We study the determinants and consequences of vacancy visibility using high-frequency data on job postings, job seeker clicks, and applications. Vacancies posted on Fridays receive substantially more clicks and applications than those posted earlier during the week; a pattern not explained by vacancy content, firm characteristics, or job seeker composition.
Our results highlight the central role of visibility in hiring and point to substantial inefficiencies in firms’ hiring practices.
Aristotle claimed that humans “by nature desire to know.” Hobbes called curiosity “the lust of the mind,” and Maslow described our urge to know as an instinct-like “burning curiosity.” Yet we often choose not to know. We often decline potentially painful medical information. Günter Grass did not want to read his Stasi file. Paul Feyerabend cautioned against trying to know everything about those close to us. Deliberate ignorance is far from rare - especially in consequential decisions.
This talk will ask: When is not knowing reasonable, and when is it reckless? Can individuals or societies ever have a moral obligation to remain ignorant? Who is homo ignorans - what distinguishes seekers from non-seekers of information? Which psychological mechanisms lead us to avert our gaze, and how can these processes be modeled? How prevalent is deliberate ignorance in times of societal transformation, and how does it evolve from childhood through old age?
We analyze how a worker’s severe health shock affects the employment and health behavior of their older coworkers. We link comprehensive administrative data on labor market histories and health records from Austria to identify coworker networks and severe health shocks in small firms, which cause substantial increases in healthcare expenditures, absenteeism, and mortality, as well as persistent reductions in the labor supply of affected workers. Combining a matching approach with a difference-in-difference framework, we find a significant impact of a health shock on the labor market outcomes and health behavior of older coworkers.
Affected coworkers are about 2.3 percentage points more likely to be employed in the shock firm and tend to delay retirement. Although there is no change in daily earnings and earnings growth, coworkers are more likely to receive special bonus payments after leaving the firm. The employment effects are larger when the health shock affects a high-skilled worker and when the shocked worker leaves the firm after the health shock.
Finally, we find that female coworkers in the treatment group are more likely to have a mammography, especially in response to health shocks due to cancer. We find no statistically significant effects on participation in general health check-ups and PSA tests, or on coworker absenteeism.
The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) is pleased to announce our 2nd workshop on imperfect competition in the labor market. Studies addressing one of the following topics from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective are particularly welcome for presentation at the workshop:
This paper studies how the U.S-China technology rivalry reshapes college admissions across fields of study using novel college admissions data from China.
Exploiting differential exposure to tariff escalation and export restrictions across major-region pairs over time, we find that more exposed pairs experience larger increases in admissions selectivity and enrollment, particularly for STEM majors and elite universities.
A one percentage point increase in the tariff exposure raises admission cutoff scores by 2-3 percent. Labor market returns shift in the same direction, with rising wage premia for STEM-related and R&D-intensive positions, consistent with a defensive-innovation channel in which rivalry pressure spurs self-reliance and innovation effort in China, increasing demand for science and high-end engineering skills.
After a decade of strong export-led growth, the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and rising trade tensions have hit the German economy and emphasised the need to accelerate structural reforms. The recent reform of fiscal rules will allow to raise spending to improve defence capacity and address a large infrastructure backlog.
To ensure medium-term fiscal sustainability, this should be combined with raising spending efficiency, reallocating spending and broadening the tax base. Addressing rising spending pressures due to population ageing will require reforming the pension, health and long-term care systems. Simplifying and harmonising public procurement and infrastructure planning and approval procedures should be complemented with improving the capacity of the public administration to ensure a timely and efficient implementation of public investment projects.
To ensure that increasing domestic demand is matched by supply, it is key to address skilled labour shortages and reduce high administrative burdens and regulatory barriers to competition, which have weighed on business dynamism, innovation and productivity growth. Fostering regional development requires better coordination of placed-based with industrial, infrastructure and innovation policies as well as improving the financial and administrative capacity of municipalities.
This study investigates the often-overlooked “mental load” of domestic labor-the invisible planning, organizing, and anticipating required for household functioning- and its implications for gender equality and careers.
Drawing on a survey experiment with 2,104 white-collar professionals across 11 provinces in Turkey, I test whether information interventions can shift awareness and attitudes toward the unequal distribution of domestic and cognitive labor. Participants in the treatment group viewed two short videos explaining the concept of mental load, its gendered burden, and possible tools for more equitable task-sharing, while the control group received only a brief statistic on cooking responsibilities.
Findings show that the intervention significantly increased participants’ willingness to request support in household tasks, especially among women, and heightened recognition of under-appreciation, conflict, and time poverty linked to domestic work. While implicit gender biases remained unchanged, men in the treatment group reported greater awareness of unfair household labor allocation. These results provide early causal evidence on how simple information treatments can raise recognition of invisible labor and highlight their potential for workplace and policy interventions targeting gender equity.
Despite the well-known negative correlation between long working hours and workers’ health, credible causal evidence for the short- and particularly long-run is scarce.
We study a nationwide policy trial from Sweden in 1920 that reduced the standard workweek from 55 to 48 hours--but only for selected occupations--while keeping earnings constant. Using full population data and difference-in-differences designs, we demonstrate that reduced working hours led to a 15% decline in annual mortality rates over the first six years, driven by fewer workplace accidents, serious injury at work, and deaths from heart disease. Causal forest estimators indicate particularly strong effects for older workers. Long-run effects were substantial: affected workers lived up to one year longer over the next 50 years.
Our results suggest that reducing working hours, particularly in labour-intensive occupations, could yield large and lasting health benefits globally.
This paper examines how post-16 educational tracking into academic and vocational pathways shapes early-career earnings trajectories, and through which mechanisms these differences arise.
Using population-wide linked education and tax records from England, we document not only differences in earnings levels, but mainly substantial divergence in earnings growth between academically and vocationally educated workers over the first twelve years of labor market experience. While the previous literature has favored skills-based explanations, we explore the role of firm sorting as a potential driver of this divergence. For this, we (statistically) decompose earnings growth into instantaneous returns to job moves, sorting into firms with different returns to tenure, and education-specific returns to experience. Between-job mobility (i.e., switching to firms with higher AKM fixed effects) plays a limited role beyond the very beginning of workers’ careers. The vast majority of the gap in earnings growth is due to differential sorting into firms with higher returns to tenure and higher returns to experience among academically educated workers across firms (each accounting for roughly 40%).
Overall, the results highlight the importance of firm heterogeneity and sorting in understanding the labor market consequences of educational tracking, complementing human-capital-based explanations.
This paper studies how large-scale refugee inflows affect native workers, firms, and aggregate productivity, using the arrival of almost 4 million Syrian refugees by the end of 2018 in Turkey as a natural experiment.
Linking matched employer-employee administrative data to firm balance sheets, we trace effects across three levels of analysis. At the worker level, refugee exposure raises wages of formally employed native men and shifts them away from manual tasks toward more cognitive-intensive occupations; person-firm fixed effects reveal that task upgrading occurs substantially within existing employment relationships. At the firm level, refugee exposure increases total factor productivity - by approximately 4% for a 10 percentage point increase in the refugee-to-native ratio - without corresponding increases in capital intensity or outsourcing. At the aggregate level, we implement Olley-Pakes and dynamic Melitz-Polanec decompositions to quantify the relative contributions of within-firm improvements, reallocation across firms, and firm entry and exit to aggregate productivity growth.
These findings are consistent with task-based specialization operating through Turkey's dual labor market: Syrian refugees, working predominantly in the informal sector, provide low-cost manual labor that complements formal native workers, enabling firms to reorganize production toward higher-value activities.