Heterogeneity in the Cyclical Sensitivity of Job-to-Job Flows

Although the cyclical aspects of worker reallocation are investigated in numerous studies, only scarce empirical evidence exists for Germany. Kluve, Schaffner, and Schmidt (2009) emphasize the heterogeneity of cyclical influences for different subgroups of workers, defined by age, gender and skills. This paper contributes to this literature by extending this analysis to job-to-job flows. In fact, job-to-job transitions are found to be the largest flows in the German labor market. The findings suggest that job-finding rates and job-to-job transitions are procyclical while separation rates are acyclical or even countercyclical. The empirical framework employed here allows demographic groups to vary in their cyclical sensitivity. In Germany, young workers have the highest transition rates into and out of employment and between different jobs. Additionally, these transitions are more volatile than those of medium- aged or old workers. By contrast, old workers experience low transition rates and less pronounced swings than the core group of medium-aged, medium- skilled men.Labor force, employment dynamics, worker flows, business cycle, worker heterogeneity, job-to-job

Health Effects of Temporary Jobs in Europe

Over the last two decades, temporary employment has gained importance in the European Union. The implications of this development for the health of the workforce are not yet established. Using a unique individual-level data set for 27 European countries, this paper evaluates whether temporary employment is interrelated with self-assessed health. We find pronounced differences in self-assessed health by employment status across European countries. Furthermore, in the EU full-time permanent employed workers report the best health, followed by temporary and part-time employed workers. These differences largely vanish, when taking into account the potential endogeneity between employment status and self-assessed health. However, repeated temporary contracts have a significant negative impact on health.Temporary employment; fixed-term contracts; self-assessed health

Biases in the measurement of labour market dynamics

This paper analyses worker transitions on the German labour market derived from different data sources. These include the two German micro data sets which provide high-frequency observations on workers' employment and unemployment histories: the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and the IAB Employment Subsample (IABS). This exercise thus yields a comprehensive overview of German labour market dynamics. Furthermore, it highlights the differences between the results obtained from a retrospective survey, the SOEP, and a process-induced administrative data set, the IABS. In particular, our analysis shows which groups of the labour market are particularly affected by measurement error. We also show which role measurement issues play when establishing the stylised facts about the cyclicality of labour market dynamics. --gross worker flows,SOEP,IABS

Does Marginal Employment Substitute Regular Employment? – A Heterogeneous Dynamic Labor Demand Approach for Germany

In Germany we observe a decline in regular employment and an increase in atypical forms of employment. Especially marginal part-time employment which is characterized by lower tax rates and lower social security contributions increased substantially after a reform in 2003 made this type of employment even more attractive to employers. In our paper we estimate the substitutability of regular employment by marginal part-time employment using data on the industry level before and after the reform.We detect high substitution elasticities with respect to three skill categories of regular employment in both time periods. The substitutability of unskilled full-time workers increased significantly after the reform.Mini-Jobs, dynamic labor demand, elasticities, Hartz-reforms

The Intensive and Extensive Margin of European Labour Supply

Labour supply is determined by two factors: the participation of workers in the labour market (extensive margin), and the number of hours supplied by those working (intensive margin). Based on the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS), we analyse which margin is more decisive in determining overall labour supply in 24 Member States. The results reveal large diff erences between countries, even after controlling for composition effects in terms of socio-demographic and household characteristics. In addition to individual labour supply, our focus is on differences between EU Member States concerning household labour supply. Joint determination of the number of hours worked between spouses can be observed for dual-income couples in Austria, the Netherlands and Spain.Female labour supply; household labour supply; European Union; EU-LFS

Using Job Changes to Evaluate the Bias of the Value of a Statistical Life

This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) with labor market data. Investigating job changes, we combine the advantages of recent panel studies, which allow to control for unobserved heterogeneity of workers, and conventional cross-sectional estimations, which primarily exploit the variation of wage and risk between different jobs. We find a VSL of 6.1 million euros from pooled cross-sectional estimation, 1.9 million euros from the static first-differences panel model and 3.5 million euros from the job-changer specification. Thus, ignoring individual heterogeneity causes overestimates of the VSL, whereas identifying the wage-risk tradeoff not only by means of between job variation (job-changer model) but also on the basis of noisy variation on the job (panel models) may lead to underestimates of the VSL. Our results can be used to perform cost-benefit analyses of public projects aimed at reducing fatality risks, e.g., in the domains of health, environmental or traffic policy.Value of a statistical life (VSL), compensating wage differentials, work accidents, job changes

