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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This paper demonstrates that labor market regulations shape trade competition in labor-intensive activities.

This paper demonstrates that labor market regulations, such as minimum wages or payroll taxes, shape trade competition in labor-intensive activities. I exploit data from a large European trade program where firms from different countries supply labor services at the same location but face different payroll taxes and minimum wage rules. Country case-studies and model-consistent gravity estimates show large trade responses to tax and regulatory reforms, with an elasticity of trade in services to labor costs larger than one. The results imply that absent regulatory and fiscal harmonization, export competitiveness depends, in part, on domestic labor market policies. 

The workshop brings together junior and senior researchers working on issues about Urban Labor Markets and Local Income Inequality.

Urban labor markets provide agglomeration advantages to workers and firms. However, the distributional consequences are not fully understood. Agglomeration benefits are unevenly shared among low- and high-skilled workers. At the same time, many large urban labor markets around the world have experienced strongly rising housing costs in recent decades, especially for renters and young first-time homebuyers, putting these groups at risk of being priced out of the local labor market. The workshop aims to bring together junior and senior researchers working on these and related issues and welcomes both empirical and theoretical contributions. The list of topic includes, but is not limited to

  • Distributional consequences of agglomeration benefits
  • Labor market outcomes and housing affordability
  • Highly-local income inequality
  • Spatial extent of local labor markets and commuting patterns
  • Neighborhood effects and segregation
  • Interactions between local housing and labor markets

This conference marks the third international conference of the ELMI Network (Network of European Labour Market Research Institutes).

Organised by the Institute for Structural Research (IBS), Institute for Employment Research (IAB), and Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), the international scientific conference Jobs, Skills, and Productivity in Structural Transformations aims to bring together leading scholars in the social sciences to address the challenges of the employability, skill mismatches and skill upgrading, social cohesion, and public policy responses to industrial and structural transitions.

The conference marks the third international conference of the ELMI Network (Network of European Labour Market Research Institutes), composed of 11 research institutes to facilitate the international exchange of best practices, ideas and people (www.elmi-network.eu). It promotes multi-disciplinary European research collaborations, and the exchange of best practices in data management, data access, and discussions with policy-makers and stakeholders.

We are particularly interested in papers that address the following issues:

  • Labour market consequences and long-term career trajectories of workers affected by deindustralisation and large structural shifts
  • The impact of green and digital transitions on skill demand and skill mismatches
  • Labour market consequences of military rearmament
  • Regional disparities in labour market adaptation to structural change
  • The role of education systems in preparing workers for structural transitions
  • The effectiveness of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in addressing structural transformations

This paper studies how family and firm investments interact to explain gender gaps in career achievement.

This paper studies how family and firm investments interact to explain gender gaps in career achievement. Using Danish administrative data, we first document novel evidence of this interaction through a “spousal effect” on firm-side career investments. This effect is accounted for by family labor supply choices that shape worker characteristics, which then influence firms’ training and promotion decisions.

Our main theoretical contribution is to develop a quantitative life cycle model that captures these family-firm interactions through household formation, families’ joint career and fertility choices, and firms’ managerial training and promotion decisions. We then use the estimated model to show that the interaction between families and firms in the joint equilibrium of labor and marriage markets is important when evaluating firm-side and family-side policy interventions. We find that gender-equal parental leave and a managerial quota can both improve gender equality, but leave implies costly skill depreciation, whereas the quota raises aggregate welfare, in part through adjustments in marital sorting towards families that invest in women.

The presentation focuses on the relevance of the labour market in strategies of people living in poverty securing their livelihood.

With the reproach of ‘dependency’, the receipt of welfare benefits is given a pejorative connotation, whereas securing one’s livelihood through paid work is seen as the epitome of ‘independence’ (Fraser/Gordon 1994). However, the assumption that receiving welfare benefits reduces work incentives has been disproved. Research has shown that employment continues to be an important goal for the long-term unemployed and poor (Dörre et al. 2013; Shildrick et al. 2012; Patrick 2017). Yet, access to the labour market is often difficult for people living in poverty for a variety of reasons such as health impairments, unpaid care responsibilities or lack of educational qualifications. When they do find work, it is mostly in precarious jobs with working conditions that are harmful to their health, leading to insecurity and, consequently, other forms of dependency.

