"We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and 'the East' - China and Eastern Europe - in the period 1988-2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use trade...

"Labour markets in most highly developed countries are marked by rising levels of skill segregation in the production process and increasing inequalities in skill-specific employment prospects. Local human capital has a likely effect on skill specific productivity levels and employment growth....

"The advent of the New Economic Geography has spawned a renewed interest in questions of agglomeration. The work expands the research on the impact of agglomeration economies on employment growth by connecting two strands of the empirical literature. A localization index and a cluster index are...

"Since the fall of the iron curtain in 1989, the migration deficit of the Eastern part of Germany has accumulated to 1.8 million people, which is over 10 percent of its initial population. Depending on their human capital endowment, these migrants might either - in the case of low-skilled...

"The paper shows that the distribution of regional unemployment rates in Germany exhibits strong persistent behaviour. Furthermore, panel unit root tests and autoregressive fixed effects models indicate that regional unemployment rates display conditional rather than unconditional convergence....

"How do agglomeration effects influence the demand for labour? To answer this question, approaches on labour demand are linked with an analysis of the classic 'urbanization effect'. We use models for static and for dynamic labour demand to find out, whether agglomerations develop faster or...

"This paper studies the impact of the local industrial structure on employment dynamics in Western Germany. Following an approach of Combes/Magnac/Robin (2004) for France, local employment growth is decomposed into internal growth resulting from employment changes in existing plants and into...

"Economic integration typically goes along with disintegration of production through outsourcing and offshoring (Feenstra 1998). As horizontal and vertical links between firms become more and more pronounced, value chains within regions are increasingly organized by production and innovation...

"This paper explores how different levels of regional concentration and specialisation affect the long-term growth of young firms. The sample consists of knowledge-intensive and non-knowledge-intensive western German manufacturing firms which were set-up in 1992 and managed to survive 11 years....

"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...