Search

In many industrialized societies we observe persistent gender pay gaps and while labor force participation of women is increasing, it is also consistently found to be lower than men's par- ticipation. The persistence of gender inequality seems surprising, given recent developments of globalization and the sectoral shift from male dominated industrial production to service work. In this paper, we address the question of how economic globalization affects gender inequality. Using employer-employee linked administrative data, we analyze trade flows between Germany and China as well as Eastern Europe. We use an instrumental variable approach to identify the causal effects of trade exposure on men's and womens labor force participation and wages in Germany. We show that imports, and to a lesser degree exports, affect female and male labor market outcomes differentially. While women seem to be overproportionally negatively affected by imports, their labor force participation also does not seem to improve through increasing exports. We ascribe these disproportional effects mainly to occupational sex segregation and differences in men's and women's position in firms affected by trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, inequalities in the labor market are strongly tied to social origin by way of educational degrees: Children from higher social origins moreoften choose a traditional pathway that leads to a formal university entrance exam and with it to the highest returns in the labor market. The following paper focusses on the status attainment of nontraditional alumni in Germany, who first completed their vocational training and then entered higher education with an occupational qualification but without holding a university entrance certificate. By this pathway, inequalities can be lessened if nontraditionals attain the same status as traditionals. Estimated random-effect models on data of 155 nontraditionals and 1,881 traditionals of the National Education Panel Study (NEPS) show, that over 15 years after graduating, nontraditionals attain a lower occupational status (SES) in comparison to traditionals. Referring on social reproduction and social position theory, these results are explained for nontraditionals of lower social origins by a desire for status maintenance of the SES attained before their studies and for nontraditionals of higher social origins by a failed reproducation of parental status. Both motives lead to a lower SES attainment than that of the traditionals who successfully reproducte the parental SES by their graduate degree. The findings show that although alternative route to an educational degree lessen educational inequalities, inequalities do not disappear but manifest in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing sociological research has explained the unequal division of unpaid work between men and women among others with differences in relative resources and time availability. Numerous theoretical and empirical studies alike claim an influence of (potential) labor market success on household arrangements. We challenge a strictly monocausal interpretation of this relationship by investigating the influence of the division of unpaid work in different-sex couples on various labor market outcomes: A more equal distribution of unpaid work is argued to free time resources of the primary providers of housework - in most cases women - and to enhance their labor market participation and employment careers. Besides providing causal evidence for an effect of unpaid on paid work a major contribution of this paper is to exploit recent longitudinal data and dedicate particular attention to the accompanying methodological difficulties. Based on SOEP data for the years 2001-2015 we investigate the effects of different care work distributions within different-sex couple households in Germany on their employment probability as well as the actual working hours, hourly wages and labor earnings of employed couples. Applying instrumental variable regressions with fixed individual and time effects that include controls for individual and household characteristics allows to account for the endogeneity of an individual's time spent in housework. According to our findings the labor market participation of men and women as well as their actual hours worked and individual labor earnings are negatively affected by their own and positively affected by their spouses' time spend in housework. The effects are more pronounced for women. A more equal distribution of housework within couples would thus imply a substantial step towards more gender equality on the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women earn less than men, and among women, mothers earn less than non-mothers. Recent evidence reaffirms the importance of parenthood in accounting for the persistent gender gap in earnings in the United States, but the mechanisms that account for this gap are not undisputed, and the wage penalty for motherhood remains poorly understood. Against this background, the paper examines wage penalties for motherhood in the United States and Germany, two countries that differ significantly in terms of both labor market and welfare state institutions supporting the continuous employment of mothers. We find that white and African-American mothers in the US, along with women in western Germany, earn 6%-9% less than women without children, but working mothers in the states of the former East Germany experience no penalties. Much of the gap can be attributed to differences in time spent in the workforce, and to occupational and sectoral segregation. However, part-time workers experience severe penalties in the US, but not in Germany. We conclude that the adoption of convetional male-breadwinner behavior remains the best guard against wage erosion, but labor market institutions in Germany provide better protection for working mothers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the transition from an industrial society to a service society, particularly changes on the labour market are likely to occur. A number of