"The paper analyses the impact of regional own-ethnic concentration on the language proficiency of immigrants. It solves the endogeneity of immigrants' location choices by exploiting the fact that guest-workers in Germany after WWII were initially placed by firms and labor agencies. We find a...

"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...

"This paper provides an analysis of the labour market entry of migrant youth in Germany after completion of an apprenticeship. We are particularly interested in the impact of local cultural diversity on a successful career start. Focusing on the cohort of people completing apprenticeships in...

"This paper analyses extensively the effects of inter-regional mobility on the earnings of skilled workers. We interact returns to inter-regional migration with employer changes to separate the two effects and find that inter-regional mobility results in positive additional returns as compared...

"Empirical evidence for the US shows that migrants increase the productivity of regions. To explain the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003). We consider heterogeneous firms with different...

"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...

"This paper deals with the medium-term effects of job mobility on the average wage growth of job movers in East Germany. The analysis is based on all employees subject to social insurance contributions working in East Germany in 2004. Using a statistical matching procedure combined with a...

"Reservation wages indicate the wage threshold for which individual workers are inclined to supply their working capacity. In important theoretical approaches it is assumed that this threshold depends on the unemployment rate. If this is true, the variation of reservation wages might be an...

"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...