Documents Wapler, Rüdiger 3 results

"Two stylised facts of the German labour market are that first, the demand for highskilled labour has been growing rapidly for a number of years and second, the country is facing a particularly strong demographic change with the expected size of the population decreasing rapidly and the average age of the labour force increasing sharply. This has led to a widely discussed fear of 'labour shortages'. One of the reasons often stated in the public debate is that within a given time period many more old individuals are retiring than young individuals are entering the labour market. Although there is a certain logic in this argument, it is only prima facie convincing because firstly, a change in labour demand could counteract this effect and secondly, it is unclear whether - given labour demand for the occupations people retire from - people retiring from the labour market are normally 'replaced' by young cohorts entering the labour market. Thirdly, even if the size of a cohort differs between generations, it is by no means clear what the effects on labour supply are as, for example, the participation rates may also differ. We address these issues from a theoretical and empirical perspective. In the theoretical part we focus on the relationship between vacancies and unemployment (labour-market tightness) and show that it does not always increase with demographic change. In the empirical part, we analyse how employment is affected over time by different shares of different age cohorts. We find no evidence that a higher number of retirees in an occupation leads to a higher demand for younger workers. Instead, to a large extent, retirees seem to be 'replaced', if they are replaced at all, by middle-aged cohorts who change occupations. Thus, we conclude that the interaction between large retiring cohorts and small entering cohorts within occupations is less direct than is suggested in the public debate."

"Active labour-market policy (ALMP) not only affects the labour-market success of participants. Due to indirect effects, they might also affect the job perspectives of non-participants. Hence, even if ALMP programmes have a positive effect for the participants, this does not mean that ALMP improves the labour-market situation as a whole. Therefore, this paper deals with the question whether ALMP improves the matching-process between job-seekers and vacancies and thus increases the total number of outflows from unemployment into employment at the regional level. To answer this question, we use data for local employment offices of the German Federal Employment Agency for the time period 2006 to 2010 and focus on job-seekers subject to unemployment insurance. As microeconometric evaluation studies show, the search effectiveness of programme participants is low during participation due to the lock-in effect, but ideally increases at the end of the programme. In contrast to previous studies on aggregate effects of ALMP, we take this into account and explicitly differentiate current and former programme participants. The result from our augmented matching function shows that the lock-in effect is also present on the regional level. However, a higher search effectiveness after completion of the programme is not outweighed by potential indirect effects on non-participants. A higher share of former programme participants among the job-seekers in a region leads to an increase of the regional matches. This findings show that the application of ALMP improves the regional matching process. However, this effect varies largely between different types of programmes. Positive effects occur for long-term vocational training and wage subsidies as well as for in-firm training measures. Further, our results show that the effect of the different programme types depends to some extent on the regional labour-market situation."

"While many studies estimated the effects of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) on the participants' labour market outcomes, much fewer studies are concerned with effects of these policies on the regional matching-process between job seekers and vacancies. An essential part of many reforms of the unemployment benefit system such as in Germany intended to activate unemployed job-seekers through an intense use of ALMPs. Therefore, it is crucial to understand whether such policies can improve the matching efficiency. We analyse quarterly panel data of German job centres in the period 2006 to 2011 and estimate the effects of the most important ALMPs on the regional exit rate from job-seeking into regular employment in a matching-function framework by applying the system generalized methods of moments estimator. Our results point to positive effects on the matching efficiency of a number of ALMPs, but the effects partly differ between high and low unemployment regions. Only for a few programmes does our evidence point to no or negative effects on the matching efficiency and this may be related to the implementation of these programmes on a very large scale."