Ramona Jost’s research while affiliated with Institute for Employment Research and other places

Many firms in Germany are short of qualified workers, whereby East German regions are particularly affected because of the out-migration to West Germany after the reunification. This gives rise to an important debate for regional policy as the shortage of workers is a major challenge for each region and firm. In this context, out-commuters—workers who commute to work in another region—become an important group of employees to potentially satisfy local labour needs. In this study, we take a closer look at out-commuters in a particular eastern German region—the Federal State Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MV)—and address the question whether out-commuters are a selective group of individuals working in e.g. occupations or industries that are rarely needed for labour market requirements in MV. Further, we focus on the wage differential between out-commuters and workers who are living and working in MV (home employees). The determination of the factors that explain this wage gap can provide new insights and a deeper understanding of the labour market in MV. This can provide a basis to work out potential strategies to attract the group of out-commuters for a workplace in MV to reduce the complained labour shortage. The derived evidence suggests that only few out-commuters can be recalled, as the labour demand in MV and the respective wage level are too low and the economic structure is too weak to sufficiently gain back out-commuters. Especially females suffer from the job-market weakness in MV.

Unlabelled: In this study, I investigate the commuting behavior of workers in Germany. Using comprehensive geo-referenced administrative employee and firm data, I can calculate the exact commuting time and the distance between workers' residence and workplace locations. Based on a behavioral economic approach (Simonson and Tveresky in J Mark Res 29:281-295, 1992), I show that individual commuting decisions are influenced by wages and individual heterogeneity as well as depending on the context individuals observed in the past. In particular, my results show that previously observed commutes have an impact on subsequent commuting behavior: workers choose longer commuting times in the region they recently moved to when the average commute in the region they left was longer. The results indicate that while selectivity and sorting do not influence the effect of the context, the inclusion of individual fixed effects is crucial. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00168-023-01223-4.