authors assert that these changes will result in an increasing external-numerical flexibility, which is assumed to affect labour market processes in terms of generally higher labour market mobility and decreasing employment stability (?high-velocity-labour-market?). The consequence of this process is said to be a levelling out of employment opportunities and risks; uncertainties that in industrial societies were unevenly distributed along clearly defined socio-economic demarcation lines are said to be becoming increasingly generalised. The old division between ?core? and ?peripheral? workforces is said to be dissolving into general employment instability. Therefore, the paper investigates into the individual and firm-specific determinants of job stability and how these determinants have changed over time by estimating transition rate models for Germany. For this reason the event history data of the IAB Employment Subsample (IABS) is used. Hence, it will be possible to identify, which are the significant determinants of labour market success or failure and if there is evidence for an increasing polarisation on the German labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper presents results of estimations of the influence of age discrimination on job stability in the German labor market using Cox-models as estimation method and the LIAB waves of 1993 to 2005 as empirical database. The first section frames this empirical work in the context of the discussion about the effects of an aging population in industrialized countries on society and especially labor markets. In the second section two hypotheses regarding the effects of age discrimination on job stability are deducted from the assumptions of screening-theory: The closer individual age approaches an institutional barrier the higher is the hazard-rate of job terminations and the further individual age exceeds the average age in a horizontal segment of the labor market the higher is the hazard-rate as well. The third section describes how these hypotheses are operationalized using the LIAB data. The fourth section presents the estimates of the Cox-models, indicating that almost all age effects represented by indicator variables of age groups can be explained by the age evaluation procedures described by the two hypotheses. They provide anempirical micro foundation for explaining the disadvantages of older workers on the German labor market. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s retirement has become increasingly early and de-standardized across advanced societies. While much research has addressed the trend to earlier retirement, the changing structure of retirement is less understood. This paper compares Germany and Britain to assess how labor market and pension institutions play together in structuring individual retirement experiences. We use sequence analysis and relative distribution method to analyze the structure of retirement processes and associated income inequalities. Results from household panel data support that de-standardization of retirement is driven by high institutional differentiation in pensions, a lack of institutionalized early retirement routes, and employment maintenance policies on the labor market. De-standardization of retirement, however, does not go along with increasing income inequality among retirees. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitions from school to work are considered to be very 'vulnerable' transitions within the life course since the later career is heavily influenced by success and failure during the period of job entry. In recent years, Britain and Germany have implemented labour-market programmes for young people who failed to enter the job market. Referring to the current agenda of life course research these programmes, the New Deal for Young People (NDYP) in Britain and the Sofortprogramm gegen Jugendarbeitslosigkeit (Jump) in Germany are analysed from a comparative perspective. The programmes exemplarily show how different types of economies try to combat youth unemployment and foster increasingly fragmented transitions from school to work. Against the background of new institutional theories (Hall and Soskice) the paper illustrates that an erstwhile strength of the German training system - the strong linkages between labour market and training system - has now become a disadvantage, since the stronger regulation makes it more difficult to establish new instruments combating youth unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is a labour market without exclusion possible? In recent years, Britain and Germany have implemented labour-market programmes for young people who have failed to enter the job market - the 'New Deal for Young People, NDYP' in Britain and the 'Sofortprogramm gegen Jugendarbeitslosigkei', Jump, (immediate action programme against youth unemployment)' in Germany. Both programmes were central projects of the newly elected social democratic governments and part of the modernized social democratic strategy, in which education and training, as well as active labour-market policy, play a key role. Thus, both programmes are supposed to reflect a new strategy on education and training. In this paper, I argue that both programmes differ greatly with regard to their strategies towards labour markets integration. I show that these differences do not emerge by chance, but are the outcomes of different insti-tutional linkages between educational systems and labour markets in Britain and Germany. Further, I show that both programmes fail to include all young people into the labour market even though to distinct extends: particularly the German labour market programme tends to enforce existing patterns of exclusion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of migrant specific labor market segregation on the wages of migrants and non-migrants in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and the German Microcensus we test several sociological and social-psychological explanations relevant to this topic. The notion of Quality Sorting states that the differences in wages that