Lohnerwartungen von Arbeitslosen / Reservation wages of the unemployed
Zu welchem Lohn sind Arbeitslose bereit, eine Beschäftigung aufzunehmen? Sinken ihre Lohnansprüche mit der Dauer der Arbeitslosigkeit? Werden die Lohnansprüche von der Höhe der Arbeitslosenunterstützung beeinflusst? Diese IAB-Infoplattform dokumentiert wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse zum Thema "Reservationslöhne".
For what wages are the unemployed willing to take up a job? Do their expectations regarding pay drop with the length of their unemployment? This IAB info platform presents scientific findings on "reservation wages".
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Literaturhinweis
Biased Expectations and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from German Survey Data and Implications for the East-West Wage Gap (2024)
Balleer, Almut; Forstner, Susanne; Duernecker, Georg; Goensch, Johannes;Zitatform
Balleer, Almut, Georg Duernecker, Susanne Forstner & Johannes Goensch (2024): Biased Expectations and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from German Survey Data and Implications for the East-West Wage Gap. (Ruhr economic papers 1062), Essen, 80 S. DOI:10.4419/96973232
Abstract
"We measure individual bias in labor market expectations in German survey data and find that workers on average significantly overestimate their individual probabilities to separate from their job when employed as well to find a job when unemployed. These biases vary significantly between population groups. Most notably, East Germans are significantly more pessimistic than West Germans. We find a significantly negative relationship between the pessimistic bias in job separation expectations and wages, and a significantly positive relationship between optimistic bias in job finding expectations and reservation incomes. We interpret and quantify the effects of (such) expectation biases on the labor market equilibrium in a search and matching model of the labor market. Removing the biases could substantially increase wages and expected lifetime income in East Germany. The difference in biases in labor market expectations explains part of the East-West German wage gap" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
The Gender Gap in Earnings Losses After Job Displacement (2024)
Zitatform
Illing, Hannah, Johannes F. Schmieder & Simon Trenkle (2024): The Gender Gap in Earnings Losses After Job Displacement. In: Journal of the European Economic Association online erschienen am 13.03.2024, S. 1-41. DOI:10.1093/jeea/jvae019
Abstract
"We compare men and women who are displaced from similar jobs by applying an event study design combined with propensity score matching and reweighting to administrative data from Germany. After a mass layoff, women’ s earnings losses are about 35% higher than men’ s, with the gap persisting five years after displacement. This is partly explained by women taking up more part-time employment, but even women’ s full-time wage losses are almost 50% higher than men’ s. Parenthood magnifies the gender gap sharply. Finally, displaced women spend less time on job search and apply for lower-paid jobs, highlighting the importance of labor supply decisions." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © Oxford Academic) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Job Displacement and Migrant Labor Market Assimilation (2023)
Balgová, Mária; Illing, Hannah;Zitatform
Balgová, Mária & Hannah Illing (2023): Job Displacement and Migrant Labor Market Assimilation. (ECONtribute discussion paper 246), Köln ; Bonn, 68 S.
