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This paper investigates the effects of migration and work experience on university-to-work transitions of German university graduates. We use a job search model, signaling and social network theory to discuss different links between the duration of labor market entry, graduate mobility and work experience. We apply event history analyses and make use of administrative social security records to examine whether work experience and pre-study as well as post-study migration accelerates the labor market entry of graduates. Our regression results stress the importance of both mobility and work experience for the length of the transition period. However, whether the effect is beneficial or adverse depends on the type of graduate migration and previous employment.

Twelve qualitative case studies in German and Canadian hospitals and IT companies were used in this mixed-methods study analysing the labour market outcomes of immigrants. The reported case studies investigate the immigrants' recognition, integration process and the usability of foreign qualifications, skills and work experiences in the labour market. Furthermore, the strategies and rationales of employers and employees within the recruiting process are analysed. Here, the focus lies on the transferability and obstacles of cultural and social capital across country borders as well as the relevant framework conditions. This paper refers to Bourdieu's approach towards different types of capital as well as the rational choice theory. The results demonstrate that immigrants in both countries face more obstacles accessing the labour market within the health sector than within the IT sector. The context of the recruiting situation strongly affects the strategies and behaviour of the employers or the recruiters. Within these sector- and country-specific confines, individual factors determine the immigrants' labour market success. Furthermore, the sector and the country affect the relevance of each individual factor in the recruiting process.

Early life course conditions and the social origin of families frequently influence the inequalities people experience in adulthood. The transition from education to work is a challenging period during which adolescents make their first employment-related choices and establish the course of their careers. Future expectations guide adolescents' employment-related choices and are assumed to influence future employment outcomes. Therefore, this paper investigates whether family (dis)advantages affect adolescents' employment expectations. We assess various underlying mechanisms that may influence the relationship between social origin and adolescents' employment expectations by using cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP: 2006-2018), specifically a youth questionnaire administered at age 17. Three key findings emerge. First, family disadvantages, particularly an insecure parental labor market participation, influence the employment expectations of adolescents negatively. Second, supportive parenting does not mediate the relationship between social origin and the employment expectations of adolescents; instead, it functions as an additional positive factor. Third, supportive parenting creates more optimistic employment expectations because it fosters specific "beneficial" personality traits, such as extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and internal control beliefs., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Employed informal caregivers often experience role conflicts between caring for an elderly person in need of care at home and their employment. The goal of this paper was to identify a risk profile of care-related termination of employment., Methods: Analyses are based on the cross-sectional Benefits of Being a Caregiver Study (October 2019 - March 2020) with data from 481 informal caregivers of elderly persons in need of care. The data collected relate to characteristics of the care recipient, the informal caregiver, and the caregiving situation, as well as aspects of the employment situation. The risk profile of care-related cessation of employment is based on a binary logistic regression., Results: Approximately one in nine in the present sample (n=55) terminated employment because of having to offer informal care to an elderly person at home. Factors characterizing the risk profile of a care-related termination of employment were female gender of the caregivers, younger age of the care receiver, co-residence with the care receiver, and a higher care level of the care receiver., Conclusions: In order to reduce care-related cessation of employment, support and relief services need to be adapted to the factors of the identified risk profile. In particular, the form and content of informal caregiver counselling should be modified in order to reach informal caregivers at an early stage. Adapted support programs should focus on and reach in particular female employed caregivers., Competing Interests: Die Autorinnen/Autoren geben an, dass kein Interessenkonflikt besteht., (The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).)

