Michaela Fuchs (p), Andreas Rehs

28 years after the German reunification, there is an ongoing public debate about the representation of East Germans in political, societal and economic elite positions. We enter this discussion by examining the labor market outcomes of 3,700 native East and West German PhD graduates who completed their dissertation between 1995 and 2010. In both parts of the country, these graduates can be considered as equally qualified to enter elite positions and should arrive at similar outcomes with respect to wages and jobs requiring a high skill level. We link information on the place of birth collected from data on PhD dissertations in Germany with administrative social security records providing detailed information on individual employment and wage biographies. Besides a detailed description of the two groups of PhD holders, we apply logit models to assess whether there are any significant differences in the wage levels and in the skill level of the obtained jobs. Based on a large set of control variables, first results indicate that after five years of having received their degrees, East Germans are likely to earn lower wages than native West Germans when working in East Germany. For those PhD graduates with the place of work in West Germany, wage differences are not significant. Regarding the occupation of jobs with a high skill level, the findings show no effect of the place of birth. Instead of having an East or West German origin, it is rather the degree of labor mobility that seems to plays a role. These first results suggest that labor market outcomes of East and West German PhD holders differ to some extent, even though their qualification is the same.

Isra Hatipoglu (p), Ferhan Gezici Korten

In line with the changes in the world, two concepts have dominated the political-economic system: Globalization and Neo-liberal Policies. These concepts have caused many changes in social, political, spatial and economic structure of countries and regions. Deindustrialization is one of the outcomes of this process, which has influenced especially the most developed regions in developing countries. The process, which began with the inter-regional relocation of the manufacturing industries, undoubtedly has profound effects on everything, but especially workers; because they face risk to lose their job, home, and family-social ties. However, the main literature and empirical studies on deindustrialization have mainly focused on the decisions of the capital and the factors behind their choices, by neglecting the roles and experiences of labor. The aim of this paper is to examine how labor is affected spatially and socially by deindustrialization and which factors change the decisions of labor. The research is carried out within the scope of the A Factory, which was relocated from Istanbul Metropolitan Area to Cerkezkoy as contiguous province to Istanbul in mid-2018. In this context; first, the economic and political structure of Turkey was analyzed by using primary and secondary data in order to realize the background of deindustrialization. Then, the in-depth interviews with the workers and other actors- Turkish Metal Union, workers' community, journalists - were conducted to find out their experiences, behaviors, and decisions in the process. The results highlight the labor’s decisions depend on the economic and political situation of the country, the structure of the industrial sector, the strategies of the factory and the socio-economic characteristics of labor.

Rodger Campos , Carlos Azzoni (p)

We estimate the intra-urban wage premium and its attenuation with distance from a balanced panel of workers in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region in the period 2002–2014, dispersed in a fine grid of 1km x 1km cells. We do not determine exogenously central business centers (CBD) or sub-centers (SBD), but estimate the wage premium for each cell and for two layers of surrounding cells. Based on the wage premium estimated in these three layers, we were able to estimate the attenuation effect. This way of estimating the wage premium and its attenuation in space is novel to the literature. We estimate POLS and Fixed Effects specifications to illustrate how the sorting of workers and firms is powerful in biasing the estimated coefficients. Since sorting might be present even after the introduction of fixed effects of worker, firm, cell, sector-cell and matches firm-worker-cell, we run a 2SLS-IV model. We instrumentalize employment in the cells by the additional constructed area for business and housing purposes, lagged by 7 years. Even after controlling for those time-constant effects, our instrumental variable estimation provides evidence of an intra-urban wage premium and its non-isotropic agglomeration effects. The estimated premium is larger by multiples of the POLS or Fixed Effects estimations. The magnitude of the effects is economically relevant: the introduction of 100,000 additional workers in the inner cell produces a 1.78% increase in wages in that cell. The effects on the surrounding cells are negative and much larger than in other forms of estimation that do not correct for endogeneity. The heterogeneity analysis revealed that educated workers benefit the most from the increased interaction possibilities given by concentration and they are less affected when located in the surrounding cells.