Abstract
"This paper sheds new light on the barriers to migrants' labor market assimilation. Using administrative data for Germany from 1997-2016, we estimate dynamic difference-in-differences regressions to investigate the relative trajectory of earnings, wages, and employment following mass layoff separately for migrants and natives. We show that job displacement affects the two groups differently even when we systematically control for pre-layoff differences in their characteristics: migrants have on average higher earnings losses, and they find it much more difficult to find employment. However, those who do find a new job experience faster wage growth compared to displaced natives. We examine several potential mechanisms and find that these gaps are driven by labor market conditions, such as local migrant networks and labor market tightness, rather than migrants' behavior." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
Beteiligte aus dem IAB
Illing, Hannah; -
Literaturhinweis
The Unequal Consequences of Job Loss across Countries (2023)
Bertheau, Antoine; Barceló, Cristina; Acabbi, Edoardo Maria; Saggio, Raffaele; Gulyas, Andreas ; Lombardi, Stefano;Zitatform
Bertheau, Antoine, Edoardo Maria Acabbi, Cristina Barceló, Andreas Gulyas, Stefano Lombardi & Raffaele Saggio (2023): The Unequal Consequences of Job Loss across Countries. In: The American economic review. Insights, Jg. 5, H. 3, S. 393-408. DOI:10.1257/aeri.20220006
Abstract
"We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while workers in Italy, Spain, and Portugal experience losses three times as high. French and Austrian workers face earnings losses somewhere in between. Key to these differences is that southern European workers are less likely to find employment following displacement. Loss of employer-specific wage premiums explains a substantial portion of wage losses in all countries." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Wage reactions to regional and national unemployment (2023)
Zitatform
Blien, Uwe, Jan Mutl, Van Phan thi Hong & Katja Wolf (2023): Wage reactions to regional and national unemployment. In: Regional Science Policy & Practice, Jg. online first accepted manuscript, S. 1-11., 2023-05-02. DOI:10.1111/rsp3.12675
Abstract
"This paper analyses the entire wage effects of unemployment for an especially long observation period. In a three-step approach, the wage reaction at national level (wage setting curve or aggregate wage equation) is added to the reaction at regional level (wage curve). Spatial models with instrumental variables are used." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © Wiley) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
The Accuracy of Job Seekers' Wage Expectations (2023)
Zitatform
Caliendo, Marco, Robert Mahlstedt, Aiko Schmeißer & Sophie Wagner (2023): The Accuracy of Job Seekers' Wage Expectations. (arXiv papers), 49 S. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2309.14044
Abstract
"Job seekers’ misperceptions about the labor market can distort their decision-making and increase the risk of long-term unemployment. Our study establishes objective benchmarks for the subjective wage expectations of unemployed workers. This enables us to provide novel insights into the accuracy of job seekers’ wage expectations. First, especially workers with low objective earnings potential tend to display excessively optimistic beliefs about their future wages and anchor their wage expectations too strongly to their pre-unemployment wages. Second, among long-term unemployed workers, overoptimism remains persistent throughout the unemployment spell. Third, higher extrinsic incentives to search more intensively lead job seekers to hold more optimistic wage expectations, yet this does not translate into higher realized wages for them. Lastly, we document a connection between overoptimistic wage expectations and job seekers’ tendency to overestimate their reemployment chances. We discuss the role of information frictions and motivated beliefs as potential sources of job seekers’ optimism and the heterogeneity in their beliefs." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
What do women want in a job? Gender-biased preferences and the reservation wage gap (2023)
Elass, Kenza;Zitatform
Elass, Kenza (2023): What do women want in a job? Gender-biased preferences and the reservation wage gap. (French Stata Users' Group Meetings 2023 15), Marseille, 43 S.
Abstract
"Recent explanations of the gender wage gap emphasize the role of gender differences in psychological traits. Nevertheless, there have been only a limited number of studies confirming the relevance of these factors for labor market outcomes. This presentation assesses the role of gender-specific preferences in the reservation wage gap during the job search. I use French administrative data from the unemployment insurance agency providing information on job search behavior and previous outcomes to assess which kind of occupations men and women apply for and the gap in their reservation wages. Employing text analysis, I build a novel dataset classifying occupations with respect to a number of characteristics and examine to which extent men and women differ in the occupation they are looking for. I document widespread gender differences in the occupation characteristics targeted by job seekers. Quantile decomposition methods allow me to document an unequal gap in reservation wage, intensifying along the distribution. After I adjust for occupation characteristics reflecting gender-biased preferences and household constraints, the unexplained part of the reservation wage gap is decreased by half. Investigating unemployment history and outcomes from previous interviews with firms, I do not find evidence of a female risk aversion to previous unemployment shocks or male overconfidence." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Estimating Duration Dependence on Re-employment Wages When Reservation Wages Are Binding (2023)
Grice, Richard; Liu, Kaixin; Martinez, Victor Hernandez;Zitatform
