This paper investigates the effects of home-ownership on labour mobility and unemployment duration. We distinguish between finding employment locally or by being geographically mobile. We find that home ownership hampers the propensity to move for job reasons but improves the chances of finding...

Since the inequality of earnings in East Germany has approached West German levels in the late 1990s, the standard Roy model predicts that a positive selection bias of East-West migrants should disappear. Using a switching regression model and data from the IABemployment sample, we find however...

In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...

This paper uses two recent UK surveys to investigate labour market performance, the determinants of language proficiency, and the effect of language on earnings and employment probabilities of non-white immigrants. Our results show that language acquisition, employment probabilities, as well as...

To date, analysis of the spatial dimension of New Zealand labour markets has been limited to administrative, rather than appropriately-defined functional, geographic units. This paper presents a preliminary classification of New Zealand into local labour market areas using area unit...

The paper surveys the recent theoretical and empirical literature on the economic determinants of interregional labor migration. In the first part, theoretical approaches are outlined, in the second part, results of several empirical investigations are surveyed. The authors conclude that...

This paper analyses the causal linkages between regional labour market variables and internal migration flows among German states between 1991-2006. We adopt a Panel VAR approach to identify the feedback effects among the variables and analyse the dynamic properties of the system through...

Recent European legislation on immigration has revealed a particular paradox on migration policies. On the one hand, the trend of recent legislation points to the increasing closure of frontiers (OECD 1999, 2001,2004), trying to limit the immigrants' stock. On the other hand, there is an...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

A main feature characterising the transition process of Eastern Germany is the scope with which east-west migration took place before, during, and after the German unification. Overall, roughly 2.77 million East Germans left their territory to migrate to the west between 1989 and 2002 (gross...