Datenspeicher Gesellschaftliches Arbeitsvermögen verknüpft mit administrativen Daten des IAB (GAV-ADIAB) 1975-2019

The Integrated Employment Biographies (IEB) of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) make it possible to track the employment status of a person exact to the day. They comprise periods of employment subject to social security in West Germany since 1975, among others. However, this information is available for East Germany only from 1992 onwards, which makes it hard to analyse the effects of German reunification on individual labour market trajectories with these data alone.
The GAV-ADIAB partially closes this gap by linking data of workers employed in the GDR in 1989 from the GDR’s “Data Fund of Societal Work Power” (Datenspeicher Gesellschaftliches Arbeitsvermögen; GAV) with their IEB data. It also adds the IEB data of a comparison group of workers employed in 1989 in West Germany.
The GAV-ADIAB thus enables the analysis of employment, unemployment, job mobility, and regional mobility around reunification, in particular. However, it is not well suited for comparing East and West Germany in more recent years.
The GAV-ADIAB contains a sample from the GAV data of the Bundesarchiv, with a selection of variables that were – as far as possible – harmonised with the IEB data.