Grice, Richard, Victor Hernandez Martinez & Kaixin Liu (2023): Estimating Duration Dependence on Re-employment Wages When Reservation Wages Are Binding. (Working paper / Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland 2023,21), Cleveland, OH, 51 S. DOI:10.26509/frbc-wp-202321
Abstract
"This paper documents a novel finding indicating that re-employment wages are elastic to the level of unemployment insurance (i.e., a binding reservation wage) and adapts the IV estimator for duration dependence in Schmieder et al. (2016) to account for this fact. Using administrative data from Spain, we find that unemployed workers lower their re-employment wages by 3 percent immediately after the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. Workers' characteristics and permanent unobserved heterogeneity cannot explain this. To estimate duration dependence, we extend the IV framework proposed by Schmieder et al. (2016), whose estimator of duration dependence is proportional to the response of wages to an extension of the potential duration of UI, to account for the response of reservation wages. We find that while extending the potential duration of UI has an insignificant effect on re-employment wages, duration dependence is strongly negative. We estimate that the degree of duration dependence in Spain is approximately 0.8 percent per month in daily wages. Workers' inability to find full-time jobs as the duration of non-employment increases is an important mechanism behind this effect, since the duration dependence of hourly wages is 0.25 percent per month. Failing to account for the fact that reservation wages are binding would underestimate the magnitude of duration dependence by 15 to 20 percent." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Unemployed Job Search across People and over Time: Evidence from Applied-for Jobs (2023)
Maibom, Jonas; Glenny, Anita; Fluchtmann, Jonas; Harmon, Nikolaj;Zitatform
Maibom, Jonas, Nikolaj Harmon, Anita Glenny & Jonas Fluchtmann (2023): Unemployed Job Search across People and over Time: Evidence from Applied-for Jobs. In: Journal of labor economics online erschienen am 06.04.2023, S. 1-40. DOI:10.1086/725165
Abstract
"Using data on applied-for jobs for the universe of Danish UI recipients, we examine variation in job search behavior both across individuals and over time during unemployment spells. We find large differences in the level of applied-for wages across individuals but over time all individuals adjust wages downward in the same way. The decline in applied-for wages over time is descriptively small but economically important in standard models of job search. We find similar results when examining variation in the non-wage characteristics of applied-for jobs and in the search methods used to find them. We discuss implications for theory." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Gender Differences in Reservation Wages in Search Experiments (2023)
Zitatform
McGee, Andrew & Peter McGee (2023): Gender Differences in Reservation Wages in Search Experiments. (IZA discussion paper / Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit 16577), Bonn, 26 S.
Abstract
"Women report setting lower reservation wages than men in survey data. We show that women set reservation wages that are 14 to 18 percent lower than men's in laboratory search experiments that control for factors not fully observed in surveys such as offer distributions and outside options. This gender gap—which exists even controlling for overconfidence, preferences, personality, and intelligence—leads women to spend less time searching than men while accepting lower wages. Women—but not men—set reservation wages that are too low relative to theoretically optimal values given their risk preferences early in search, reducing their earnings." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
How should job displacement wage losses be insured?: Wage losses upon re-employment can seriously harm long-tenured displaced workers if they are not properly insured (2023)
Parsons, Donald O.;Zitatform
Parsons, Donald O. (2023): How should job displacement wage losses be insured? Wage losses upon re-employment can seriously harm long-tenured displaced workers if they are not properly insured. (IZA world of labor 446), Bonn, 10 S. DOI:10.15185/izawol.446.v2
Abstract
"Job displacement represents a serious earnings risk to long-tenured workers through lower re-employment wages, and these losses may persist for many years. Moreover, this risk is often poorly insured, although not for a lack of policy interest. To reduce this risk, most countries mandate scheduled wage insurance (severance pay), although it is provided only voluntarily in others, including the US. Actual-loss wage insurance is uncommon, although perceived difficulties may be overplayed. Both approaches offer the hope of greater consumption smoothing, with actual-loss plans carrying greater promise, but more uncertainty, of success." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Labor Market News and Expectations about Jobs & Earnings (2023)
Zitatform
Schmidpeter, Bernhard (2023): Labor Market News and Expectations about Jobs & Earnings. (Working paper / Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler Universität of Linz 2023-14), Linz, 30 S.
Abstract
"Little is known about how workers update expectations about job search and earnings when exposed to labor market news. To identify the impact of news on expectations, I exploit Foxconn's unexpected announcement to build a manufacturing plant in Racine County. Exposure to positive news leads to an increase in expected salary growth at the current firm. Individuals also revise their expectations about outside offers upward, anchoring their beliefs to Foxconn's announced wages. They act on their updated beliefs with a small increase in current consumption. Negative news from a scaled-down plan leads to a revision of expectations back toward baseline." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Job Ladder, Human Capital, and the Cost of Job Loss (2022)
Audoly, Richard; Pace, Federica De; Fella, Giulio;Zitatform
Audoly, Richard, Federica De Pace & Giulio Fella (2022): Job Ladder, Human Capital, and the Cost of Job Loss. (Staff reports / Federal Reserve Bank of New York 1043), New York, NY, 48 S.
