This paper analyzes the interaction between structural change and labor market dynamics in West Germany, during a period in which industrial employment declined by more than 30% and service sector employment more than doubled. Using transition data on individual workers, we document a marked...

Different models of protection against labor market risks are associated with diverging models of economic performance. Historically established institutional complementarities between labor market regulation, unemployment protection, and vocational training tend to mirror specific national...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled-to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework,...

The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the ?classics?, however (Fisher (1935), Clark...

Labor mobility is crucial for an efficient allocation of resources and the transition economies are often viewed as suffering from inadequate reallocation of labor. Using quarterly micro data for the 1994-1998 period, we provide a comparative analysis of the extent and determinants of labor...

This paper studies regional unemployment inequality in Poland. We find that higher unemployment regions are those experiencing greater change in industrial structure. We also find high unemployment regions are those with higher inflow rates to unemployment rather than longer spells of...

This paper seeks to document and analyse changes in the distribution of wages and employment in the transition countries since the collapse of communism. Most countries experienced an increase in wage inequality during the initial shock of the transition. Proximate causes of this increase seem...

Gross job and worker flows in Russian industry are studied using panel data from a recent survey of 530 firms selected through national probability sampling. The data permit an examination of several important measurement issues – including the timing and definition of employment, the roles of...

We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...