Does early‐career unemployment cause future unemployment? The authors approach this question using German administrative matched employer–employee data that track almost 700,000 individuals over 24 years. Instrumenting early‐career unemployment with firm‐specific labour demand shocks, they find significant and long‐lasting “scarring effects”. In the mean, each additional day of unemployment during the first eight years on the labour market increases unemployment in the following 16 years by half a day. However, quantile regressions show that the scarring effects are much stronger for individuals who already suffer from lengthy and repeated spells of unemployment.

In this paper, we investigate the wage, employment and reallocation effects of the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage in Germany that affected 15% of all employees. Based on identification designs that exploit variation in exposure across individuals and regions, we find that the minimum wage raised wages, but did not lower employment. At the same time, the minimum wage lead to reallocation effects. At the individual level, the minimum wage induced low wage workers (but not high wage workers) to move from small, low paying firms to larger, higher paying firms. This worker upgrading to better firms can account for up to 25% of the wage increase induced by the minimum wage. Moreover, at the regional level, average firm quality (measured as firm size or fixed firm wage effect) increased in more affected regions in the years following the introduction of the minimum wage.

SummaryWe analyze the relationship between early-career unemployment and prime-age earnings with German administrative linked employer-employee data. The careers of more than 720,000 male apprenticeship graduates from the cohorts of 1978 to 1980 are followed over 24 years. On average, early-career unemployment has substantial negative effects on earnings accumulated later in life. An identification strategy based on plant closure of the training firm at the time of graduation suggests that the revealed correlation is not the result of unobserved heterogeneity. Scarring effects also vary considerably across the earnings distribution. Workers with a high earning potential are able to offset adverse consequences of early-career unemployment to a large extent. Workers who are located at the bottom of the prime-age earnings distribution, in contrast, suffer substantial and persistent losses. Our findings imply that a policy with the aim of preventing early-career unemployment would have long-lasting beneficial effects on future earnings.

No abstract

The high-frequency establishment survey “Establishments in the Covid-19-Crisis” (BeCovid) started in 2020 and continued until June 2022 to collect monthly data on how businesses in Germany adjusted to the challenges of the pandemic. This article describes the survey design and provides an overview over the topics covered. We further outline the survey’s research potentials, particularly when linked to administrative records.