IAB-Veranstaltungen Archiv - Page 14 of 32 - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Performance Incentives in Education: The Role of Goal Mismatch

Students often face incentives to reach performance goals, for instance, to receive a scholarship, enter a college, or be hired for a job.

Students often face incentives to reach performance goals, for instance, to receive a scholarship, enter a college, or be hired for a job. This paper uses a field experiment to study how incentives to reach performance goals affect students, whether the effects vary for students at different parts of the performance distribution, and whether allowing students to choose their own goal improves their performance. We find that incentives backfire: students offered incentives perform worse than their control counterparts.

These negative effects are mainly driven by mismatched goals: the negative treatment effects are concentrated among low-ability students who are assigned a high goal and among students with high aspirations who are assigned a low goal. The effects are also negative but not statistically significant from zero when students are allowed to choose their own goal. Our results show that incentives for performance goals can harm students' performance, especially among students whose goals are mismatched.

The Impact of Multinationals Along the Job Ladder

Multinational affiliates are more productive than domestic firms, so how do they affect a host country through the labor market?

Multinational affiliates are more productive than domestic firms, so how do they affect a host country through the labor market? We use data for Norway to show that the labor market is characterized by a job ladder, with multinationals on the upper rungs. We calibrate a general equilibrium job ladder model with endogenous multinational entry to the Norwegian data. In a counterfactual where multinationals face an infinite entry cost, payments to labor fall and profits of domestic firms rise, but the impact is heterogeneous. Competition for workers increases low down on the job ladder, while it decreases high up.

Gender inequality in employment trajectories, later life income, and wealth

My presentation will cover results from two research projects on gender inequality in life courses and later life financial well-being in Germany.

My presentation will cover results from two research projects on gender inequality in life courses and later life financial well-being in Germany, which both rely on linked survey-administrative data. The first study examines how the life courses of couples in East and West Germany are associated with women’s income in later life using multichannel sequence analysis. By applying a couple perspective, we overcome the individualistic approach in most previous research analysing women’s old-age income. Detailed monthly information on spouses’ employment and earnings trajectories from age 20 to 50 for the birth cohorts 1925–1965 stems from SHARE-RV, a data linkage of the administrative records of the German public pension insurance with the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

Seven clusters of couples’ life courses are identified and linked to women’s individual income in later life. By means of a cohort comparison, a polarization in dual-earner and male-breadwinner type clusters is identified. The former increasingly diverge into successful female-breadwinner constellations and those with both partners in marginalized careers. The latter polarize between persistent male-breadwinner constellations and those in which women increase their labour market engagement. Second, I will introduce first results from the project "Life Course, Assets and Retirement Income in East and West Germany". It examines gender-specific differences in the interplay of employment histories and the accumulation of wealth comparing East and West Germany. Data basis is the SOEP-RV that links the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey to respondents’ Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) records.

Joint work with: Babette Bühler, Clara Overweg, Andreas Weiland

Labor Market Discrimination and the Racial Unemployment Gap: Can Monetary Policy Make a Difference?

Black workers experience a higher unemployment rate, as well as more volatile employment dynamics, than white workers.

Black workers experience a higher unemployment rate, as well as more volatile employment dynamics, than white workers, and the racial unemployment rate gap is largely unexplained by observable characteristics. We develop a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions in the labor market, endogenous separations, and employer discrimination against Black workers to explain these outcomes. The model is consistent with key features of the aggregate economy and is able to explain key labor market disparities across racial groups. We then use this model to assess the effects of the Federal Reserve's new monetary policy framework—interest rates respond to shortfalls of employment from its maximum level rather than deviations—on racial inequality in the labor market. We find that shifting from a Deviations interest rate rule to a Shortfalls rule reduces the racial unemployment rate gap and the model-based measures of labor market discrimination but increases the average inflation rate. From a welfare perspective, we find that the Shortfalls approach does not do much to reduce racial inequality in our model economy.

Parental Leave from the Firm’s Perspective

This study, investigates firm side responses to generous parental leave mandates.

In this study, we investigate firm side responses to generous parental leave mandates. Our primary focus is on firms’ adjustments in the gender and age composition of their workforce. To identify these effects, we use employer-employee matched data from Norway, and deploy a Bartik-type instrument exploiting variation in exposure and shifts across firms due to a series of expansionary reforms of the duration of paid parental leave. We find that in response to longer parental leave related absence, firms increase demand for young female employees but at lower wages. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that this is particularly the case in the private sector. We also document some positive effects on firm performance measured by investment and productivity. Increased part-time work by young women, and overtime hours by older workers emerge as important mechanisms explaining our results.

Our findings suggest that both small and large firms have successfully adapted to young women’s work interruptions linked to longer parental leave, an issue that has so far been overlooked in labor markets.

Wage Setting in Times of High and Low Inflation

The recent surge in inflation led many unions and firms to alter their bargaining and wage-setting policies.

