Low-wage Jobs: A Means for Employment Integration of the Unemployed? Evidence from Administrative Data in Germany and Austria

Carola Grün, Helmut Mahringer and Thomas Rhein
Additional contact information
Carola Grün: University of Göttingen
Helmut Mahringer: WIFO
Thomas Rhein: Institute for Employment Research

No 383, WIFO Working Papers from WIFO

Abstract: Does the low wage sector serve as a stepping stone towards integration into better-paid jobs or at least towards integration of jobless people into employment? There is evidence for a "low-wage trap" and for a high risk of low-wage earners to get unemployed, but this may also be due to sorting effects and not to low-wage work itself. The present paper contributes to this debate analysing employment spells of male low-wage earners who had been unemployed before, with methods of continuous-time event history analysis. The present data have been retrieved from two large administrative micro-data sources: the IAB employment sample (IABS) for Germany, and a combination of social security data from the Austrian Social Insurance Institutions. Two possible exits of low-wage spells are focused on: exits to higher-paid employment (upward mobility vs. persistence), and exits to unemployment ("no pay-low pay cycle"). The results show shorter spell durations in Austria, pointing to a considerably higher fluctuation and labour turnover in the Austrian labour market. The influence of individual and firm-related characteristics and of the individual unemployment history on exit probabilities and the role of duration dependence in both countries is investigated. With regard to upward mobility, no convincing evidence for "true" duration dependence is found, at least for Germany. As to the risk of falling back into unemployment, the results suggest that even low-wage workers can accumulate job-related human capital favouring employment integration over time.

Keywords: duration analysis; low wage; unemployment dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2010-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wifo.ac.at/wwa/pubid/41058 abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2010:i:383

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WIFO Working Papers from WIFO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Florian Mayr ().