In this paper, we estimate the causal effects of a set of active labor market programs for male unemployed refugees on welfare who entered Germany between, 2013 and September, 2016. Using rich administrative data, we employ covariate balancing propensity scores combined with inverse probability weighting to estimate effects up to 33 months after the start of treatment. Our results show that relatively short-term training in the form of Schemes by Providers and In-Firm Training, as well as longer-term Further Vocational Training programs have a positive impact on both the employment chances as well as labor market earnings of refugees in the medium run. So-called "One Euro Jobs", a public employment program, does not yield positive effects on employment or earnings. Sensitivity analyses confirm that our results are unlikely to be driven by unobserved confounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent theoretical positions in sociology and labor economics disagree whether educational expansion has outstripped the demand for qualified labor (overexpansion), or whether economies face a skill shortage despite increases in education (underexpansion). Focusing on the United Kingdom and West Germany, two countries with dissimilar skill formation institutions, patterns of expansion, and labor markets, this paper asks to what degree expansion of education has been absorbed. I point out shortcomings of wage-centered analyses and develop an approach that focuses on trends in self-assessed over- and underqualification. Using repeated surveys among workers and official labor market statistics, I estimate regression models that link the cohort-level expansion of education to the cohort-level prevalence of mismatch. Results suggest overexpansion in the United Kingdom, with overqualification increasing and underqualification decreasing over historical times and cohorts. West Germany, on the other hand, shows signs of underexpansion. While dominant theoretical accounts focus on the under-/overexpansion of tertiary education, my results show that mismatch-dynamics in both contexts are strongest for workers without university degrees., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The paper asks for the contribution of growth models for the explanation of public sector employment relations in Germany. The paper is subdivided into three parts. The first elaborates on long-term developments as well as forms of employment. The second part analyzes wage setting systems, that is, bilateral collective bargaining for employees and unilateral decision-making for civil servants. The third part compares the empirical outcomes of both sub-systems with the assumptions of growth models and distinguished explicitly various concepts of the state as corporate actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Childcare policy responses towards Covid-19 differed in European welfare states. • Policy responses cause informalization of childcare to different degrees. • Informalization of childcare is mainly connected with social risks for women. • Cultural and institutional differences help to understand varying policy responses. The closure of extra-familial childcare facilities by European governments in 2020 was an important part of interventions against the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. One consequence was that childcare was provided by parents at home, mainly by women. As a result, women mainly experienced financial and employment risks related to this "informalization" of childcare. The childcare policies of European welfare states differ in the extent to which they include measures to reduce the social risks related to informalization. Against this backdrop, this paper asks: How should one understand cross-national differences in childcare policies during the pandemic? We are also particularly interested in the effects of childcare policies on the social risks connected with the informalization of childcare and what these mean for the gendered division of paid work and care. Differences in childcare policies during the pandemic are commonly explained in terms of the path dependence of such policies. Using the theoretical approach of "care arrangement," this article introduces a broader theoretical framework that considers the role of cultural and institutional factors for understanding the cross-national differences in childcare policies during the pandemic. We introduce the findings of a comparative empirical study of childcare policies in three European welfare states—Denmark, Germany and England—that represent different types of care arrangements. This paper uses policy and media documents, quantitative data on childcare and women's employment, cultural ideas and secondary analysis of empirical studies. We find that governments did not per se respond to the pandemic based on institutional path dependence regarding childcare policies, while the integration of culture into the theoretical framework allows for a more comprehensive understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries face substantial shortages of skilled nurses. With an aging population and global demographic changes, developing a skilled workforce of nurses has become one of the central challenges for public health care. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated labor shortages, which pose a threat to the quality of publicly provided health care. Improving nurses' working conditions could be a means by which to address the global shortages of nurses. However, in countries with public health care, such improvements may come with additional costs in the form of higher taxes or social security contributions. Therefore, such improvements partly depend on people's willingness to pay (WTP) for them. In this paper, we investigate workers' willingness to pay for improvements in the working conditions of nurses. This study is a factorial survey experiment included as part of an online survey. The factorial survey experiment was implemented within the high-frequency online panel survey "Life and Employment in Times of Corona" (IAB-HOPP) conducted by the Institute for Employment Research (Germany). We analyze data from N = 2128 survey participants; our main analysis consists of N = 6384 responses from those participants. Our research is based on a factorial survey experiment (vignette analysis) designed to