The recent surge in inflation led many unions and firms to alter their bargaining and wage-setting policies. Using novel German firm-level survey data, we document the extent of state dependency of wage-setting behavior across firms and workers given high vs. low inflation environments. The granularity of our micro-level data also allows us to study heterogeneous patterns across sectors, firms, and workers. Embedding the empirical findings in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous firms, we then analyze the implications of state-dependent wage-setting behavior for the transmission and propagation of shocks. Lastly, we discuss the interaction of state-dependent wage setting with firms' monopsony power and how these features impact monetary policy and the slope of the Phillips curve.

The European Unemployment Puzzle: Implications from Population Aging

We build a large new Keynesian OLG model with a realistic age structure, labor market frictions, sticky prices, and aggregate shocks.

We study the link between the evolving age structure of the working population and unemployment. We build a large new Keynesian OLG model with a realistic age structure, labor market frictions, sticky prices, and aggregate shocks. Once calibrated to the European economy, we quantify the considerable extent to which demographic changes over the last 30 years contribute to the decline of unemployment rate. Our findings have important policy implications given the expected aging of the working population in Europe. Furthermore, lowering inflation volatility is less costly in terms of higher unemployment volatility. It suggests that optimal monetary policy is more hawkish in the older society. Our results hint also at a partial reversal of the European-US unemployment puzzle due to the fact that in the US the share of young workers is expected to remain robust.

Identifying Worker and Firm Quality

Linked employer-employee data offer a wide range of possibilities for researchers.

Linked employer-employee data offer a wide range of possibilities for researchers. For example, this type of data is used to understand the role of worker and firm quality in the development of wage inequality, as for example in Card, Heining, Kline (2013). A widely used approach to identify worker and firm quality was developed by Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999) who decomposed earnings in a worker-specific component, a firm-specific component and an error term in a two-way fixed effects model. Since then, many researchers have used the AKM model to study worker and firm heterogeneity in wages, as well as the importance of labour market sorting. While the model continues to be heavily used until today, recent developments discuss potential biases and propose corrections (for example Abowd et al, 2004; Andrews et al, 2008, 2012; Kline, Saggio, Sølvsten 2020; Bonhomme et al, 2023). The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers working with these models to present and discuss current work. Possible topics for the workshop are:

How important are worker and firm heterogeneity for the variation of wages?
How do wage premia differ for worker subgroups?
How persistent are wage premia?
How important is worker-firm sorting?
Is there assortative matching in the labour market?
Are there persistent penalties to working in low-quality firms?

IAB Conference ‘Investigating social inequalities using survey and register data’

In this conference, which will be part of a two-day celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Research Data Centre of the BA at the IAB (IAB-FDZ).

Rising costs of living and the lack of affordable housing have brought social inequalities back to the centre of political debates in many countries. Large, high quality survey and register data provide social scientists with a solid foundation to explore topics in inequality research and to gain unique and valuable insights fostering both scholarly and public discussion.

In this conference, which will be part of a two-day celebration of the 20^th anniversary of the Research Data Centre of the BA at the IAB (IAB-FDZ), we bring together scholars from various disciplines to discuss their work based on IAB-FDZ data products or similar research data made available by other national or international data providers.

We invite empirical contributions on all topics addressing social inequalities connected to labour markets, demographic change, as well as occupational or educational choice. This might include (but is not limited to) effects of labour market interventions, technological change (greening economy, digitalisation, AI), voluntary and forced migration, social stratification, working and living conditions and gender topics.

Furthermore, the Journal for Labour Market Research (JLMR) plans a Special Issue celebrating 20 years of IAB-FDZ with Till von Wachter (UCLA) as guest editor. The Journal for Labour Market Research is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed, open access journal in the field of labour market research and publishes papers in English language concerning the labour market, employment, education/training and careers (https://labourmarketresearch.springeropen.com/). All presenters are invited to submit their manuscripts emerging from the presented research to this Special Issue by December 1^st, 2024. Acceptance is contingent on successful peer review.

Skills for the Future: Navigating the Digital, Green and Social Transitions in European Labour Markets

Skills for the Future: Navigating the Digital, Green and Social Transitions in European Labour Markets is to bring together leading national and international scholars in the social sciences to address the challenges of the digital, green and social transitions for the labour market, society and education.

Organised by the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and co-funded by Luxembourg’s National Research Fund (FNR), the objective of the international scientific conference Skills for the Future: Navigating the Digital, Green and Social Transitions in European Labour Markets is to bring together leading national and international scholars in the social sciences to address the challenges of the digital, green and social transitions for the labour market, society and education.

The conference marks the first international conference of the ELMI Network (Network of European Labour Market Research Institutes) initiated in October 2022 by the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The network is currently composed of 11 research institutes from all over Europe to facilitate the international exchange of best practices, ideas and people. It promotes multi-disciplinary research collaborations, especially at the EU level, and the exchange of best practices in data management, data access and discussions with policy-makers and stakeholders.