The German Job Search Panel

This report introduces the German Job Search Panel, a monthly survey that follows people who registered as job seeking over the course of up to two years. The focus of the survey is on the well-being and health of jobseekers, with special emphasis on workers affected by mass layoffs. The use of an innovative survey app allows for frequent measurement every month and for conducting the experience sampling method to measure affective well-being. The collected data may be linked to administrative records of the Federal Employment Agency subject to participant consent. For a subsample of surveyed jobseekers hair cortisol levels are available as a biomarker for chronic stress. In this report, we describe the sampling procedure, adjustments over the recruitment period and the collected data. We moreover examine selective participation in the panel. It turns out that high-skilled workers, young individuals and women were more likely to sign up. Age increases the probability to take part in the hair sampling. People working in East Germany are more likely to consent to the linkage of survey data and administrative records. However, the aggregated bias resulting from selective participation is small.