The relationship between the dynamics of employment on the one side and hirings and separations on the other side is crucial for the dynamics of unemployment and the labour market response to recessions. Although the average level of hiring and separation is much lower in Germany than in the US,...

Using a representative establishment data set for Germany, I show that, in line with the existing literature for several countries, firms' adjustment costs for employment are characterized by a fixed and convex functional form. Furthermore, they are asymmetric with dismissal costs exceeding...

In the German debate on firms' flexibility strategies, one strategy for handling the fluctuation of labour requirements is mainly ignored: the temporary laying off of employees and their subsequent reemployment by the same employer (recalls). This paper focuses on describing the extent of...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the flexibility opportunities of firms to respond to increasing labour market requirements and heterogeneity. Thereby, we focus on two groups of workers and two kinds of management events. The two groups of workers are female and older workers, while...

On the one side the success of the IAB Establishment Panel Survey can be traced to the high response rate and the excellent data quality necessary for panel analyses as well as the unique possibility to use the establishment register of the Employment Statistics of the Federal Employment Agency...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the flexibility opportunities of firms to respond to increasing labour market requirements and heterogeneity. Thereby, we focus on two groups of workers and two kinds of management events. The two groups of workers are female and older workers, while...

Whereas employee participation is generally conceived to facilitate implementation of organizational change, only limited research has investigated whether it may reduce the negative effects of downsizing. The present study compares two Swedish hospitals that implemented downsizing in different...

In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel mills and related firms in the metal industry have lead to large-scale redundancy plans. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This foundation acted like an independent training center, where...

Firms are affected by the product demand. This leads to employment adjustments. In the literature we find only very few contributions investigating the issue whether internal adjustments are linked and which relationships exist with external adjustments. Are they of a complementary or...

In public discussion in Germany it is often argued that jobs are mainly created in small and medium-sized firms (i.e. the "Mittelstand"), whereas large firms tend to reduce their number of jobs. An empirical analysis for the period 1999 to 2005 with data of all western and eastern German firms...