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This event brings together research from the disciplines of economics, sociology as well as statistics and data science.

The IAB’s and FAU’s joint graduate programme GradAB is inviting young researchers to its 18th interdisciplinary PhD workshop “Perspectives on (Un-)Employment”.

This event brings together qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods research from the disciplines of economics, sociology as well as statistics and data science. It provides an opportunity for junior researchers to present their ongoing work in the field of theoretical and empirical labor market research, and to receive feedback from leading scholars in the field.

The workshop will focus on, but not be limited to the following subfields:

  • Education, Qualification, and Social Mobility
  • Inequality and Poverty, Gender, Migration, and Health
  • Wages, Firms, and the Workplace
  • Labor Market Institutions and Policies
  • International Trade, Globalization, and Regional Labor Markets
  • Technological Change and Artificial Intelligence
  • Climate Change and its Impact on Labor Markets
  • Survey Statistics, Survey Methodology and Computational Social Science

This study is the first to explore the extent of job offers with remote work options.

Promoting remote work among women living in peripheral areas is a potential tool to limit gender and geographical imbalances in the labour market. This study is the first to explore the extent to which women living in peripheral municipalities (compared with those from metropolitan ones) are attracted to job offers with remote work options.

The study is based on a CAWI survey with a conjoint experiment conducted in Spring 2026 among 3,785 prime-aged women living in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Sweden.

The initial results indicate that, on average, fully remote work (compared to fully on-site work) increases the probability of accepting a job offer to the same degree in both metropolises and peripheral municipalities, by around 14 percentage points. What is relevant, remote work remains attractive for peripheral respondents with lower than higher education, as well as for those with poor digital skills.

This study characterizes optimal labor-market policy in a multi-sector economy.

This study characterizes optimal labor-market policy in a multi-sector economy that joins endogenous growth, frictional worker reallocation, and human-capital accumulation on an input–output network.

Our growth engine is portable human capital: within-match training lifts the economy’s growth frontier, but because trained skill is carried into unemployment and priced in the worker’s outside option, it compresses the bilateral surplus that funds job creation. In contrast to productivity differences across sectors differences in growth potential push labor out of the higher-growth sector. The model speaks at once to the human-capital and diffusion theory of growth and the recent growth-through reallocation literature. To correct for worker-stealing and incumbent-match externalities - similar to those in Fukui and Mukoyama, 2025 in a growth context - the social planner needs to use a complex system of hiring, firing, training, on the-job search, unemployed switching, and schooling taxes/subsidies that we characterize.

We find that if on-the-job search merely reshuffles workers the planner subsidizes separations and taxes hiring; when mobility instead builds portable skill, the prescriptions reverse. The framework delivers a unified, network-aware account of when worker mobility is socially valuable and how employment-protection policy might respond in a theory of second best.

This paper explores how the motherhood effect on earnings evolves amid rising childlessness.

This paper explores how the motherhood effect on earnings evolves amid rising childlessness, using population-wide administrative data from South Korea, where fertility has fallen to the world's lowest level.

Using an event study design, we find that earnings losses after childbirth have increased across recent cohorts of mothers. Evidence suggests that the expansion of parental leave and increasingly positive selection into motherhood - toward women with higher earnings and stronger family preferences - contributed to this trend.

The results indicate that as fertility declines and selection grows more salient, the motherhood effect may persist, even as overall gender earnings gaps narrow.

This study is about the effect of finding a job through one’s social contact on starting wages.

This study is about the effect of finding a job through one’s social contact on starting wages. Using combined SOEP-INKAR data for Germany and propensity score analysis - both matching and weighting - we document that referral hiring is associated with a wage penalty of 10%. This penalty is stable over time. Separating by the type of the social contact, we find that referrals from former colleagues are associated with a 9% wage premium compared to a direct formal application. In contrast, referrals from friends are associated with a 7% wage penalty.

Our results highlight persistent self-selection of workers on observable and unobservable characteristics. Using information from a short test of cognitive abilities (symbol digit test) we document that workers recommended by former colleagues perform best in the ability test, consistent with the predictions from a sorting model. The lowest performance is recorded for those relying on the help of their friends. The effects are primarily driven by the sub-sample of women. No significant differences across search channels are found for personality traits.

This study examines why large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is essential for meeting climate targets.

Professor Ottmar Edenhofer examines why large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is essential for meeting climate targets and establishing a third pillar of climate policy alongside abatement and adaptation.

Even with rapid innovation, projected levels of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) remain far below what is required to stay within internationally agreed temperature limits. The main barriers to technology development and deployment are institutional, economic, and political – reflected in governance gaps that undermine incentives to invest in and deploy CDR at scale. He presents market and governance solutions, including innovative “clean-up certificates” and a European Carbon Central Bank to manage net-negative emissions within carbon market frameworks. By “cleaning up” the atmosphere, CDR can also help reduce free-riding incentives in international climate co-operation.

Professor Edenhofer identifies planetary carbon management as the central challenge of 21st-century climate policy, a necessary third pillar of climate policy, alongside emissions reduction and adaptation, and as a critical enabler of net-zero and net-negative pathways.

This paper examines whether tighter financial conditions contributed to this development.

Since 2022, manufacturing employment in Germany has declined markedly, even as overall employment remained stable. This paper examines whether tighter financial conditions contributed to this development. Using pre-pandemic sectoral leverage as a measure of financial exposure, we show that highly leveraged manufacturing sectors experienced significantly larger employment declines following the sharp increase in euro area interest rates. The decline is particularly high for capital intensive manufacturing sectors and robust to controls for energy intensity and preexisting trends. The findings suggest that financial leverage amplified the impact of monetary tightening on manufacturing employment.

Joint work with Enzo Weber.

This study exploits exogenous variation in the pricing of childcare caused by a nationwide reform.

We exploit exogenous variation in the pricing of childcare caused by a nationwide reform to estimate the impact of lower childcare costs and the propensity of individuals to start a firm. The reform capped the childcare prices, whereas the exogenous variation in the reduction of childcare prices comes from the pre-reform prices, which depended on the place of residence and family type. Decreasing the cost of childcare lowers both the capital and time constraint, which can lead to individuals becoming entrepreneurs.

We evaluate such potential mechanisms both for males and females separately in a difference-in-difference setting up to 5 years post reform. We find that reducing childcare costs increases entrepreneurial activity for both mothers and fathers.

The focus is on papers that analyze current transformation processes and examine their heterogeneous effects.

The German economy is going through a period of profound transformation. Technological change, decarbonization and demographic developments are fundamentally changing labor markets – albeit not uniformly, but with significant differences between regions, sectors and groups of workers.

At the same time, structural change is not a new phenomenon. Past transformation processes provide important insights into how labor markets respond to disruptions and the role institutions and policy can play in managing these adaptation processes.

The workshop brings these perspectives together: the focus is on papers that analyze current transformation processes, examine their heterogeneous effects, and/or draw lessons from past transformations for today’s economic policy challenges.

The aim is to exchange up-to-date research that provides new insights into transformation processes and illuminates their economic policy implications.

Special issue of the workshop:
Selected papers from the workshop may be invited for submission for aplanned Special Issue in the Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbücher für
Nationalökonomie und Statistik).
When submitting to the workshop, authors are asked to indicate whether they are interested in submitting to the Special Issue at a later date.
Submission for the Special Issue takes place separately until 31.12.2026 and is subject to the journal’s regular peer review process.

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