Worker flows in Germany: Inspecting the time aggregation bias

This paper analyzes the importance of time aggregation in the measurement of worker flows by exploiting daily information from German administrative data. Time aggregation caused by comparing monthly labor market states leads to an underestimation of total worker flows by around 10%. Contrary to the claim of Shimer (2005, 2012), the time aggregation bias in the separation rate is relatively unaffected by business cycle fluctuations, whereas the time aggregation bias in the job finding rate is procyclical. Nevertheless, monthly time aggregation does not have notable effects on the relative contributions to steady-state unemployment dynamics. The reconsideration of German worker flows reveals that both the job finding rate and the separation rate play an important role for German unemployment dynamics, but the job finding rate dominates in the long run.