The debate over whether contingent (and typically more precarious) employment acts as a bridge to permanent employment, or as a trap, has tended to focus on transitions rather than longer-run pathways. This approach cannot accurately identify indirect pathways from contingent to permanent...

Germany has always been one of the prime examples of institutional complementarities between social insurance, a rather passive welfare state, strong employment protection and collective bargaining that stabilize diversified quality production. This institutional arrangement was criticized for...

'Marginal employment', i.e. employment at low working hours and earnings not covered by social security, has been gaining importance in the German economy over the past decade. Using a large newly available panel data set and statistical matching techniques, we analyse the effects of marginal...

The paper addresses an often neglected question in labour market research: to which extent do outcomes aggregated on the national level disguise occupational diversity in employment conditions? In particular, how and why do occupational groups differ with regard to the incidence of non-standard...

This paper presents – in a new way of examination and portrayal – the extent and changes of nonstandard employment relationships (part-time work, fixed-term contracts, and self-employment) in 24 EU member states at two points of time, in 1998 and 2008, on the basis of the European Labour...

Temporary Help Services (THS) employment has been growing in size, particularly among disadvantaged workers, and in importance in balancing cyclical fluctuations in labor demand. Does THS employment provide some benefits to disadvantaged workers, or divert them from better jobs? We investigate...

The share of non-standard jobs in total employment has increased in Germany over recent decades. Research tends to attribute this in particular to labour market re-forms and socio-economic change. However, it becomes clear upon closer inspection that macro trends alone cannot provide...

This paper gives an overview of the transformation of the German labor market since the mid-1990s with a special focus on the changing patterns of labor market segmentation or 'dualization' of employment in Germany. While labor market duality in Germany can partially be attributed to labor...

Ethnic minorities have lower wages compared to the ethnic majority in most EU-countries. However, to what extent these wage gaps are the result of prejudice toward ethnic minority workers is virtually unknown. This study sets out to examine what role prejudice play in the creation of the ethnic...

The observation of highly regulated, but successful economies has given rise to the hypothesis of various viable models of labor market adaptability. The paper presents a quantitative indicator that tries to avoid a simplified flexibility-rigidity dichotomy and provides a detailed picture of the...