Precarious employment and regional mobility: An experimental study using a factorial survey design

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The purpose of this proposal is the one year extension of the successful work in the DFG-funded project Precarious employment and regional mobility: An experimental study using a factorial survey design (AU394/1-1 und AB111/8-1). The main aim of this project is to test theories from labour market research and sociology of the family with regard to the influence of job characteristics (e.g. income, fixed-term contracts, regional distance) on the willingness to accept a new (interregional) job offer. Therefore for the first time an experimental design is used. The research team implemented a factorial survey module (FSM) with five hypothetical job offers in one wave of the panel study Labour market and social security (PASS). Using such experimental method allows comparing the job offer acceptance of respondents (N = 4.813) conditional on various job characteristics, while avoiding the selectivity issues existing research is suffering from. In contrast to real labour markets, job offers in the experimental FSM are randomly allocated to respondents. This allows isolating the effects of job characteristics and estimating trade-offs (like those between gains of income and job security) without bias by unobserved heterogeneity. During the first funding period comprehensive data preparation and publication was achieved as intended. The aim of this renewal is to achieve further data preparation and analyses that focus on the longitudinal aspect of the PASS data set and address research gaps that were identified during the first funding period. Four research questions are of particular interest: To what extent do regional contexts (e.g. regional unemployment rates or childcare situations) influence respondents' job offer acceptance? What effect has the previous mobility- and partnership-biography on job offer acceptance? Do data from the factorial survey module hold a high external validity? How important are job characteristics, like fixed-term contracts, for the evaluation of job offers?