Individual, firm-specific and regional effects on internal employment trajectories in Germany: with special focus on education, further training and skill formation

Abstract

The employment period is an important and central stage in the life course which influences the opportunities in life in different ways (Kreckel 1990; Kocka and Offe 2000; Vobruba 1990, 2000). It is widely known that the success of employment greatly depends on education (Boockmann and Steffes 2010; Struck 2006; Erlinghagen 2005; Diewald and Sill 2004; Hillmert et al. 2004; Grotheer et al. 2004; Bender et al. 2000). In his international literature review Card (1999: 1802) concluded: “Education plays a central role in modern labor markets. Hundreds of studies in many different countries and time periods have confirmed that better-educated individuals earn higher wages, experience less unemployment, and work in more prestigious occupations than their less-educated counterparts.“ Education can thus be considered as a key determinant for employment trajectories by having both a selection func-tion at the transition from education to employment and determining the returns to education (Allmendinger 1989; Hillmert 2001; Müller and Shavit 1998). Against this backdrop, the question will be raised if there are additional factors diminishing the economic usability of knowledge and skills. This paper deals with the following ques-tions: 1. What is the effect of education on employment trajectories? 2. Can life course costs of bad employment histories, which are for example caused by poor starts to employment careers, be observed? 3. Do certain characteristics of firms influence employment careers? 4. How strong is the impact of regional disparities on employment trajectories? The following section gives a brief overview of the related literature as well as theoretical considerations. The data and the econometric methods used for the analysis are described in the third section. Section 4 contains the estimation results and the final section draws some conclusions.