Job Stability Trends, Layoffs and Quits - An Empirical Analysis for West Germany

This paper studies signs and reasons of decline of job stability in West Germany. Using data from the longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-1997 (about to be extended until 1999), we look at two measures for job stability. Based on repeated cross sectional data we first show that medium elapsed tenure declined for men. Secondly, we find that the measure of completed job duration can efficiently be used, to distinguish reasons for job termination and to surpass the problem of right censoring. Estimating the popular proportional Cox hazard model with competing risks, we show that the decline in stability of jobs of men beginning after 1984 can be attributed primarily to an increase in layoffs. We will extend the analysis by taking unobserved heterogeneity into account, exploiting the presence of multiple spells in the data.. Furthermore, we will include jobs which started before 1985 into the multivariate analysis by using a stock sampling approach.Job stability, labor mobility, layoffs, duration analysis