A proposed data set for analyzing the labor market trajectories of East Germans around reunification

Data from German social security notifications and internal procedures of the Federal Employment Agency are an important source for analyzing labor market trajectories. However, for East Germans these data are only fully available from 1992 onwards. As a consequence of German reunification, by 1992 significant fractions of East Germans had already lost their jobs, had changed their occupations and industries, and had moved to West Germany. We partially close the gap in the data by linking the "Integrated Employment Biographies" - that start in 1992 for East Germany - with the GDR's "Data Fund of Societal Work Power" from 1989. The new data set permits the analysis of phenomena such as unemployment, job mobility, and regional mobility. It can also be used to refine the existing knowledge of the individual-level labor market consequences of German reunification. Our long-term goal is to make the new data set available to the research community via the Research Data Center of the Federal Employment Agency.