Using data from the longitudinal Labor Market Monitor for the New German States we provide a portrait of East-West commuters in the first year after unification and evaluate various hypotheses to explain the phenomenon. Commuters may be driven by the search for higher wages in the west or by...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person's actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...