To recruit skilled workers or to train one's own? : vocational training in the face of uncertainty as to the rate of retention of trainees on completion of training

"The article deals with the impact of uncertainty as regards the retention of trainees completing vocational training programmes on firms' training behaviour. As an alternative to vocational training, the external recruitment of skilled workers is considered via an opportunity costs approach. The uncertainty is traced back to staff turnover, considerable product market competition and changing skill requirements. Indicators of these causes of uncertainty are examined as to their impact on vocational training and the recruitment of skilled workers with a fractional logit model, using a seemingly unrelated cluster-adjusted sandwich estimator with data from the IAB Establishment Panel. There is no confirmation that the presumed correlations exist in manufacturing. A negative correlation is identified in the service sector between high staff turnover coupled with rapid change in the skills required on the one hand, and commitment to vocational training on the other, while there is a positive link with the external recruitment of skilled workers. This is interpreted as an indication that uncertainty with regard to retention after training can go some way towards explaining the growing gap between employment and vocational training in the tertiary sector." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) Additional Information Kurzfassung (deutsch) Executive summary (English)Betrieb, Personalpolitik, betriebliche Berufsausbildung, Ausbildungsverhalten, Auszubildende, Ausbildungsabsolventen, beruflicher Verbleib, zwischenbetriebliche Mobilität, Arbeitsplatzwechsel, Qualifikationsanforderungen, Personaleinstellung, Fachkräfte, verarbeitendes Gewerbe, Dienstleistungsbereich, Bildungsökonomie, IAB-Betriebspanel

The East German wage structure in the transition to a market economy

An important question for the development of the East German labour market in the transition to a market economy is whether wage differentials by qualification, industry or region which were relatively small in the former GDR adjust to those in market economies which are more in line with differences in productivities and economic conditions. We estimate empirical earnings functions to quantify the contribution of various important factors shaping the earnings distribution in the East German transition process. Estimation is based on the first six waves of the Labour Market Monitor which is a representative panel data set of the East German workingage population covering the period 1990 to 1992. The specification of the estimated earnings functions is motivated by the various hypotheses of the development of the East German wage structure in the transformation process. Although we do find some similiarities with the existing wage structure in West Germany, the East German wage structure still differs in some important dimensions. --

Interfirm Job Mobility of Two Cohorts of Young German Men 1979 - 1990: An analysis of the (West-)German Employment Statistic Register Sample concerning multivariate failure times and unobserved heterogeneity

The OECD (1993) has documented that the majority of workers in industrialised countries can look forward to finding a stable employment relationship. However new entrants into the labor force experience high turnover. Promoting institutions which support longer tenures and worker participation (or ''voice`` in the firm) utilize strategies to encourage enterprise and employee efforts in skill formation and training. The results of the OECD (1993) study show that attachments between employee and employer are more likely to endure for Japanese, French and German workers. Furthermore Germany has the highest share of young new recruits who received any formal training from their employer. In Germany, 71.5 % of young new recruits were trained at any job within 7 years after leaving school, whereas in the U.S. only 10.2 % of young new recruits were similarly trained (cf. OECD 1993, 137). It is sometimes assumed that employment protection policies have been exogenously imposed and thus probably impair efficiency. However, research on the micro-economics of labor markets has shown that employers may be interested in long-term employment relationships (cf. Levine 1991). Here, the job training model focusing on the importance of human capital investment, specifically the job shopping and matching model stressing the process of information gathering through employment experience should be mentioned. In such models employment protection legislation has not only desirable distributional effects but also help to ensure efficient outcomes. Therefore, it is important to assess the relevance of micro- economic theories empirically. This paper provides an empirical analysis of job durations in Western Germany using information from two cohorts of new entrants to the labor force documented in the (West-)German employment statistic register sample (cf. Bender and Hilzendegen 1996). The appropriate empirical technique to study job length is event history or survival analysis. In labor market research, survival analysis has primarily focused on explaining the length of unemployment spells. Application of this technique to employment is less common 1 , because huge longitudinal data sets are needed. Apart from testing hypotheses about the effect of personal characteristics and labor demand variables (e.g. firm size and industry affiliation), we will assess the influence of heterogeneity of the members of the two cohorts on their duration profile. The applied model and estimation method allow for unobserved heterogeneity and correlation between the clustered failure times of one employee as well as for right-censored spells. Our analysis is not restricted to the beginning of the working life of the employees. The individual retirement decision is affected by employment protection and early retirement regulations which differ widely between the firms. The respective data are missing in the employment statistic register, so that the retirement decision cannot be modelled explicitly

Wage structure and labour mobility in the West German private sector 1993-2000

"Since the early 90's the West German firms have to deal with sharp changes of economic environment: the German Unification, the emerging competitors in the east European countries and the deregulation of several labour market institutions. We analyse the wage structure, the wage changes and the labour mobility during this period using the linked employer-employee dataset from the Institute for Employment Research for the years 1993, 1995 and 2000. The dataset allows us to investigate especially the wage structure within firms and the exit and entry rates of workers at firm level. The main finding is that both wage inequality within and between firms and workers mobility was rising during the 90's. This development is mainly driven by the dynamics of high wage workers and high wage firms. The rising variance of wages can only partly be explained by a change in the occupational composition of firms. A decomposition of the variance of wages shows that the importance of the firm-specific variation increases, whereas that of human capital variation decreases." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Lohnstruktur, Lohnentwicklung, Arbeitskräftemobilität, IAB-Linked-Employer-Employee-Datensatz, Arbeitsplatzwechsel, Lohnunterschied, Lohndifferenzierung, privater Sektor, Privatwirtschaft, Westdeutschland, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Churning and institutions : Dutch and German establishments compared with micro-level data

"Often the high level of unemployment in Germany is explained by a lack of flexibility, over-regulation in the labour market and disincentives of the social security system. However, these institutional effects are difficult to test by means of data from only one country. Cross-country comparisons are hindered by the availability of comparable datasets, especially at the establishment level. The comparative analysis of labour markets with different degrees of flexibility, regulation, and social security systems will show the importance of these institutions for the mobility of individuals. In this paper we will estimate regressions - almost identically specified - using establishment datasets from Germany and the Netherlands. We do not only analyse the process of hiring and firing, but also the extent to which they occur simultaneously. Churning can be regarded as the part of hiring which occurs above the level of replacement of separations. Our results show that German establishments have significantly lower churning rates than their Dutch counterparts. To some extent this can be explained by a different economic situation and a different age-structure of the working population. Important labour market institutions exerting some influence on churning appear to be: the share of fixed term contracts in total employment (higher in the Netherlands), the German apprenticeship system, and the German works councils." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))IAB-Betriebspanel, Arbeitskräftenachfrage, institutionelle Faktoren, Arbeitskräftemobilität, Personaleinstellung, Entlassungen, Personalplanung, befristeter Arbeitsvertrag, Berufsbildungssystem, Gewerkschaft, Altersstruktur, Erwerbsbevölkerung, Arbeitsmarktstruktur - internationaler Vergleich, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Niederlande

Selektion und Anpassung. Lerntheorien im Umfeld von Evolutionstheorie und Pragmatismus

Der Autor fragt, inwieweit "Lerntheorien im Umfeld von Evolutionstheorie und Pragmatismus" für erziehungswissenschaftliche Theoriebildung und Forschung eine Logik "jenseits von Kausalität und Teleologie" bereitstellen. Gewürdigt wird, dass pragmatische Lerntheorien die kontextgebundene Bedeutung negativer Erfahrungen sowohl evolutions- als auch handlungstheoretisch interpretieren. Der Beitrag gelangt schließlich zu der Diagnose, weiterreichende Gewinne für erziehungswissenschaftliche Theoriebildung und Forschung seien erst zu erwarten, wenn diese Phänomene selektiver Abkoppelung eine vergleichbare Aufmerksamkeit wie Anpassungsvorgängen entgegenbringen. (DIPF/Orig.

Job and Worker Turnover in German Establishments

We use a simple regression-based approach to measure the relationship between employment growth, hirings and separations in a large panel of German establishments over the period 1993-2009. Although the average level of hiring and separation is much lower in Germany than in the US, as expected, we find that the relationship between employment growth and worker flows in German establishments is very similar to the behaviour of US establishments described in Davis, Faberman & Haltiwanger (2006, 2011), and quite different to the behaviour of French establishments described in Abowd, Corbel & Kramarz (1999). The relationship is very stable over time, even during the most recent economic crisis, and across different types of establishment.job turnover, worker turnover, hirings and separations

Experience on the implementation of a nonlinear material model for membrane fabrics in a finite element program

This paper describes the implementation of a nonlinear material law and presents examples to nonlinear warp fill behavior and wrinkling