are associated with the migrant share within occupations are due to differences in human capital and qualification requirements in those jobs alone. In contrast, a Cultural Devaluation of occupations with a high migrant share should have a further negative influence on both migrants' and natives' wages. Finally, Inter-Group Conflict approaches predict that conflicts between non-migrants and migrants increase when the latter group is expanding which leads to additional disadvantages for migrants: the negative effect of the migrant share within an occupation on wages should be stronger for migrants than for non-migrants. In our results we find evidence for all these approaches: The effect of the share of migrants is reduced but not removed completely by including dimensions of quality sorting. Overall, the inequality that results from migrant-specific segregation is stronger for women than for men. Conversely, evidence for Inter-Group Conflicts emerges only for males and only after removing highly skilled/managerial positions from the sample. This indicates that in higher labor market positions the migrant/non-migrant inequality is lower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze intra-generational mobility in West Germany. Individual mobility is linked with the development of inequality along the life course: Higher occupational mobility increases the chances of advancing from disadvantageous positions and contributes to making the class structure more fluid. Using growth curve modeling on data from the German Life History Study, we look in particular at the effect of educational attainment and class origin over individual careers, along with their changes across cohorts. We find that younger cohorts of men and women enter the labor market later and hold higher prestige occupations. Career progression appears faster at the beginning of the career and is on average slower for women, who also start from lower positions. Returns to education seem very high and constant across the career, the latter stressing the importance of the first job in creating returns to education. Class background has a weaker, but still significant effect, and men from upper class backgrounds continue proceeding in their careers to later ages than others. Overall, the results stress the rigidity of the German stratification system in which initial disadvantages can be hard to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the career dynamics and wage outcomes of foreign and native young men who have finished vocational education in Germany. Several different groups are compared against the native population: Italians, EU-13, East-Europeans, Ex-Yugoslavs, and Turks. I follow them for seven years beyond their vocational training in the year 2000 by applying random and fixed effects estimations to German register data. The panel design allows in particular for looking at employment histories and analysing the impact of status-changing events on wages, e.g. job mobility. Beyond that, this empirical design enables me to examine 'the opportunity structure for discrimination'. Status-changing events are accompanied by the phase of recruitment, which is probably the most critical point for discrimination in working life. If foreigners receive less job offers their search costs will be higher and lower wages are the observable consequence. The empirical results reveal that some foreign groups are found to be affected by labour market penalties in response to status-changing events. In contrast, wage penalties are not observed for foreign employees who manage to stay with an employer. This supports the assumption that ethnic wage inequalities are a matter of opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the thesis that inequality is on the increase in German society, this paper discusses changes in wage inequality between 1998 and 2006. Our objective is to identify differences in real wage growth for various occupational groups. Theory-wise, our explanations take economic as well as sociological approaches into consideration. Recent studies by labor economists suggest, for example that market forces driven by technological change and growth in the relative demand for highly-skilled labor have led to an increase in wage inequality (skill-biased technological change [SBTC]). In contrast, the structural approach adopted by Sørensen argues that increasing wage inequality is due to the ability of certain labor market groups to generate rents. For the empirical analysis, we have used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), the German Microcensus, and the BIBB survey. Our results show that between 1998 and 2006 people in lower occupational classes were among the losers of general income dynamics in Germany, while the winners in changing wage distribution are the higher occupational classes. By including a broad variety of independent variables we are able to show that the growing wage inequality in Germany has been driven not only by skill-biased technological change but also increasingly by rent generating processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imbalanced numbers of men and women (i.e. skewed sex ratios) have been linked to a variety of social consequences. Studies report associations with relationship formation patterns and timing, divorce rates, fertility timing and rates, sexual norms, female labour market participation as well as violence and aggression. Theoretical explanations commonly argue that sex ratios shape individuals' dyadic power on the partner market and within relationships, shifting the attractiveness of different partner market strategies. Consequentially, behavioral consequences are theorized to result from these power and opportunity cost imbalances. However, reasoning remains vague on whether behavioral consequences result from individuals' deliberate adjustment of partner market strategies. Specifically, subjective partner market perceptions might play a crucial role. Whether individual partner market perceptions correlate with local sex ratios has yet to be tested. We fill this gap using longitudinal