The Speed of Leaving the Old Job

Abstract

This paper analyses how quickly old job matches ceased to exist during the East German transition process from July 1990 to December 1993. Using job spells from the German Socio-Economic Panel-East, we estimate the effects of important covariates on the transition rates from the old job to a new one and into unemployment by a competing-risks duration model. Our results suggest that the speed of exit into new jobs rises with skills. The special short-time allowance slowed down the exit rate into unemployment. Workers increased their rate of job change temporarily just after the end of this program.