"This paper presents the results of an expert opinion prepared by the Institute for Employment Research in cooperation with the Steinbeis Transfer Centre Applied System Analysis (STASA), Stuttgart, to calculate 'labour market and income indicators for identifying regions that are eligible for...

"The labor markets of most industrialized countries are polarized. This means that employment has grown in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has stagnated or declined. However, there exists no measure that allows a...

"In 2003, Germany moved from a system in which participants in training programs for the unemployed are assigned by caseworkers to an allocation system using vouchers. Based on the rich administrative data for all vouchers and on actual program participation, we provide inverse probability...

"A major unemployment and welfare benefit reform took place in Germany in 2005. One objective of this reform was to more strongly encourage an adult worker model of the family, with an emphasis on activating the formerly inactive. Our hypothesis is, however, that assignments to activation...

"A considerable number of people, particularly the older unemployed, exhibit a variety of barriers to placement. Integrating them into employment constitutes a challenge for labor market policy. The current research report presents the results of a program aimed at older persons receiving...

"Using new and unique linked employer-employee data from Germany, I examine the extent to which immigrants sort into worse-paying establishments and worse job positions within establishments. The results demonstrate that recent immigrants are particularly likely to work at low-paying workplaces....

"Job mobility offers opportunities for workers to obtain wage increases, but returns to job changes differ considerably. We argue that parts of this inequality result from a trade-off between occupational and regional mobility. Both mobility types offer alternative strategies to improve one's...

"The paper analyses movements in the unemployment rate of West German districts in the period 1992-2004 by the chain reaction theory of unemployment (CRT). The estimations show that unemployment movements are generated together by lagged adjustment processes and by exogenous shocks. We find that...

"Differences in regional labour market conditions are still pronounced in Germany, especially between the Eastern and the Western part. Traditional neoclassical models imply that labour mobility should reduce disparities. In contrast, models that include externalities or selective migration...

"Using the IAB Employment Sample (IABS) covering 1980-2001 we investigate what impact the fall of the Iron Curtain has had on the skill structure of employment and wages in the western German districts neighbouring the Czech Republic. The introduction of free trade in this region, which has one...