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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

Job adverts include detailed descriptions of skills, knowledge and behaviours relevant to carry out occupational and professional roles in firms. In addition, they (occasionally) show earnings information, provide firm characteristics and contextualise to local labour markets. Such data, validly extracted from job adverts, are an invaluable resource to inform education and labour market policy about crucial aspects of matching job seekers and vacancies and, together with further data sources, likely returns from skills investment and potential skills shortages affecting different sectors or localities in the economy.

With improving information technologies, online job search engines grew since the 1980s. Since then they created huge amounts of data, which can be used to provide systematic descriptions of job skills at a granular level and to understand changes affecting occupational roles. However, the use of such sources for research in economics, business and education only emerged recently with better availability of off-the-shelves packages for text analytics allowing individual researchers to navigate the complexities of unstructured “big” data and to derive high-quality structured information from millions of vacancies. And finally, the analytical work for descriptions and econometric modelling offers new opportunities and challenges as with many “Big Data” applications.

Our workshop aims at interested researchers working with such data, with a focus on the analysis of knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to jobs. A non-exhaustive list of topics includes:

  • Understanding broader or specific aspects of skills from vacancy data, for example specific to tasks, jobs, sectors or localities
  • Longitudinal studies on changes in occupational profiles and skills requirements
  • Topical research about skills changes, e.g. resulting from decarbonisation or increasing digitalisation of job roles
  • Understanding skills relevant to making transitions into the labour market, for example data used in vocational education institutions and universities from placements
  • Methodological innovations in the work with large data from online vacancies

We are pleased to announce the 6th user conference of the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the Federal Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers who work with the data provided by the FDZ and to promote exchange between researchers and FDZ staff. The program committee invites submissions on any topic related to labor markets using FDZ data.

This year’s conference will also host an extra session on the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the panel. Therefore, submissions relying on the LPP or LPP-ADIAB data are especially welcome.

We also plan an extra session on data from other data providers within the International Data Access Network (IDAN). Therefore, we are looking forward to submissions relying on country comparisons. 

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With the COVID-19 pandemic in its third year, the question how the former has affected labour markets and economic policies continues to be of prime importance. Has the pandemic led to lasting changes in the organization of work? Which workers, firms or regions will benefit from such changes? Thus far, research has mainly focussed on the pandemic’s initial impact. Much less is known about its effects in the medium run and if early adjustments have turned into permanent changes. As more data is becoming available, it is now possible to assess how individual labour market biographies have been affected; how firms adapted to disruptions in their production processes; how the effects of the pandemic differed between regions, sectors or occupations; and whether certain policies have been changed permanently as a result of the crisis. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers to present and discuss current work on the labour market consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  1. How have individual labour market biographies been affected by the pandemic?
  2. Do pandemic effects differ between groups of individuals and have there been changes in labour market inequality?
  3. Has the pandemic led to labour market scarring?
  4. How have school-to-work transitions, entries into training or transitions from training into employment been affected?
  5. How has the allocation of household or care tasks changed during the pandemic?
  6. Has occupational mobility changed as a result of the pandemic?
  7. How have firms responded to the pandemic?
  8. How has the adoption of working-from-home schemes affected firms’ production processes?
  9. Has the pandemic led to more investment in digital technologies and how has this affected the workers at the firm?
  10. Has occupation- or task-specific labour demand changed during the pandemic?
  11. How has short-term work been used during the pandemic?
  12. Have firms adjusted their (international) supply chains?
  13. Have urban labour markets become less attractive?
  14. Have regional labour market disparities increased as a result of the pandemic?

The 5nd Workshop on Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market is jointly organized by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and focuses on a broad range of topics related to regional labour markets.

This year, a special focus is on aspects revolving around the Covid19 crisis. COVID-19 is hitting local labour markets at a time when megatrends related to globalisation, digitalisation, technological change, are reshaping the way we live and work. The pandemic causes enormous economic and social disruptions which might affect regional labour markets in various ways in the short and long term.

The two organizing institutions, Institute for Employment Research (IAB), and Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), aim to bring together frontier research of labour economists, regional economists, sociologists, geographers and scholars from related fields. Theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented contributions are very welcome. The workshop provides a forum that allows scientists to network while fostering the exchange of research ideas and results. 

