Labour Mobility: Individual, firm-specific and regional effects on the chances and risks in employment careers

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Olaf Struck
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 242931379

In all welfare societies employment is primary structure bearing for the allocation of opportunities in life. This refers to the wage levels as well as to welfare state entitlements. Therefore ensuring job stability, whether internally or between firms, is essential for workers. This is even more effective, since it allows workers to both preserve and further develop their occupational skills as throughout their employment careers. Against the background of increased flexibility and deregulation processes as well as in the course of the evaluation of the so-called Hartz-reforms recently an increased interest for empirical research on the determinants of promising and risky employment careers can be noticed. To date research has mainly considered individual factors influencing employment trajectories. Rather seldom firm characteristics have been included into the employment career research, even though the interdependencies between employees and employers features have been emphasised in many labour market theories. Even less frequently regional differences have been taken into account, although research on regional economies could prove multifaceted and persistent regional heterogeneities. Furthermore, the economic situation is to be included into the research on employment careers in a more systematic way as before because companies and employees unequally react to upswings and downturns, according to the sector affiliation and belonging to qualification groups as well as in dependency on national tolerances, trade agreements or internal scopes for flexibility.Against this background, the research project seeks to contribute more fully to life course research through focussing on structural framework conditions in greater detail. It wants to analyse the partly simultaneously acting effects of opportunity and risk structures on employment careers which are described in various theories and research traditions. Therefore, besides individual and firm-specific determinants especially region-specific framework conditions and influences of the economic situation will be considered. The effects of these levels on employment careers will then be researched on the basis of the content aspects 'job stability and inter-firm vertical upward and downward mobility', 'internal employment careers and vertical mobility' as well as 'regional mobility and vertical promotion and decline'. For this purpose a new longitudinal linked-employer-employee dataset, provided by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) will be completed with regional data. The empirical analyses will be carried out by means of multi-level-models in order to meet the requirements of the hierarchical clustering of data.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants