Na de val van de muur: Baanmobiliteit in een herenigd Duitsland

The reunion of the western and eastern part of Germany in 1990 led to a radical restructuring of the German economy. This in turn caused high rates of unemployment and job mobility in the former DDR. In this article we address the question of whether external job mobility in Eastern Germany in the years immediately following the reunion (1991-1997) differed from that in Western Germany and if so, why. In order to answer the explanatory question we constructed a push-and-pull model of the job market that enabled an analysis of German job mobility at the macro (East and West), meso (occupations and branches) and individual (employed persons) level. We tested hypotheses derived from this model by using micro level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and macro and meso level data from the Mikrozensus. We found that our push-and-pull model provided informative and reasonably adequate predictions of some important movements on the German job market, but definitely not of all of them. One of the most important findings was that contrary to our expectations the institutional frame and the employment structure had the same and not different effects in East and West