Based on an ongoing research project on the welfare production of people living in poverty, the presentation focuses on the relevance of the labour market in their strategies of securing their livelihood: How do they position themselves in the face of the alternative of 'welfare dependency' and the insecurities of the labour market? It will be analysed how their labour market strategies develop and change in the context of individual biographies as well as labour market and welfare state conditions. The data include three interview waves with 40 poor households in Switzerland. Four standpoints with regard to welfare production were taken into account, which also imply different labour market positions: Working poor, who forego welfare benefits; single parents with limited availability for paid work; migrants, whose educational qualifications are often not recognised; and old-age pensioners, who are exempted from the obligation to work.

The findings suggest that particularly migrants without recognised formal qualifications pursue professional plans linked to the goal of social advancement and accept almost any full-time job in the low-wage sector. For single mothers, reconciling paid work with caring responsibilities is crucial, often leading them into fragmented work arrangements with no prospects for advancement. Lone mothers living on social assistance accept adverse working conditions in order to comply with the social norm of working, even if this does not significantly improve their standard of living, as they have to hand over most of their wages to the welfare office. For about half of the sample, labour market opportunities are reduced over the life course due to health impairments. A small number of cases deliberately refuse available employment opportunities in order to realise alternative life plans or roles, while at the same time refusing welfare benefits.

The presentation focuses on interviewees’ labour market strategies and examines the work and employment forms into which they lead them: regular low-wage work, marginal employment in private households, gig work, self-employment and various forms of informal work. It also looks at strategies beyond conventional employment, such as investing in cryptocurrencies, trading second-hand goods or subletting rooms.

This presentation analyzes the agency of poor people from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach.

Multidimensional poverty concepts conceptualize poverty as a combination of material and immaterial lack: a lack of material means which constitutes an important, albeit not the only cause for a lack of self-determination. At the same time, such multidimensional approaches have a strong normative impetus towards acknowledging and promoting the agency of people living in poverty. Thus, while this broader understanding of poverty has its sociological merits, it also leads to a theoretical dilemma: if the lack of self-determination is a defining dimension of poverty, can the poor have agency at all while they are living in poverty? Empirical poverty research mirrors this dilemma in that it mainly focuses on the limited choices of the poor and the detrimental effects of their choices and actions. Finally, there is no doubt that the lack of material means poses countless dilemmas in daily life for the poor, not least because choosing one course of action may jeopardize one’s welfare in other respects, e.g. risking one’s health by accepting a hazardous job (Wollf/de-Shalit 2007).

In this presentation I will analyse the agency of poor people from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach (CA). Agency as the freedom of leading one’s life according to one’s own values constitutes the empirical and normative yardstick for the CA. Moreover, the CA champions a view of human beings as “doers” and “judges” capable of having aspirations and shaping their lives, given adequate individual and social conversion factors (Bonvin/Laruffa 2018). I will discuss three theoretical issues. (1) If value-based choices are a marker of agency, how can we distinguish autonomous choices from adapted preferences stemming from habituation to poor circumstances? (2) All the different strands of the CA posit minimum standards (basic capabilities) for various material and immaterial conversion factors as conditions for genuine agency. For political and measurement purposes these standards must be the same for everyone. In contrast, in qualitative research individual cases constitute the starting point of analysis. How can we thus bring together general standards with individual ideas of ‘good enough’ living conditions expressed in qualitative interviews? (3) Agency is not a binary phenomenon but a gradual one. Referring to the debate on autonomy in feminist philosophy I propose to distinguish ranges of agency in different domains of life (Mackenzie 2014).

The presentation is based on empirical data from a qualitative long-term study of the practices of welfare production of poor households in Switzerland comprising three waves of interviews with 40 households and financial diaries over one month.

This paper analyzes the consequences of a recent, major Danish welfare reform for employment and welfare participation.

This paper uses register-based data to analyze the consequences of a recent, major Danish welfare reform for employment and welfare participation, while paying attention to the roles of a broad range of individual level barriers to work.

