Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Migrant women labor-force participation in Germany Human capital, segmented labor market, and gender perspectives

This paper analyzes individual, structural, and cultural factors that influence the labor-force participation of migrant women in Germany. Considering the well-established evidence that immigrant women work less than natives, with statuses and earnings differing significantly between them, The author investigates the economic activity of the former by examining the cross-sectional data from the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample 2013 with multiple linear regression techniques.

IAB-Discussion Paper 12/2018

Urbanization, Commuting and Regional Labor Markets

Due to its regional structure, with numerous centers of intensive economic activity, Germany lends itself particularly to analyses of spatial mechanisms of cities and interrelationships between regions. As a result of the increase in urban population, commuting serves as a spatial dispersion mechanism and leads to interactions between regional labor markets. The author studies how local labor markets interact, how densely populated markets facilitate the search for a new job and how employees react to changes in their commuting distance.

IAB-Bibliothek 368

Labour market advice and job placement of refugees: Labour market integration is still a long way off

A few refugees get a job soon after they arrived in Germany. However, for most of them labour market integration is still a long way off. Bevor getting a job, many refugees have to learn German and engage in retraining or vocational education and training. As far as labour market integration of refugees is concerned, job counsellors in the public employment service play an essential role. In an extensive research project the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) has analysed the process of labour market advice and job placement of refugees.

The full article can be found in our Magazine IAB-Forum.

Bogus self-employment in Germany. Also a question of definition

Based on a large-scale empirical study with 30,000 participants, the IAB explored the dissemination of bogus self-employment in Germany. In particular, the study analyses which labour market groups are over average affected by bogus self-employment as an illegal form of employment. The study employs alternative legal definitions of employment to test the sensitivity of the results.

The full article can be found in our Magazine IAB-Forum

FDI and Unemployment, a Growth Perspective

North-South foreign direct investment (FDI) is frequently viewed as a process in which
jobs relocate from the North to the South. I build a growth model with two asymmetric
trading economies, the North where firms innovate and the South where Northern firms
invest to take advantage of lower wages.

IAB-Discussion Paper 11/2018

Digitalisation, hiring and personnel policy: evidence from a representative business survey

In this paper we examine how employment and hiring processes develop in the course of digitalisation in German establishments. To this end we use a large representative business survey – the IAB Job Vacancy Survey – that was extended in 2015 to include special questions about the state of digital development in each establishment surveyed, thereby permitting a direct link between the topics of digitalisation and employment/hiring.

IAB-Discussion Paper 10/2018

Low Wage Growth in Germany? – Don’t Blame the Migrants!

The German labour market follows a fascinating employment trend since the year 2005. In contrast, wage growth remained weak until 2010 and although wage dynamics have picked up by now, they remain clearly subdued when compared to the vibrant development of employment and vacancies. Various explanations such as weak productivity development and the rise of service jobs are given for this phenomenon. In the same context, one often finds the strong migration to Germany. The argument is a classical one: migrants increase labour supply which leads to higher wage competition. We argue that such a mechanism is unlikely to have played a relevant role for German wages in the recent years.

The full article can be found in our Magazine IAB-Forum

For better or worse? How more flexibility in working time arrangements and fatherhood affect men’s working hours in Germany

Many fathers want to spend more time with their children and engage in household, but most of them continue to work full-time after the birth of a child. To better combine work and family, flexible working time arrangements might play a crucial role for fathers. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and fixed-effects regression models, we investigate the impact of flexible working time arrangements on actual working hours of men and fathers.

IAB-Discussion Paper 9/2018

Do active labour market policies for welfare recipients in Germany raise their regional outflow into work?

While many studies estimated the effects of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) on the participants’ labour market outcomes, much fewer studies are con-cerned with effects of these policies on the regional matching-process between job seekers and vacancies. An essential part of many reforms of the unemployment benefit system such as in Germany intended to activate unemployed job-seekers through an intense use of ALMPs. Therefore, it is crucial to understand whether such policies can improve the matching efficiency. We analyse quarterly panel data of German job centres in the period 2006 to 2011 and estimate the effects of the most important ALMPs on the regional exit rate from job-seeking into regular employment in a matching-function framework by applying the system generalized methods of moments estimator.

IAB-Discussion Paper 8/2018

Cohort size and labour-market outcomes

How does the size of young age cohorts affect the labour-market outcomes of these groups? Employing different microeconometric methods in an empirical analysis at the regional level, Duncan Roth addresses this question in the four essays contained in this book. The analysis deals with the effects on wages, employment and unemployment as well as the duration of search for employment following labour-market entry.

IAB-Bibliothek 367