pairfam data to analyze correlations between local and subjective sex ratios in Germany on state, county as well as municipality level. Our results reveal no correspondence between subjective partner market perceptions and local sex ratios. Results are robust for a variety of operationalizations for local sex ratios and all three aggregation levels. Additionally, we analyze transitions into relationships and find significant effects of local sex ratios only for women and only for age-specific sex ratios that reflect age hypergamy. Subjective sex ratios consistently correlate with union formation. In sum, our findings suggest that local and subjective sex ratio are independent of one another. Consequently, sex ratio effects on behavioral outcomes are rather unlikely to be due to conscious strategy adjustments. Subjective partner availability and local sex ratios appear to be separate factors. Instead, local sex ratios may affect relationship formation via processes not observed by individuals. Moreover, our results question the common use of adult sex ratios for wide age ranges in partner market research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender disparities in housework persist in the U.S. and Germany. In this article, we contrast the effects of gender norms with the effects of gender-neutral explanations, such as differences in men's and women's labor market resources. We also explore the validity of widely used item questions about gender norms. Drawing on a novel survey experiment allowed us to isolate the effects of norms from other, possible confounding factors. In 2017/18, 1,152 German residents participated in our experiments and evaluated more than 3,400 descriptions of hypothetical work-family scenarios. The labor market characteristics of the male and the female partner (i.e. earnings power and paid working hours), the division of housework, and family status were experimentally varied across all descriptions. In addition, we varied the amount of information to explore the validity of vague item questions. Our main finding is that the appropriate share of housework depends on gender-neutral factors like 'monetary contributions' and 'time availability,' while there is no evidence for gender specific evaluations: Equity norms seem to clearly trump gender norms. Also, our experiments suggest that prior research over-estimated the prevalence of gender norms. Disclosing too little information on individual's labor market resources causes artificial measurements of normative gender beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to information is essential for employees in the labor market, as it is relevant for both a worker's productivity and her chances to change to other jobs. However, little is known about the structures that grant access to or restrict access to relevant information. We argue that employees who change to other jobs create a network of interconnected firms. The firm's network position should then govern what information is accessible for workers within the firm. We use German administrative data on social security contributions (IEB) with a sample of all employees from the manufacturing industry in Germany's largest labor market region Munich from the period 1998 to 2014 to identify changes of employees (ties) between firms (nodes). We show that the position in the resulting network structure (in- and outdegrees and betweenness centrality) has significant effects on an employee's wages. Using fixed-effects and first-difference models, we show that a change into a central position in the firm network is associated with an increase in wages, especially when assuming that changes to other firms create longer lasting information channels. While increases in indegree seem to further increase wages for employees within the firm, increases in outdegree impose negative effects, suggesting that negative effects of employees leaving the firm outweigh positive effects through information flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany has long been considered the classic coordinated market economy. However, the German labor market has undergone substantial changes in recent decades and scholars have debated whether there has been a rise of dualization and/or precariousness. We analyze how the German labor market changed from 1984 to 2010. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) through the Luxembourg Income Study, we examine five labor market outcomes: employment, temporary and part-time employment, wages, and low wage employment. The results show that the only unequivocally improving trend is the rise of employment among working-aged adults. By contrast, several labor market outcomes have grown worse. Part-time employment, low wage employment, and wage/earnings inequality have all increased substantially, and youth employment has declined. While there has been an increase in women's labor force participation and employment, women are increasingly disadvantaged in terms of part-time employment, low wage employment, and hourly wages. Finally, there have been substantial increases in the education/skills of the labor force, and those with vocational training or high levels of education have becoming increasingly advantaged. Ultimately, we argue that dualization best captures the changes in the German labor market, though it is important to acknowledge the elements of stability and robustness within the German model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research project comparatively analysis work and life patterns of freelancers in the new media culture in the context of welfare state and labour market regulations in Denmark and Germany. Regarding freelancers as pioneers in "new", flexibilised work organization and taking into account the embeddedness of new work forms in specific societal frameworks (such as welfare state and labour market regulations), the project focuses on the differences and similarities in the freelancer's handling of "re-drawn" boundaries of work. The empirical core of the project consists of qualitative, guided interviews with freelancers in