Job Stability, Mobility and Labour Market Restructuring. Evidence From German Microdata**

Zusammenfassung

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The paper analyses the change of job stability and its determinants in the course of time by presenting some empirical evidence from Germany. Drawing upon event history data from the German Federal Labour Office insurance accounts and employing Cox Proportional Hazard Rate Models, we test six core hypotheses on labour market restructuring and its impacts on job stability. Our analysis suggests that during the transition to service society between the 1980s and the 1990s some kind of 'restructuring' of the German labour market has taken place that has simultaneously led to an increasing polarisation and to an increasing levelling out of individual employment chances and risks.

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Auszug

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Job Stability, Mobility and Labour Market Restructuring. Evidence From German Microdata**

1. Introduction

There can be no doubt that fundamental social, economic, technological, and political changes have taken place during the last two decades. Those changes are often summarized, for example, in terms like "globalisation" (c.f. Reich 1992) or "individualisation" (c.f. Beck/Beck-Gernsheim 2002). It can be suggested that these changes have had a significant impact on employers' as well as employees' behaviour. Therefore, the transition from industrial to service economy1 and its impact on modern societies and individual employment histories has received considerable attention for at least 20 years. What seems to be indisputable is that all these fundamental changes caused an increasing demand for flexibility of both employers as well as employees. However, flexibility is a multi-dimensional phenomenon as we can see, for example, with regard to the flexibility of the allocation of labour within firms: On the one hand we can distinguish internal from external flexibility and on the other hand there are differences between quantitative and qualitative flexibility (c.f. Goudswaard/Nanteuil 2000); further on wage flexibility could be an additional dimension (c.f. OECD 1989).

In addition the flexibility of labour market actors is determined by the institutional framework they are embedded in. As Hall and Soskice (2001) have pointed out we can distinguish "liberal market economies" and "coordinated market economies" as two ideal types of production regimes because of their fundamental differences in the institutional organisation for example in labour market regulation or educational systems. Whereas the United States are often described as the prototype of "liberal market economies" Germany is suggested to be the prototype of "coordinated market economies". However, due to global changes the traditional German system of "regulated flexibility" has become under pressure during the last two decades and there have been some efforts to de-regulate labour market institutions for example by lowering the dismissal protection in the mid-1980s. But not least because of the path dependencies of institutions the German labour market is still highly regulated compared to liberal market economies (Fuchs/Schettkat 2000). Thus, the paper tries to answer the following questions by analysing the evolution of job stability and its determinants...

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