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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This paper examines the incidence and consequences of individual wage bargaining.  We collected survey data on the bargaining policies of more than 700 German firms.  Using these data, we validate a new survey measure of firm bargaining policies.  We then examine what drives heterogeneity in firm policies. Using the link between these data, administrative Social Security records, and a survey we fielded to 135,000 German workers, we examine the dynamics of bargaining in the labor market.  In the last part of the paper we examine the implications of individual-bargaining for wage inequality.  We also draw a link between individual specific pay premia and bargaining behavior.

During the tour, three excellent job market candidates in Labour Economics, Pauline Carry, Elio Nimier-David and Raoul van Maarseveen will present their job market papers.

The IAB is excited to host one station of the EALE Job Market Tour 2023 on Wednesday, April 19th 2023. The EALE Job Market Tour is an annual event devised to promote research and interaction among young scholars from European institutions. The event takes place after the job market, but the candidates are selected beforehand by a committee based on their paper and participation at the EALE conference.

During the tour, three excellent job market candidates in Labour Economics, Pauline Carry (Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST)), Elio Nimier-David (CREST) and Raoul van Maarseveen (Uppsala University) will present their job market papers. PhD students, junior and senior staff are welcome to attend.

The event also includes a keynote by Wolfgang Dauth (IAB) and a presentation of the IAB data by Dana Müller (IAB). With the event, we aim to foster exchange between the job market candidates and researchers from the IAB as well as local institutions.

The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) is pleased to host a workshop on imperfect competition in the labor market from 26-27 May. Topics that will be covered at the workshop are:

  • Models of monopsonistic and oligopsonistic competition and their empirical assessment
  • Quantifying the elasticities of labor supply, recruits and separations to the firm
  • The role of firms in wage-setting
  • Outside options and wages
  • Employment concentration and wages
  • Rent sharing
  • Policies that may remedy imperfect competition, e.g. minimum wage and collective bargaining

This workshop invites empirical contributions using either the IAB Establishment Panel, one of its derivatives (LPP/LIAB), or other matched employer-employee data.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the IAB Establishment Panel Survey, this workshop invites empirical contributions using either the IAB Establishment Panel, one of its derivatives (LPP/LIAB), or other matched employer-employee data. Research projects from all areas of labour market research are welcome, including personnel economics, sociology and economics of vocational education and training, industrial relations, or industrial economics. Papers may address research questions in any of these areas as well as methodological questions.

The conference aims to discuss the meaning of gender, gender roles and gender relations in the context of migration and flight and to reflect on possible solutions in practice.

With the war in Ukraine, the topic of migration and gender is (again) present in the public media. Especially at the beginning of the coverage of Russia's war of aggression, images of women with children in need of care dominated, seeking protection in Ukraine's neighboring countries and EU member states, including Germany. The EU's decision to apply the so-called mass influx directive for the first time is associated with new social inequalities in regard to other groups of immigrants, including racial exclusion at border crossings.

Due to the increased relevance of activating integration policy for different immigrant groups, not only in Germany, policies started to focus on labor market integration of female and male refugees and the participation of refugee girls and boys in education and training. The labor market integration of refugees is also associated with the discourse on a shortage of skilled workers, the Skilled Worker Immigration Act that came into force in 2020, and the reform proposals currently being discussed by the German government that may increase the chances of migrant women and men entering the German labor market. For female migrants, integration into the labor market after moving usually takes more time than for male migrants. The visible differences in migration circumstances and integration trajectories of immigrant men and women highlight the need for gender-specific research. In addition to occupational and labor market perspectives, there are multiple research gaps on the relationship between gender and migration.