In addition to work requirements, the reform introduced substantial reductions to welfare transfers. We make use of a comparative event study that compares individuals on welfare at the time of reform announcement before and after the implementation of the reform with the development in outcomes for a comparison group, consisting of those on welfare exactly one year prior. We find that the reform reduced the propensity to receive welfare and we observe a small – albeit large in a relative sense – increase in hours worked. Groups with family responsibilities react considerably more to the incentives inherent in reform and those in poor mental health and criminal offenders, who are disadvantaged in many respects, react the least.

Joint: Marianne Simonsen, Lars Skipper, Jeffrey Smith

This talk will outline the theoretical development and provide some key methodological developments.

Conventional models of inequality focus on the attributes of individuals and their connection to important inequality markers such as occupations and earnings. These models focus on the supply side of the labor market but are ill equipped to deal with employers as actors in the inequality generation process.

Relational Inequality Theory explicitly theorizes this joint supply and demand process as one of actors – employees and employers and other potential stakeholders – making claims on organizational resources. The outcomes of those claims are understood to lie in the relative power and status of actors in the claims making process.

To produce evidence consistent with this theoretical account requires data on both sides or the employment relationship. It is here that linked employer-employee data have become a crucial tool, complementing evidence from more qualitative work. This talk will outline this theoretical development, provide some key methodological developments, and suggest where fruitful lines if new work might develop.

This Special Lecture Series is presented in collaboration with the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU)

This paper studies the potential downside to poor knowledge of Dutch.

Poor knowledge of Dutch is one of the main obstacles to the integration of newcomers on the labour market in Flanders. Notwithstanding the many vacancies and the often adequate technical skills and expertise that newcomers have, finding a job is a challenge, and if so, it is below the level of their degree. Consequently, the newcomers, in our case Ukrainians displaced by the war, take Dutch courses and many of them take a lot of Dutch courses, up to an advanced level.

This paper studies the potential downside to it, to wit the cost for the newcomer, in essence the lower number of days worked because the newcomer is spending a lot of time in the classroom. The paper uses detailed data on the labour market behaviour and Dutch learning effort of Ukrainian newcomers in Flanders since February 2022, obtained from the Flemish Employment Agency (VDAB).

We find that men without academic degree work more days after they have learned Dutch, compared to never-learners, but only if they stop taking language courses after one year. Women with an academic degree who study Dutch, work less compared to never-learners, in particular when they continue studying Dutch after one year. From the point of view of days worked, this group overstudies Dutch, but they may have other reasons to do so.

This study brings together research on trends in religiosity among migrants with work on how immigrants understand and relate to religion.

Religion is a salient boundary marker between migrants and non-migrants in Europe and therefore there is much interest in the question how religion changes among immigrants after migration. In this presentation, I will bring together research on trends in religiosity among migrants with work on how immigrants understand and relate to religion, and how different understandings, in turn, relate to multiple dimensions of the broad concept of ‘immigrant integration’.

First, relying on a four-wave panel study of recent immigrants to the Netherlands from four different origin countries, I will depict trends in different aspects of religiosity and how they relate to migrants’ orientations towards their co-ethnic community and the receiving society. Results from latent growth models show that after an post-migration drop in religiosity from pre-migration levels, there is an initial recovery followed by a consistent downward trend, which applies to all indicators of religiosity and similarly to Muslim and Christian immigrants. Subsequently, I will problematize research on religious changes based on existing survey measures as this fails to capture individual differences in religious meaning-making, or literal vs. symbolic cognitions about religion, that are conceived to be independent of individuals’ levels of religiosity. Based on a two-dimensional framework that separates religious cognition from religiosity, I will present findings from a German survey among Turkish-origin Muslims that assess the relative importance of both dimensions for migrants participation in education and the labour market, along with social, cultural and political dimensions of immigrant integration.

Bio: Fenella Fleischmann is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Programme Group Institutions, Inequalities and Life Courses and the University of Amsterdam. Trained in interdisciplinary social scientific research with a topical focus on migration and quantitative methods, she received her PhD in 2011 from the universities of Utrecht and Leuven for her dissertation ‘Second-generation Muslims in European societies: Comparative perspectives on education and religion’. She worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) and held positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at Utrecht University (Netherlands). Her research focuses on the social position of immigrants and their children in European societies, with a particular focus on religion, identity and discrimination. Her work has been published in multiple fields including Migration Studies, Sociology, Social and Cross-Cultural Psychology.