of the child seldom takes place. That is one of the central research results presented by the book "Inter- and intragenerational economic mobility". The author, Daniel D Schnitzlein, examines the causes of economic mobility, comparing Germany to the United States and Denmark. He also analyses the economic mobility of siblings as well as the influence of cultural backgrounds. However Dr Schnitzlein does not only take a comparative look beyond Germany's borders: his research also revolves around the development of wage mobility in the eastern and western parts of Germany itself, concentrating on mobility within a generation.
The author Daniel D Schnitzlein completed his doctorate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and is currently a researcher on the SOEP longitudinal study (socioeconomic panel) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin.
Further informations
Worker flows in Germany: Inspecting the time aggregation bias
03 May 2012
This paper analyzes the importance of time aggregation in the measurement of worker flows by exploiting daily information from German administrative data. Time aggregation caused by comparing monthly labor market states leads to an underestimation of total worker flows by around 10%.
IAB-Discussion Paper 12/2012
The labour markets in Finland, Germany, Latvia, Norway, and Sweden 2006-2010
16 April 2012
Via the International Labour Market Forecasting Network, forecasters of the public employment services or comparable institutes from the Nordic countries as well as Germany and Austria exchange their analyses about the current and future development of the national economies and labour markets. This report documents some of the discussions during the past few years. Finland, Germany, Latvia, Norway, and Sweden exemplify their starting conditions and labour market reactions to the Great recession in 2008 and 2009.
IAB-Forschungsbericht 7/2012
Effectiveness of further vocational training in Germany
10 April 2012
Further vocational training for the unemployed aims at enhancing their job prospects. This paper analyses the effectiveness of such subsidized training programmes for means-tested unemployment benefit recipients in Germany.
IAB-Discussion Paper 10/2012
Between familial imprinting and institutional regulation
29 March 2012
In this paper, I examine how family related employment interruptions for women in the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) and the GDR (German Democratic Republic) looked like in the period prior to German reunification. Furthermore, I investigate how career interruptions developed after the German reunification in the old and new states and whether a convergence of re-entry behaviour can be observed. Following research questions are addressed: Which factors are more important: attitudes towards the employment of mothers, which were transferred through socialisation in childhood and adolescence, or institutional arrangements shaped by parental leave regulations? Based on data from the IAB ALWA study ('Working and Learning in a Changing World'), the results show that even twenty years after the German reunification, significant differences between women in East and West Germany are found to exist with respect to family related employment interruptions.
IAB-Discussion Paper 9/2012
Journal for Labour Market Research
28 March 2012
From this edition onwards, the Journal will operate under the main title "Journal for Labour Market Research" while "Zeitschrift für ArbeitsmarktForschung" will remain as the subtitle; in addition the layout has been slightly altered. With this, we wish to send the signal to the international scientific community that the Journal is intended to play a more important role on the international stage than previously but without disowning its German roots.
Volume 45 - Number 1 - March 2012
Foreign direct Investment and search unemployment
01 March 2012
This paper proposes a simple multi-industry trade model with search frictions in the labor market. Unimpeded access to global financial markets enables capital owners to invest abroad, thereby fostering unemployment at the extensive industry margin. Whether a country benefits from FDI in terms of unemployment depends on the respective country's net-FDI, measured as the difference between in- and outward FDI. The derived FDI and unemployment nexus is tested employing macroeconomic data for 19 OECD countries on unemployment, FDI, and labor market institutions. Results support the model in that net-FDI is robustly associated with lower rates of aggregate unemployment.
IAB-Discussion Paper 4/2012
The time trend in the matching function
29 February 2012
We revisit the puzzling finding that labour market performance appears to deteriorate, as suggested by negative time trends in empirical matching functions. We investigate whether these trends simply arise from omitted variable bias. Concretely, we consider the omission of job seekers beyond the unemployed, the omission of inflows as opposed to stocks, and the failure to account for vacancy dynamics. We first build a model of all labour market flows and use it to construct series for these flows from aggregate data on the U.S. labour market. Using these series, we obtain a measure for employed and non-participating job seekers. When we thus include all job seekers, the estimated time trend remains unchanged. We similarly obtain measures for inflows into unemployment and vacancies.
IAB-Discussion Paper 3/2012