Übergänge zwischen Erwerbstätigkeit, Arbeitslosigkeit und Selbständigkeit:Evidenz für Deutschland,Transitions between employment, unemployment and entrepreneurial activities:evidence from Germany
This dissertation analyzes the mechanisms behind labor market dynamics from different angles. Entrepreneurship is, as well as an alternative to paid labor, a source of job creation. High rates of nascent entrepreneurship can considerably decrease unemployment if the matching of new jobs and the unemployed is efficient and without large institutional frictions. As the matching of new jobs and the unemployed is not an instantaneous process, frictional unemployment is part of a healthy labor market. When short-term unemployment turns into long-term, the Beveridge curve --- with its negative relationship between vacancy rate and unemployment rate --- shifts outwards, indicating an inefficient matching processes that may lead to persistent mismatch patterns and unemployment. Here, instruments of Active Labor Market Policy (ALMP) can also decrease unemployment if they work as intended, which must be carefully evaluated. Tools to evaluate labor market must eventually deal with the large heterogeneity in real world societies concerning individual traits such as education, age, etc.
From a macroeconomic perspective, the interactions between firms and workers, and the flows of people between unemployment and employment or out of the labor force are strongly affected by periods of up- and down-turns in the business cycle. The exact reasons for fluctuations in job finding and separation rates still pose puzzles in macroeconomic research of labor market dynamics. Labor market fluctuations, and in particular their magnitudes and autocorrelations after shocks in productivity and separation are still not fully understood today. A better replication and, hence, understanding, lies in the openness to new analytical models, exploratory methodologies or the work in interdisciplinary teams to adapt promising standard methods from one field to the other.
The incidence of long and persistent unemployment remains one of the major challenges in economic policy. There is large body of literature that documents the negative consequences of unemployment for society and the individual: the economy is undermined by declining human capital, lower wages and increasing governmental expenditures on unemployment and welfare benefits.