Women's Fertility and Employment Decisions under Two Political Systems - Comparing East and West Germany before Reunification

Over the last decades fertility rates have decreased in most developed countries, while female labour force participation has increased strongly over the same time period. To shed light on the relationship between women's fertility and employment decisions, we analyse their transitions to the first, second, and third child as well as their employment discontinuities following childbirth. Using new longitudinal datasets that cover the work and family life of women in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) allows for taking into account two political regimes and drawing conclusions about the relevance of institutional factors for fertility and employment decisions. Our results suggest that in both parts of Germany women's probability of having a first child is negatively correlated with both employment and educational achievement. Regarding second and third birth risks, this negative correlation weakens. Analysing women's time spent out of the labour market following childbirth we find that in the East almost all mothers return to work within 18 months after birth. In the West, however, this proportion is much smaller and at the age when the child starts nursery school or school, women re-enter the labour market at higher rates. These results point to a strong influence of institutional circumstances, specifically the extent of public daycare provision. A multivariate analysis reveals a strong correlation between a woman's employment status prior to birth and her probability of re-entering the labour market afterwards.Female labour force participation, fertility

Copayments in the German Health System – Do They Work?

This paper examines the effect of copayments on doctor visits using the German health care reform of 2004 as a natural experiment. In January 2004, copayments of 10 euros for the first doctor visit in each quarter have been introduced for all adults in the statutory health insurance. Individuals covered by private health insurance as well as youths have been exempted from these copayments. We use them as control groups in a difference-in-differences approach to identify the causal impact of these copayments on doctor visits. In contrast to expectations and public opinion our results indicate that there are no statistically significant effects of the copayments on the decision of visiting a doctor.Copayment, doctor visits, difference-in-differences, fixed-effect logit

Labor Force Status Dynamics in the German Labor Market - Individual Heterogeneity and Cyclical Sensitivity

The aggregate average unemployment rate in a given country is essentially the result of individual workers' transitions between the three core labor force states, employment, unemployment, and inactivity. The dynamics of these transitions depend both, on individual duration in a particular state and the transition probabilities between states. Individual transitions, in turn, depend on observable and unobserved factors. Simultaneously, person-specific dynamics may be influenced by swings of the business cycle. This paper analyzes these labor force status dynamics for the East and West German labor market, separately using comprehensive data on monthly transitions from the SOEP. The results show that the experience of high unemployment rates is more sensitive to cyclical behavior for certain demographic groups, specifically unskilled and young workers. Heterogeneity in unemployment and transition rates differ between East and West Germany, as well as between the sexes. In East Germany, all demographic cells are almost entirely detached from the cycle. Women are less influenced by the cycle in their re-employment rate from unemployment to employment.Labor force, unemployment dynamics, business cycle, worker heterogeneity

Der Einfluss unbeobachteter Heterogenität auf kompensatorische Lohndifferentiale und den Wert eines Statistischen Lebens: Eine mikroökonometrische Parallelanalyse mit IABS und SOEP

Die Arbeit untersucht mittels IAB-Beschäftigtenstichprobe, Sozioökonomischem Panel und Informationen über tödliche Arbeitsunfälle die Existenz kompensatori- scher Lohndifferentiale zur Bestimmung desWertes eines statistischen Lebens (WSL) in Deutschland. Querschnittsregressionen auf Basis aller Erwerbstätigen ergeben mit 7,4 (IABS) bzw. 3,5 (SOEP) Mio. € WSL-Schätzungen in der Größenordnung von querschnittsbasierten US-Studien. Zur Berücksichtigung individueller Heterogenität werden Panelregressionen durchgeführt, die zu einem geringeren WSL (3,0 bzw. 2,3 Mio. € führen und damit auf eine Verzerrung der Querschnittsschätzungen (na- tional und international) hinweisen. Zusätzliche (Differenzen-)Schätzungen auf Ba- sis von Berufswechslern bestätigen die Panelergebnisse. Die ermittelten WSL kön- nen in Kosten-Nutzen-Analysen von Projekten zur Risikoreduktion in Gesundheits-, Umwelt- und Verkehrspolitik eingesetzt werden