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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This workshop aims to improve the knowledge on welfare and unemployment dynamics and social security under different institutional settings. It is also about the question of how benefit recipients can be helped to leave benefit receipt permanently.

Demographic change, digitalisation and the need to achieve carbon-neutral growth not only have macro-economic consequences, but also have an impact on individual employment prospects and careers. Flexible employment might offer additional employment opportunities, but might also lead to interrupted employment careers with workers being less well protected against social risks and against old-age poverty. Technological change might decrease the labour demand particularly for medium and low-skill occupations. This might affect individual employment stability. Changing working conditions may demand new requirements on employees' qualifications and skills, leading to qualification policies reacting more flexibly to new requirements. The recent crises have also shown that certain population groups have limited access to benefits in existing social security systems. This particularly holds for those with non-standard employment (i.e. solo-self-employed, marginally employed). Conditionality and demanding elements are prevalent in most social security and minimum income systems. It is vital to understand consequences of these principles for the take-up of benefits as well as the employment prospects and social mobility of recipients.

Against this background, this workshop aims to improve the knowledge on welfare and unemployment dynamics and social security under different institutional settings. It is also about the question of how benefit recipients can be helped to leave benefit receipt permanently.

The workshop is open to empirical and policy-oriented single country studies or international comparisons from sociology, economics or political science based on quantitative empirical data. Contributions using different methods, for example sequence data analysis, duration analysis, causal analysis, and methods of policy analyses and microsimulation on one or more of the following questions are very welcome:

  • How do the mentioned structural changes (e.g. technological change) affect individual employment prospects and economic situation? What is the impact on social inequality?
  • What are typical labour market trajectories for different groups of unemployed individuals (e.g. vulnerable groups)?
  • What role does atypical employment play? Have atypical employment relationships proved successful? How can upward mobility succeed?
  • What role do education and training play? What are their long-run effects?
  • Which experiences did welfare states make with the strategies of activation and social investment?
  • Is providing a basic income instead of insurance based social security an adequate response to the trends?

We argue that skill-biased technological change not only affects wage gaps between skill groups, but also increases wage inequality within skill groups, across workers in different firms. Building on a heterogeneous firm framework with labor market frictions, we show that an industry-wide skill-biased technological change shock will increase between-firm wage inequality within the industry through four main channels: changes in the skill wage premium (as in traditional models of technological change); increased employment concentration in more productive firms; increased wage dispersion between firms for workers of the same skill type; and increased dispersion in the skill mix that firms employ, due to more sorting of skilled workers into more productive firms. Importantly, a simultaneous increase in the supply of skilled workers does not offset the technology- induced rise in inequality. Using rich administrative matched employer-employee data from Germany, we provide empirical evidence of establishment-level adjustments that are in line with the predictions of the model. We further document that industries with more technological adoption exhibit particularly pronounced adjustment patterns along the dimensions highlighted by the model. 

We study a Dutch reform that raised the retirement age by 13 months and nearly tripled employment at targeted ages.

Government policies are encouraging older workers to delay retirement, which may curb younger workers' career advancement. We study a Dutch reform that raised the retirement age by 13 months and nearly tripled employment at targeted ages. Using monthly linked employer-employee data, we show that affected firms delay and decrease replacement hiring, and coworkers' earnings fall via reductions in hours worked, wages, and promotions. The hiring and coworker spillovers offset most of the additional hours worked by older workers. These spillovers exacerbate within-firm earnings disparities, redistributing earnings from low to high earners, young to old workers, and women to men.

Racial gaps in student loan accumulation and repayment are substantial. Using data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, we document that Black students are more likely to borrow than White students, and they accumulate larger student debt conditional on borrowing. Black borrowers are also more likely to be enrolled in income-based or extended repayment plans, so they have lower average monthly payments and pay off their debt more slowly. Nevertheless, Black borrowers are 2-4 times more likely to default on student loans. To what extent can initial conditions and lifecycle financial circumstances account for these racial differences in student loan repayment and default? We construct a lifecycle consumption-savings model that captures observed heterogeneity in initial wealth and student debt, as well as unobserved heterogeneity in parameters governing initial human capital and lifecycle human capital accumulation. The model produces earnings dynamics, labor supply choices, human capital accumulation, and financial asset accumulation that are consistent with lifecycle data. We use our model to quantify the relative contributions from each of these channels to the racial default rate gaps over the lifecycle. We aim to use our model to advance policy proposals that can mitigate racial gaps in student loan default.

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.

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