This paper studies whether the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy offers fundamentally new perspectives for those who, in economic terms, were relatively deprived under the old regime. Previous empirical research on this question has been limited by the availability of...

Barely any quantitative research has been devoted yet to the labor market consequences of incarceration for political offenses, which seems particularly unfortunate against the background of Europe's history of state persecution in the 20th century. Drawing on the example of the former German...

This paper studies the importance of employer-specific determinants in escaping low earnings in Germany. To address the initial conditions problem and the endogeneity of employer retention, we model (intra-firm) low-pay transitions using a multivariate Probit model that accounts for selection...

Using the German IAB Job Vacancy Survey, we look into the black box of recruiting intensity and hiring practices from the employers' perspective. Our paper evaluates three important channels for hiring -namely vacancy posting, the selectivity of hiring (labor selection), and the number of search...

In this paper, we study how wage mobility in the low-wage sector has changed in Western Germany between 1984 and 2004. Using German individual register data, we document a clear upward trend in the persistence of low-wage employment for both men and women. To explore whether the observed rise in...