quantitatively measure the willingness to pay for various improvements in the working conditions of nurses. We use random effect models and mixed models to estimate the individual-level willingness to pay for these improvements. Our results show that the survey participants are generally willing to pay for particular policies aimed at improving the working conditions of nurses. However, the amount that respondents are willing to pay varies with the type of policy changes. Survey participants exhibit a high willingness to pay for increases in minimum wages for nurses and wage-related improvements in general. We find, however, a lower willingness to pay for the right to participate in training courses aimed at reducing work-related stress. The broad support for improvements in the working conditions of nurses provides policymakers with some guidance in implementing policy measures that might address labor shortages in the nursing sector. There was no preregistration. Many people are willing to pay extra to improve the working conditions of nurses. Wage-related increases for nurses show the highest willingness to pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on reconciling family and employment debates if maternal part-time employment works as 'stepping stone' to full-time employment or as gateway to a long-term 'mommy track'. We analyse how mothers' transition from part-time to full-time employment is shaped by changing reconciliation legislations and how this is moderated by reconciliation-relevant factors like individual behaviours and macro conditions. We extend the literature on work–family reconciliation by investigating mothers' employment behaviour after the birth of their last child, i.e., after the family formative phase. We draw upon Germany with its considerable regional and historical heterogeneity. Using event history methods on SOEP-data, we observe mothers who (re)enter part-time employment (i.e., up to 30 weekly working hours) after their last childbirth. Results suggest that the impact of reconciliation legislations depends on the moderation by other factors. Recent reconciliation-friendly legislations may have contributed to the polarization of maternal employment patterns: more and less employment-oriented mothers diverge sooner after childbirth than before. Legislations co-occur with increases both in childcare institutions and part-time culture, but their moderation effects compete. Hence, boosting part-time work as either a 'stepping stone' or a 'mommy track' requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms behind legislations as well as more explicit policy incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single parents and their children benefit particularly from early childhood education and childcare programmes. Nevertheless, almost a third of single parents in Germany who need childcare for their children under the age of three are unable to find it. Although around 70 % of day care providers claim to take the single-parent criterion into account when allocating slots, the prevailing allocation procedures cannot guarantee that this is implemented. This article shows how transparent allocation criteria can be designed nationwide and how their implementation can be realised through suitable, centralised, municipal allocation systems. Particularly in (western) German regions with a high unmet demand for institutional childcare, single-parent status should be considered as an independent criterion in addition to other factors such as employment and child age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: "Core values" help to guide practice of health care delivery. The core values of general practice are described in the European definition of general practice by WONCA, e.g. a holistic, comprehensive and continuous care. They may be associated with the idea that the general practitioner is the owner of the practice rather than an employee. Objectives: The objective was to examine the core values of employed GPs in their professional setting and their practical manifestation. Methods: From April to May 2021, we conducted 17 semi-structured telephone-interviews with employed GPs in two districts in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results: We identified twelve core values, including values relevant to patient care and values relevant to the lives of employed GPs. Values with high relevance were job satisfaction, the professional distance from patients, collaboration and collegial exchange, comprehensive care, adequate consultation time and availability to patients. Values with heterogeneous relevance were continuity of care, waiting times and medical autonomy. The value "availability" of employed GPs to patients was associated with both patient care and personal life. The limited availability of employed GPs was accompanied by tensions between these two trends and other values. Conclusion: The values of employed GPs are partly consistent with the current WONCA definition of general practice. There were also indications of new values. The increase in the proportion of employed GPs implies a need to reflect on the core values of general practice, taking into account factors on the part of employed GPs, patients, and practice organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertainty shocks are found to affect labour market outcomes adversely. Most studies interrelate non-convex labour adjustment costs with the propagation of macroeconomic uncertainty to the labour market. I show that non-convex labour adjustment costs differ by establishment size in Germany. Hence, uncertainty shocks should affect large and small establishments differently. Therefore, this article studies the effects of uncertainty shocks on employment adjustments in large and small establishments employing four structural vector auto-regressive models for Germany from 1992 to 2014. These four models estimate the effects of uncertainty shocks on employment, worker flows, job flows, as well as worker churn in establishments with fewer than 100 and with at least 100 employees. The results suggest that uncertainty shocks trigger considerable employment fluctuations in large establishments while they barely affect small establishments. Furthermore, large establishments adjust their labour input by delaying the replacement of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]