Employment Biographies Research Articles

Identifying Outsiders Across Countries: Similarities and Differences in the Patterns of Dualisation

This paper makes three contributions: a) it develops a new conceptualization of outsider-status, based on employment biographies, rather than on current labour market status; b) it proposes a new operationalisation of outsiders based on post-industrial class theory and c) it shows empirically who the outsiders are across different countries and across the three dimensions of economic, social and political exclusion.The empirical analysis shows similar, but not identical sets of insiders and outsiders in different national political contexts. Workers in low-skilled service sector jobs are systematically disadvantaged throughout the developed world in terms of work and pay conditions, social rights and political integration. Low-skilled blue collar workers, by contrast, are outsiders in terms of political integration in all countries, but they are unionized and generally enjoy full social rights. Finally, medium- and high skilled young and female workers in service sector jobs tend to be outsiders in continental Europe, because they are strongly affected by atypical work contracts, lacking trade union mobilization and insufficient social rights. Overall, blue-collar workers suffer from structural economic strains, while high-skilled service workers in continental Europe suffer from political disadvantage, and low-skilled service workers fare worst because they are disadvantaged both economically and politically.

Young people's education to work transitions and inter-generational social mobility in post-soviet central Asia

This paper is based on evidence gathered in 20 firms, matched by size and business sector, in each of three Central Asia cities — Almaty in Kazakhstan, Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. In each firm the owner(s) and/or senior managers supplied information about the business, focusing on methods of recruitment, training, and employee career development. Parallel questionnaire surveys gathered information about the family and educational backgrounds, and labour market and employment biographies, of all the young (up to age 30) employees in each of the 20 companies. A total of 1,402 young employees completed questionnaires, and from these, eight per city, with equal numbers of males and females, with and without higher education, were subsequently interviewed in depth. The evidence is used to identify how families that were advantaged under the old (communist) system were continuing to reproduce their advantages inter-generationally. It is shown that this was mainly, though not entirely, via their children's superior chances of progressing through higher education. The evidence is also used to argue that cultural capital was playing a stronger role than social capital in the inter-generational transmission of advantages, that the critical events in the potentially life-long status attainment process were concentrated within a relatively short time frame, and that the multiple strategies to which families with economic and cultural assets could resort were liable to neutralise all efforts to diminish their ability to pass their advantages down the generations.

Identifying and explaining inconsistencies in linked administrative and survey data: the case of German employment biographies

Identifying and explaining inconsistencies in linked administrative and survey data: the case of German employment biographies

Effects of changes in data collection mode on data quality in administrative data: the case of participation in programmes offered by the German employment agency

Der Einfluss des Datenerhebungsmodus auf die Datenqualit?t von Verwaltungsdaten. Eine Methodenstudie am Beispiel deutscher Arbeitsmarkt daten?. Until administrative data are available as research datasets, they are passed through many organizational units and stored in different formats. The transformations of collected data to a data warehouse and further the integra tion of data from several operational sources to an integrated dataset for re search projects include various mappings of identifiers and variables. A par ticular challenge arises, whenever one of the intermediate products changes. The resulting difficulties are not only technical in nature, but may well lie in aspects of the theoretical interpretation in a particular research context. For long-term research projects, it is essential to ensure comparability between several versions of this dataset. So the main task resulting from changes in the data sources is to ensure that observations of a former version of a research dataset can be identified after these changes. A case study of the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEB) is presented as an example of these problems. In a first step reasons for changes in the data sources and the methodological problems of transformation between several versions of a research dataset are highlighted. In a second step some tests of variables fundamental for research

On the Definition of Unemployment and its Implementation in Register Data – The Case of Germany

Unemployment information in individual level register data depends on institutional settings, administrative procedures and which registers are merged. In this paper we suggest different implementation strategies for common international and German legal unemployment definitions for the Sample of the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEBS). The IEBS belongs to a new generation of German merged register data that is more comprehensive than previous data sets. Our descriptive figures show large differences in the number of spells and the unemployment duration across implementations. This suggests that empirical results of labour market research are likely to depend on the underlying legal definition of unemployment and its implementation in this data.

On the Importance of Correcting Reported End Dates of Labor Market Programs

Abstract With administrative data becoming increasingly important for empirical research, the quality of crucial variables of process generated data is of growing interest. This paper investigates reported end dates of further training programs in the German Integrated Employment Biographies Sample (IEBS) to gain insights on how to deal with this sensitive part of the IEBS in future studies and on how measurement error in program end dates affects evaluation results. Error-proneness of reported end dates in the IEBS is discussed, corrections are introduced and their impact on evaluation results is studied for different estimation frameworks using sensitivity analysis. Though there is considerable measurement error in the end dates that can be corrected, the effect on evaluation results is modest.

Mobility biographies: Elements of a biographical theory of travel demand

Summary: The contribution presents theoretical considerations and an overview on empirical knowledge from a research field recently emerging in transportation research, in which transport geographers play a prominent role. This research field deals with the development of travel demand over the life course of individuals. This process is referred to as 'mobility biographies'. It is embedded into the context of other 'partial biographies', namely residential biography, employment biography, and house hold biography. The hypothesis is that travel demand on an individual level is relatively stable in the medium term, but changes significantly in the context of certain key events in the life course. Such key events include, among others, residential location changes, workplace changes, and the birth of children. The paper concludes with some methodological considerations and the identification of research requirements.

The German Integrated Employment Biographies Sample IEBS

The German Integrated Employment Biographies Sample IEBS

On the Definition of Unemployment and its Implementation in Register Data - The Case of Germany

Unemployment information in individual level register data depends on institutional settings, administrative procedures and which registers are merged. In this paper we suggest different implementation strategies for common international and German legal unemployment definitions for the Sample of the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEBS). The IEBS belongs to a new generation of German merged register data that is more comprehensive than previous data sets. Our descriptive figures show large differences in the number of spells and the unemployment duration across implementations. This suggests that empirical results of labour market research are likely to depend on the underlying legal definition of unemployment and its implementation in this data.

Changing coalitions in social policy reforms: the politics of new social needs and demands

Recent reforms in Swiss and German old-age insurance and family policy included elements directed at both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social needs. ‘Old risks’, such as old age and unemployment, are mainly covered by income-related insurance schemes for standard industrial breadwinners. By contrast, ‘new’ needs, such as infrastructure to reconcile work and care or insurance of atypical employment biographies, concern mainly ‘new’ risk groups, such as young people or women. While reforms directed at ‘old risks’ mainly focused on cost containment, ‘new’ social policies aimed at gender equality or the increase of labour-market participation. In this article, I argue that the emergence of modernizing policies covering new social needs leads to new conflict lines in social policy making, which differ from the distributional class conflict. Instead, I expect value coalitions and cross-class alliances on these policies. In addition, I argue that in a consensus-democratic institutional context, such new alliances form more easily. These hypotheses are tested with reference to recent reforms in pension and family policy in Germany and Switzerland. Coalition dynamics are examined by means of process analysis and multidimensional scaling. Empirical evidence largely confirms the hypotheses, but also points out the need for further differentiation of policies covering new social needs.