The conference aims to discuss the meaning of gender, gender roles and gender relations in the context of migration and flight and to reflect on possible solutions in practice. To this end, we bring together researchers from sociology, demography, economics, political science, and law. In particular, we welcome submissions on the following topics, but submissions outside of the focus areas are also welcome:

  • Integration in education and the labor market
  • Legal and institutional framework for participation
  • Linguistic and cultural integration
  • Health and illness
  • Consequences of the COVID-19 crisis
  • Subjective experiences of flight, migration and arrival
  • Queer and non-binary perspectives
  • Intersectional research approaches
  • Power relations in asylum, migration, and labor market regimes 

We study the importance of firm sorting for spatial inequality. If productive locations are able to attract the most productive firms, then firm sorting acts as an amplifier of spatial inequality. We develop a novel model of spatial firm sorting, in which heterogeneous firms first choose a location and then hire workers in a frictional local labor market. Firms’ location choices are guided by a fundamental trade-off: Operating in productive locations increases output per worker, but sharing a labor market with other productive firms makes it hard to poach and retain workers, and hence limits firm size. We show that sorting between firms and locations is positive—i.e., more productive firms settle in more productive locations—if firm and location productivity are complements and labor market frictions are sufficiently large. We estimate our model using administrative data from Germany and find that highly productive firms indeed sort into the most productive locations. In our main application, we quantify the role of firm sorting for wage differences between East and West Germany, which reveals that firm sorting accounts for 17%-27% of the West-East wage gap.

Maternity protection policies have the objective of supporting mothers' access to equal opportunity and equal treatment in the workplace. We provide two examples showing that beside this direct goal, short-run policy incentives can also affect decisions involving long-term commitment. First, we examine how dismissal protection of pregnant women affects fertility decisions and show that women at the risk of job loss use pregnancy as  precautionary strategy. Second, we show that earnings dependent parental leave benefits available to the mother affect the father’s decision to acknowledge paternity.

We quantify aggregate effects of changes in the potential benefit duration (PBD) in Poland using administrative data containing the universe of unemployment spells over more than two decades. Individual workers’ PBD depends on the county unemployment rate relative to the national average in the previous calendar year. We exploit this sharp discontinuity with RDD estimates and construct impulse response functions to estimate effects of a longer PBD at the county-level. After 12 months, the effect of a PBD of 12 vs. 6 months is an increase in the log stock of all unemployed of 0.03 and an increase in the log stock of the directly affected by 0.1. In contrast, we find no evidence on spillovers on indirectly affected unemployed and no effect of PBD on labour market tightness. We document that inflows into unemployment respond strongly to PBD changes. A decomposition of the effects of a longer PBD on the stock of unemployed shows that the effect on inflows is more important than the one on the exit rate.

This paper documents and theoretically explains a nexus between globalization and wage inequality within plants through internal labor market organization. We document that the dominant component of overall and residual wage inequality is within plant-occupations and, combining within-occupation task information from labor force surveys with linked plant-worker data for Germany, establish three interrelated facts:

  1. larger plants and exporters organize production into more occupations,
  2. workers at larger plants and exporters perform fewer tasks within occupations, and
  3. overall and residual wages are more dispersed at larger plants.

To explain these facts, we build a model in which the plant endogenously bundles tasks into occupations and workers match to occupations. By splitting the task range into more occupations, the plant assigns workers to a narrower task range per occupation, reducing worker mismatch while typically raising the within-plant dispersion of wages. Embedding this rationale into a Melitz model, where fixed span-of-control costs increase with occupation counts, we show that inherently more productive plants exhibit higher worker efficiency and wider wage dispersion and that economy-wide wage inequality is higher in the open economy for an empirically confirmed parametrization. Reduced-form tests confirm main predictions of the model, and simulations based on structural estimation suggest that trade induces a stricter division of labor at globalized plants with an associated change in wage inequality.

During recessions, a larger fraction of non-employed workers actively search for a job. Simultaneously, the premium in the job-finding probability for active relative to passive search declines. I document this novel finding and show that it is symptomatic of a “crowding-out” of active search that is not accommodated under the standard approach of the literature. I estimate a declining marginal efficiency of active search, and I show that, during a recession, active search plays a less important role for finding a job. The findings emphasize the importance of the participation margin in understanding unemployment dynamics and the role of policy.