Who actually helps you find a job? What German reunification reveals about how we really find work, and the one connection that makes the difference

In this episode of Working Papers, host Tim Phillips sits down with Prof. Alexandra Spitz-Oener (Deputy Director of RFBerlin) and Prof. Jan Nimczik (Project Leader at RFBerlin) to ask why so many people stay put, even when a better job might be waiting somewhere else.

The job market is being reshaped by AI, automation and the green transition, and the shocks rarely fall evenly: some regions lose a huge share of their jobs while others are barely touched. In theory, people move to where the work is. In practice, they mostly don't. After German reunification, only 3 to 4% of displaced East German workers moved west within five years, despite higher wages, recognised qualifications, a shared language and relocation subsidies all pointing that way. Why?

Using the natural experiment of reunification and detailed GDR records, Spitz-Oener, Nimczik and Hansch show that the answer is information, and a very specific kind of it. What moved people wasn't neighbours, or friends, or even former colleagues in general. It was a former coworker who did the same job and had already made it in the West. Generic advice to "get on your bike"* and move to the jobs doesn't work, because it can't tell you whether you'll actually make it there. The finding reaches well beyond 1989: as remote work thins out the ties we once formed at the workplace, the information gap those networks used to fill only grows, and the researchers argue that AI-era job platforms could be built to close it.

Resource mentioned in the episode:
📄 If They Made It, I Can Make It: Workplace Connections and Labour Migration, by Michelle Hansch, Jan Nimczik and Alexandra Spitz-Oener (RFBerlin Discussion Paper No. 7725, 2025)

Learn more about the work of RFBerlin at rfberlin.com.

*"On your bike" is a famously British expression, that dates to a 1981 speech by Conservative minister Norman Tebbit, whose unemployed father, he said, "got on his bike and looked for work." It came to stand for the idea that the jobless should simply go where the work is.

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