both countries, which are contextualized with the help of findings in the field of comparative welfare state and labour market research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postindustrial societies reply upon educational credentialism to allocate differentially qualified and skilled job seekers throughout occupational hierarchies, but there is little consensus about how to conceptualize and measure educational credentialism. This confusion stems in part from the failure to distinguish theoretically and empirically between three dissimilar social processes that have all been labeled as educational credentialism. These are credentialist hiring (the propensity of employers to base hiring decisions on a particular educational qualification), credential inflation (increasing educational requirements for jobs), and credentials as sheepskins (non-linear wage returns to schooling in which premia are attached to completed degrees). Germany, having experienced profound changes on both the supply and demand sides of the labor market over the past generation, provides an interesting test case for examining the extent to which these three credentialist processes covary across time. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP), we find some evidence for credential inflation and somewhat more compelling evidence for the maintenance of credentialist hiring in the German labor market. Empirical support for sheepskin effects is mixed. We conclude that the mechanisms underlying the allocative role of educational credentials are more complex than they have been portrayed to be in the stratification literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in health economics show that the body-mass-index (BMI) is a biased measure of fatness and that the use of alternative measures like fat-free-mass (FFM) and body fat (BF) can yield interesting results when estimating the determinants of employees' wages. We validate these findings for Germany with recurrence to the BIAdata project and the Ger-man Socio-Economic Panel. It can be shown that FFM and, to a weaker degree, BF have meaningful effects on employees' hourly wages. The influence is about two to three times higher for females than for males. These findings are robust towards the use of numerous prediction procedures for FFM and BF. And the main results remain the same for different statistical models like simple linear regressions, models with time-lagged variables and random effects models. In contrast to these results, BMI has no statistical relevant effect in any of our models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aim to examine how previous unemployment affects future unemployment and career complexity over the life course. Theory suggests that unemployment triggers negative chains of 'low-pay-no-pay' circles. However, no studies thus far have been able to empirically test and distinguish between positive and negative sequences of labor market transitions after unemployment. Using longitudinal data on men aged 18-64 from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we employ sequence-based methods to quantify career complexity and dynamic panel models to test our hypotheses about the process of cumulative disadvantage on employment careers for the previously unemployed workers over time. In addition, we develop a new measure of complexity that captures positive and negative labor market sequences. We find that unemployment 'breeds' unemployment because it increases the negative career complexity of previously unemployed over the life course. Results indicate that unemployment at older ages, in particular, leads to much higher career complexity than at younger ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The means for migrants to move it to improve their economic situation, but what does it mean for their subjective well being (SWB)? Based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1992-2007), I investigate the influence of migration from eastern to western Germany on SWB. Hypotheses are derived from human capital and from psychological approaches. Fixed-effects models enable me to distinguish between the impact of personality and migration on SWB. Migration has a positive lasting effect on SWB. The favorable labor market conditions in western Germany account for increasing reported SWB of males but not of females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, one can observe an astonishing persistence of the gender specific labour market segregation: Although women and men nowadays are similarly work-oriented and show a comparable human capital accumulation, most women still work in typical "women's jobs" and most men in typical "men's jobs". The central question is: Looking beyond human capital theory, what are the mechanisms for the channelling of women and men into gender specific occupations? The assumption is that there are within-occupational "social control mechanisms" that force people already working in gender-atypical occupations to leave these jobs after a while, in form of a "revolving door": On the one hand, the labour market is institutionalized in a way that men's jobs are less compatible with family responsibilities, with the result that women working in men's jobs are faced with specific problems when they get children. On the other hand, people working in atypical occupations are minorities, so-called "tokens", and thus less integrated into the work group and are faced with discriminatory performance evaluations. In addition, it will be analyzed to what extent these described social control mechanisms are moderated by the organisation the people work in: Especially in growth sectors, the occupational expansion often outpaces the supply of qualified labour, with the result that employers perhaps tend to broaden their search, so that new opportunities emerge for less preferred workers (e.g. women) in this sector. The research questions will be analyzed quantitatively with longitudinal methods using adequate datasets like the German Socio-economic Panel Study (GSOEP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]