Abstract
"High-tenure workers losing their job experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with (i) on-the-job search, (ii) general human capital, and (iii) firm-specific human capital. Jobs are destroyed at an endogenous rate due to idiosyncratic productivity shocks and the skills of workers depreciate during periods of non-employment. The model is estimated on German Social Security data. By jointly matching moments related to workers’ mobility and wages, the model can replicate the size and persistence of the losses in earnings and wages observed in the data. We find that the loss of a job with a more productive employer is the primary driver of the cumulative wage losses following displacement (about 50 percent), followed by the loss of firm-specific human capital (about 30 percent)." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Heterogeneous Effects of Job Displacement on Earnings (2022)
Zitatform
Azadikhah Jahromi, Afrouz & Brantly Callaway (2022): Heterogeneous Effects of Job Displacement on Earnings. In: Empirical economics, Jg. 62, H. 1, S. 213-245. DOI:10.1007/s00181-020-01961-w
Abstract
"This paper considers how the effect of job displacement varies across different individuals. In particular, our interest centers on features of the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement. Identifying features of this distribution is particularly challenging—e.g., even if we could randomly assign workers to be displaced or not, many of the parameters that we consider would not be point identified. We exploit our access to panel data, and our approach relies on comparing outcomes of displaced workers to outcomes the same workers would have experienced if they had not been displaced and if they maintained the same rank in the distribution of earnings as they had before they were displaced. Using data from the Displaced Workers Survey, we find that displaced workers earn about $157 per week less, on average, than they would have earned if they had not been displaced. We also find that there is substantial heterogeneity. We estimate that 42% of workers have higher earnings than they would have had if they had not been displaced and that a large fraction of workers have experienced substantially more negative effects than the average effect of displacement. Finally, we also document major differences in the distribution of the effect of job displacement across education levels, sex, age, and counterfactual earnings levels. Throughout the paper, we rely heavily on quantile regression. First, we use quantile regression as a flexible (yet feasible) first step estimator of conditional distributions and quantile functions that our main results build on. We also use quantile regression to study how covariates affect the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © Springer-Verlag) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Reservation Wages and Labor Supply (2022)
Zitatform
Kesternich, Iris, Heiner Schumacher, Bettina Siflinger & Franziska Valder (2022): Reservation Wages and Labor Supply. In: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Jg. 194, S. 583-607. DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2021.12.031
Abstract
"Survey measures of the reservation wage may reflect both the consumption-leisure trade-off and job market prospects (the arrival rate of job offers and the wage distribution). We examine what a survey measure of the reservation wage reveals about an individual's willingness to trade leisure for consumption. To this end, we combine the reservation wage measure from a large labor market survey with the reservation wage for a one-hour job that we elicit in an online experiment. The two measures show a strong positive association. For unemployed individuals, the experimental reservation wage increases on average by around one Euro for every Euro increase in the survey measure. For employed individuals, the association between the two measures is weaker and depends on their occupation-specific risk of unemployment. We show that these results are robust to selection into the experiment, and that demographic variables have a similar influence on both reservation wage measures." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © 2022 Elsevier) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Indignity of Labor: Role of Occupational Prestige in Unemployment (2022)
Marjit, Baisakhi; Marjit, Sugata; Kar, Saibal; Gupta, Kausik;Zitatform
Marjit, Baisakhi, Sugata Marjit, Kausik Gupta & Saibal Kar (2022): Indignity of Labor: Role of Occupational Prestige in Unemployment. (CESifo working paper 9945), München, 24 S.