The workshop has a special focus on the spatial dimension of the consequences of the pandemic and changing economic activity. Apart from this interest, a non-exhaustive list of topics is:

  • COVID-19 pandemic, it’s impact on local labour markets
  • Telecommuting
  • Spatial distribution of activities, disparities and inequalities
  • Spatial mismatch, unemployment and spatial job search
  • Mobility of labour and imperfect labour markets
  • Location decisions and urban amenities
  • Neighbourhoods, proximity, and urban density
  • Regional dimensions of wage determination
  • Evaluation of regional labour market policy and urban or regional policy
  • Effects of globalization and technological change
  • Methodological and data-driven innovations (e.g. use of geo-coded data)

The opening of refugee shelters is regularly met with protest from the surrounding community. Often, such opposition is driven by the fear that the presence of a shelter devalues the neighbourhood, either because of a concrete decrease in the quality of local amenities and public life, or because of neighbours and prospective residents’ prejudicial beliefs (or a combination of both). At the same time, it is unclear whether protests by individual residents reflect the preferences of the entire community, and whether fears over the arrival of refugees are held strongly enough to affect residents’ concrete decisions over where to live. In this article I combine information on property listings between 2012 and 2019 with data on all refugee accommodation facilities in Munich, Germany to examine whether the opening of a refugee shelter affects the desirability of the surrounding neighbourhood, decreasing local property prices relative to elsewhere. Results from the staggered difference-in-difference design find no evidence that the presence of a shelter impacts the value of surrounding properties, or changes the demand for or supply of local housing. Complementary survey findings suggest that increased contact may be driving this null effect: the presence of a nearby refugee shelter increases casual encounters between natives and refugees, which may reduce prior fears over refugees’ negative impact on the local community.

We study a cross-border commuting reform that granted German workers in the German-Swiss border region access to the high-wage Swiss labour market. This exogenous increase in German workers‘ outside option led to an increase in average wages paid by German establishments in the border region. But this wage increase is not homogenous across worker types. First, high-skilled workers enjoyed a higher wage increase than low-skilled workers, consistent with a stronger increase in Swiss-labor demand for high-skilled German workers. Second, the positive wage effects only accrue to men in the border region, but not women, consistent with gender differences in the willingness to commute. The outside option clearly seems to play an important role in wage negotiations and its wage effects can be heterogeneous.

Recent evidence on the gender pay gap has shown that while it is narrowing for the least educated, it has remained stagnant for those with a university degree and is largest for those at the top of the earnings distribution. Attempts to explain the gap using non-cognitive traits have been limited despite a literature highlighting the fact that some of the gap may be attributable to women not “leaning in” while men are more overconfident in their abilities. We probe this hypothesis using longitudinal data from childhood into mid-career and construct a measure of overconfidence using multiple measures of objective cognitive ability and subjective estimated ability. Our measure confirms previous findings that men are more overconfident than women. We then use linear regression and decomposition techniques to account for the gender pay gap including our measure of overconfidence. Our results show that overconfidence captured in adolescence explains a significant portion of the gender wage gap at age 25, which decreases in importance by age 34 and age 42. This highlights the importance of overconfidence in helping individuals to get on a trajectory of higher earnings early in career.

We draw on research on status processes and cultural change to develop predictions about gender status beliefs in the United States. We expect that

  • while explicitly men and women may not distinguish competency and worth by gender, they do so implicitly,
  • that younger respondents, especially women, hold less consensual gender status beliefs, and
  • men are less likely to alter their gender status beliefs due to loss aversion.

We conduct two studies to assess these arguments. The first uses novel nationally-representative data to describe the distributions of status beliefs in the US population; the second demonstrates the importance of these beliefs for allocating rewards by gender. Combined, the studies demonstrate the distribution of gender status beliefs by age and gender, and the implications for gender inequality, thereby illustrating the role of cultural status beliefs for maintaining gender stratification and the potential role of cohort change for changing such beliefs. Finally, we discuss promising approaches to reduce the impact of gender status beliefs in labor market processes.