The secular rise of European unemployment since the 1960s is hard to explain without reference to structural change. This is especially true in Germany, where industrial employment has declined by more than 30% and service sector employment has more than doubled over the past three decades....

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of labour market dynamics in Western Germany by looking at gross worker flows. To do so, we use a subsample of the registry data collected by the German social security system, the IAB employment sample, for the time period 1975-2001. The latter...