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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

Studies addressing topics from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective for presentation at the workshop.

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:

  • Models of monopsonistic and oligopsonistic competition
  • Quantifying the elasticity of labor supply to the firm
  • The role of firms in wage-setting and rent-sharing
  • Outside options and wages
  • Employment concentration and wages
  • Policies to remedy imperfect competition

This paper studies how the U.S-China technology rivalry reshapes college admissions using data from China.

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 COVID-19, war in Ukraine and rising trade tensions have hit the German economy and emphasised the need to accelerate structural reforms.

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 and its implications for gender equality and careers.

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.

This study is about a nationwide policy trial from Sweden in 1920 that reduced the standard workweek from 55 to 48 hours.

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.

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.

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.

This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health.

Teacher mental health is a growing societal and economic concern with important implications for educational quality and student outcomes.

This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health. Using comprehensive population-wide Danish register data linking teachers to schools, students, and health care utilization, we document large and persistent differences in mental health outcomes across schools.

These differences reflect causal workplace effects rather than selection, as a quasi-experimental mover design shows: teachers’ mental health deteriorates after moving to schools with worse mental health environments, with effects unfolding over the subsequent years. The variation across schools correlates only to a small degree with observable school and student characteristics. Auxiliary analyses point to unobserved dimensions of workplace quality, such as leadership and organizational climate, as potential drivers of heterogeneity in teacher mental health.

joint with Antonia Entorf and Miriam Gensowski

This year’s focus topic is ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Higher Education’.

The HELM conference is jointly organized by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the IAB. It combines contributions with a general perspective on ‘Higher Education and the Labour Market’, including research on returns to tertiary education, dropout, or graduate placement in the labour market, with contributions on alternating focus topics.

This year’s focus topic is ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Higher Education’. Reforms are ubiquitous in higher education and range from small-scale changes or programmes focusing e.g. on facilitating labour market entry or reducing dropout to large-scale reforms such as the Bologna reform. What - independent of their scale - all these reforms share is that their success and overall outcomes are ex ante uncertain. Therefore, it has become widely accepted that the evaluation of such reforms is vital.

Thus, in the part of the conference on this year’s focus topic, we particularly welcome contributions that evaluate such reforms or look at reforms from a methodological perspective. In this context we are particularly interested in:

  • Papers evaluating programmes that focus on the transition from secondary school to higher education or from higher education to the labour market. We are interested in both papers focusing on reforms or programmes aimed at increasing the overall success of such transitions (e.g., by promoting university access, reducing dropout, or providing students with skills relevant for labour market success) as well as papers that focus on reforms or programmes aimed at promoting particular aspects during transition processes (such as subject choice).
  • Papers evaluating unintended effects of reforms. Independent of a reform’s or programme’s main objective, there might be additional (positive or negative) effects. There is a small but growing literature on this topic, and we particularly welcome papers that focus on such unintended effects.
  • Papers focusing on methodological approaches or using innovative methodological approaches to study (potential) reform options. In this context, we are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in control group designs for evaluating ongoing reforms (e.g., through the lagged introduction of reform components for part of the sample, or experiments in which potential components of a reform are introduced to some students as part of a control-group design).

This study is about the effects of New Horizon, a large-scale national education reform implemented in Israeli elementary schools.

We study the short-run effects of New Horizon, a large-scale national education reform implemented in Israeli elementary schools. The reform combined multiple school-level interventions, including expanded small-group instruction, increased teachers’ on-site working hours, higher salaries, new promotion and professional development requirements, and strengthened school leadership. Using the staggered rollout of the reform, we find that mathematics and English test scores increased by 0.1–0.2 standard deviations within four years, alongside immediate improvements in student–teacher relationships, teachers’ efforts to support students, and classroom behavior. At the same time, teachers reported substantially higher workloads, pointing to short-run adjustment costs that may have contributed to relatively modest achievement gains. Overall, the results suggest that comprehensive, whole-school reforms can improve both academic outcomes and the learning environment, with small-group learning and changes in teachers’ working conditions playing a central role.

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