Abstract
"Occupational prestige or job status may induce people to remain unemployed even when jobs are available. Thus measured unemployment will always have a voluntary component. Accumulated wealth in a family tends to increase the opportunity cost of job search, more so in a world where job status is socially important. Thus prosperity and unemployment may go hand in hand independent of the standard income effect. The paper shows that measured unemployment always may have a voluntary component. In fact an increase in reservation wage increases voluntary unemployment. However, the impact on the level in involuntary unemployment of such an increase cannot be easily predicted." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
The Effects of Biased Labor Market Expectations on Consumption, Wealth Inequality, and Welfare (2021)
Balleer, Almut; Forstner, Susanne; Goensch, Johannes; Duernecker, Georg;Zitatform
Balleer, Almut, Georg Duernecker, Susanne Forstner & Johannes Goensch (2021): The Effects of Biased Labor Market Expectations on Consumption, Wealth Inequality, and Welfare. (CESifo working paper 9326), München, 52 S.
Abstract
"Idiosyncratic labor risk is a prevalent phenomenon with important implications for individual choices. In labor market research it is commonly assumed that agents have rational expectations and therefore correctly assess the risk they face in the labor market. We analyse survey data for the U.S. and document a substantial optimistic bias of households in their subjective expectations about future labor market transitions. Furthermore, we analyze the heterogeneity in the bias across different demographic groups and we find that high-school graduates tend to be strongly over-optimistic about their labor market prospects, whereas college graduates have rather precise beliefs. In the context of a quantitative heterogenous agents life cycle model we show that the optimistic bias has a quantitatively sizable negative effect on the life cycle allocation of income, consumption and wealth and implies a substantial loss in individual welfare compared to the allocation under full information. Moreover, we establish that the heterogeneity in the bias leads to pronounced differences in the accumulation of assets across individuals, and is thereby a quantitatively important driver of inequality in wealth." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Will Accepting Less Bring Success? Job Related Concessions and Welfare Recipients in Germany (2021)
Zitatform
Christoph, Bernhard & Torsten Lietzmann (2021): Will Accepting Less Bring Success? Job Related Concessions and Welfare Recipients in Germany. In: The social policy blog H. 22.06.2021.
Abstract
"It is often argued that in order to find new employment, the unemployed have to compromise and accept jobs that are inferior (e.g. paying less or requiring a lower qualification) than the jobs they held before becoming unemployed. Making such compromise to find new employment is what we call a job related concession. Our results show that while there might be some truth to this Assertion - in particular with regard to accepting lower paying Jobs - being generally flexible with regard to job search has comparably positive effects without requiring the unemployed to make such compromise. Therefore, we argue that enabling the unemployed to find new occupational perspectives - ideally in combination with training and qualification measures for the new occupation - should be at least as promising as requiring them to make job-related concessions." (Text excerpt, IAB-Doku) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
The effect of unemployment duration on reservation wages: Evidence from Belgium (2021)
Zitatform
Deschacht, Nick & Sarah Vansteenkiste (2021): The effect of unemployment duration on reservation wages: Evidence from Belgium. In: Labour Economics, Jg. 71. DOI:10.1016/j.labeco.2021.102010
Abstract
"This paper studies the effect of unemployment duration on asking (reservation) wages. We provide new evidence based on unique longitudinal data on unemployed workers in Belgium, who were surveyed about self-reported reservation wages at the start of the unemployment spell, and after 3 and 6 months of unemployment duration. Our estimates suggest that reservation wages decline with unemployment duration by about 0.4 percent per month, or 5 percent per year, and that cross-sectional estimates are biased upward. We find stronger declines among men and among workers who earned high wages in their previous jobs. The paper discusses these findings in the light of learning models and discusses the implications of falling reservation wages for the debate on the effect of unemployment on wages." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © 2021 Elsevier) ((en))
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Literaturhinweis
Job Displacement and Job Mobility: The Role of Joblessness (2021)
Fallick, Bruce; Haltiwanger, John C.; Staiger, Matthew; McEntarfer, Erika;Zitatform
Fallick, Bruce, John C. Haltiwanger, Erika McEntarfer & Matthew Staiger (2021): Job Displacement and Job Mobility: The Role of Joblessness. (NBER working paper 29187), Cambridge, Mass, 51 S. DOI:10.3386/w29187
Abstract
"Who is harmed by and who benefits from worker reallocation? We investigate the earnings consequences of changing jobs and find a wide dispersion in outcomes. This dispersion is driven not by whether the worker was displaced, but by the duration of joblessness between job spells. Job movers who experience joblessness suffer a persistent reduction in earnings and tend to move to lower-paying firms, suggesting that job ladder models offer a useful lens through which to understand the negative consequences of job separations." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))