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Research on earnings inequalities in heterosexual couples has shown that women tend to earn substantially less than their male partners (e.g.Bianci et al. 1999; Estevez-Abe 2008; Dotti-Sani 2015) and also that these inequalities have been quite consistent over time and resistant to institutional change (Dieckhoff et al. 2020). These inequalities are problematic as they impact women’s future labour market outcomes. We know from existing work that women who earn less than their partner are more likely to drop out of the labour market (Shafer 2011); switch from full-time to part-time (Dieckhoff et al. 2016) and less like to advance their careers (Bröckel et al. 2015). Earnings inequalities in couples are hence not only the result of inequalities in the labour market, they can also further enhance them. It is thus important to understand these inequalities and how these evolve over the life-course. In this effort, we investigate using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) 1992-2018 how earnings inequalities evolve with duration of couple’s cohabiting relationships based on German panel data. We also examine whether different patterns can be observed for different cohorts.

We characterize work hour constraints in the labor market and quantify welfare gains to workers
from moving from their current hours to their optimal hours. There is a firm component
to work hours that explains approximately 27% of the overall variability in hours. Contrary to
predictions from established models of work hours determination, there is virtually no correlation
between worker preference for hours and employer hour requirements. Instead, high-wage
workers are more likely to sort to firms offering more hours even though they have a preference
for fewer hours. Using a revealed preference approach, we find that workers are off their labor
supply curve, on average. The typical worker has an inelastic labor supply and prefers firms
that offer more hours. Workers are willing to trade off 25% of earnings on average to move
from their current employer to an employer that offers the ideal hours, at a given wage level.

​The workshop took place from January 18th to 20th 2023. Read the complete event report.

The IAB’s Graduate School (GradAB) invites young researchers to its 14th interdisciplinary Ph.D. workshop “Perspectives on (Un-)Employment”. The workshop provides an opportunity for graduate students to present their ongoing work in the field of theoretical and empirical labor market research and receive feedback from leading scholars in the discipline. We seek papers that cover any one of the following topics:

  • Labor supply, labor demand and unemployment
  • Evaluation of labor market institutions and policies
  • Education, qualification and job tasks
  • Inequality, poverty and discrimination
  • Gender and family
  • Migration and international labor markets
  • Health and job satisfaction
  • Technological change and digitization
  • The impact of climate change on the labor market
  • Applications of machine learning and big data in labor market research
  • Survey methodology (in labor market research)
  • Data quality (in labor market research)
  • Innovative data collection methods

Call for Papers

Submission

We invite Ph.D. students to submit an extended abstract (maximum of 500 words) or a full (preliminary) paper in pdf format to IAB.PHD-WORKSHOP@iab.de.

  • The submission should include your contact information and CV
  • Please use the format lastname_firstname_paper.pdf
  • Please name up to five keywords (or JEL classification) at the beginning of your submission to categorize your research

Deadline

The deadline for submission is 14 October 2022. We will notify you about whether your paper has been accepted by 8 November 2022.

Travel Costs

For presenters without funding, a limited number of travel grants are available. Please indicate along with your submission whether you would like to apply for a travel grant. We will provide more information about the application with the notifications of acceptance.

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. 

Logo LISER - Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

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.