Following monetary union with west Germany in June 1990, the median real monthly wage of prime age east German workers rose by 83% in six years. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel data to investigate the determinants of this wage growth and some of its implications. For the 1990-1991 period I find that the biggest gainers were low-wage workers generally, and women and the less educated specifically. In the 1991-1996 period the biggest gainers were women and the better educated. Job changing rates were high; a majority of workers had changed jobs by 1996. The return to job changing, particularly changing to a job in the west, was high in 1990-1991 but fell greatly in the later period, so that overall only 18% of wage growth was due to job changing within the east, and 7% to east-west job changing.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
6878.
Length: Date of creation: Jan 1999 Date of revision: Publication status: published as Hunt, Jennifer. "The Transition In East Germany: When Is A Ten-Point Fall In The Gender Wage Gap Bad News?," Journal of Labor Economics, 2002, v20(1,Jan), 148-169. Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6878
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Find related papers by JEL classification: J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs P2 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Systems and Transition Economies
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