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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health.

Teacher mental health is a growing societal and economic concern with important implications for educational quality and student outcomes.

This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health. Using comprehensive population-wide Danish register data linking teachers to schools, students, and health care utilization, we document large and persistent differences in mental health outcomes across schools.

These differences reflect causal workplace effects rather than selection, as a quasi-experimental mover design shows: teachers’ mental health deteriorates after moving to schools with worse mental health environments, with effects unfolding over the subsequent years. The variation across schools correlates only to a small degree with observable school and student characteristics. Auxiliary analyses point to unobserved dimensions of workplace quality, such as leadership and organizational climate, as potential drivers of heterogeneity in teacher mental health.

joint with Antonia Entorf and Miriam Gensowski

This year’s focus topic is ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Higher Education’.

The HELM conference is jointly organized by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the IAB. It combines contributions with a general perspective on ‘Higher Education and the Labour Market’, including research on returns to tertiary education, dropout, or graduate placement in the labour market, with contributions on alternating focus topics.

This year’s focus topic is ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Higher Education’. Reforms are ubiquitous in higher education and range from small-scale changes or programmes focusing e.g. on facilitating labour market entry or reducing dropout to large-scale reforms such as the Bologna reform. What - independent of their scale - all these reforms share is that their success and overall outcomes are ex ante uncertain. Therefore, it has become widely accepted that the evaluation of such reforms is vital.

Thus, in the part of the conference on this year’s focus topic, we particularly welcome contributions that evaluate such reforms or look at reforms from a methodological perspective. In this context we are particularly interested in:

  • Papers evaluating programmes that focus on the transition from secondary school to higher education or from higher education to the labour market. We are interested in both papers focusing on reforms or programmes aimed at increasing the overall success of such transitions (e.g., by promoting university access, reducing dropout, or providing students with skills relevant for labour market success) as well as papers that focus on reforms or programmes aimed at promoting particular aspects during transition processes (such as subject choice).
  • Papers evaluating unintended effects of reforms. Independent of a reform’s or programme’s main objective, there might be additional (positive or negative) effects. There is a small but growing literature on this topic, and we particularly welcome papers that focus on such unintended effects.
  • Papers focusing on methodological approaches or using innovative methodological approaches to study (potential) reform options. In this context, we are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in control group designs for evaluating ongoing reforms (e.g., through the lagged introduction of reform components for part of the sample, or experiments in which potential components of a reform are introduced to some students as part of a control-group design).

This study is about the effects of New Horizon, a large-scale national education reform implemented in Israeli elementary schools.

We study the short-run effects of New Horizon, a large-scale national education reform implemented in Israeli elementary schools. The reform combined multiple school-level interventions, including expanded small-group instruction, increased teachers’ on-site working hours, higher salaries, new promotion and professional development requirements, and strengthened school leadership. Using the staggered rollout of the reform, we find that mathematics and English test scores increased by 0.1–0.2 standard deviations within four years, alongside immediate improvements in student–teacher relationships, teachers’ efforts to support students, and classroom behavior. At the same time, teachers reported substantially higher workloads, pointing to short-run adjustment costs that may have contributed to relatively modest achievement gains. Overall, the results suggest that comprehensive, whole-school reforms can improve both academic outcomes and the learning environment, with small-group learning and changes in teachers’ working conditions playing a central role.

Research on migrants and ethno-racial minorities documents that those with higher education often report more experiences of discrimination, usually attributed to heightened expectations of equal treatment, increased exposure to majority institutions, and greater awareness of subtle forms of discrimination. This process is referred to as the “integration paradox”. While this paradox has been examined extensively among migrants and ethno-racial groups, and recently among women, it remains unclear whether similar mechanisms operate among other minorities. Jews constitute a particularly interesting minority to test this phenomenon, as anti-Jewish hostilities and antisemitic incidents are frequent despite low public visibility and relatively high levels of education among Jews on average.

To fill this gap, this study examines the relationship between higher educational attainment and perceived personal discrimination on religious grounds among Jews in Europe and the US, based on data from the second survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews in the EU 2018 and PEW’s Jewish Americans in 2020 survey. Our findings show that, unlike prior research on ethnic minorities and women, higher education is, on average, associated with lower levels of perceived discrimination among Jews. Deeper analyses reveal that this is mostly the case for those who are religious or visibly Jewish, e.g., by regularly wearing a Kippa. In contrast, there is no significant education effect for those who are not religious or not visible as Jews in everyday life. These results suggest that visibility does not have a uniform effect across minority groups and that the social conditions under which minority status becomes salient are central to understanding when education reduces or amplifies perceptions of discrimination.

Job displacement causes large and lasting earnings losses. Challenging the common view that these losses increase monotonically with age, we document a clear U-shaped pattern in French administrative data: both young and older workers lose significantly more than those in mid-career. We identify distinct age-specific mechanisms behind this pattern. Young workers face prolonged job instability, whereas older workers encounter poor reemployment prospects and wage declines. We develop a search-and-matching model with human capital accumulation and obsolescence that reproduces these dynamics. For the young, displacement disrupts skill growth and traps them in high-turnover jobs; for the old, losses reflect an inability to redeploy human capital and firms’ reluctance to hire near retirement. While policy debates often emphasize older displaced workers, our findings highlight the need to also support displaced youth.

The study is about gender inequality. Are women held back in the labour market because they are less willing to engage in competitive careers?

Gender inequality is rife. Women make systematically different education choices from men, are under-represented in high-earning careers, and bear the bulk of the earning penalty from parenthood. Moreover, the disproportionate role women play in unpaid work in the home more than offsets the gap in paid work in the labor market, resulting in less leisure time and possibly lower life satisfaction.

Are women held back in the labour market because they are less willing to engage in competitive careers and/or they especially value caring for their children? In fact, research has shown that men and women are on average similar in their preferences and attitudes but face different career-family trade-offs. Besides valid arguments of social justice, differential entry barriers into certain professions raise obvious questions about the efficient allocation of women’s talent. While it would be tempting to conclude that family-friendly workplaces could provide a solution to women’s quest for the desired work life balance, there is a risk that this solution may further entrench gender segregation across firms and professions.

Conversely, research has established that, if women’s involvement in the labour market is shaped by prevailing gender norms (actual or perceived) around their primary role in raising children, progress towards gender equality requires redressing gender stereotypes via policy, education, and information interventions.

The study examines how the desirability of masculine and feminine traits for men and women varies across societal and occupational settings.

Women are often encouraged to display warmth and tenderness in society, while professional success is associated with stereotypically masculine traits such as assertiveness. This creates a potential double bind in which the desirability of gendered traits differs across social and workplace contexts.

Using a large online experiment with U.S. participants (N = 1,867), we examine how the desirability of masculine and feminine traits for men and women varies across societal and occupational settings. We show that women face a sharp shift: feminine traits are highly desirable in society but substantially less at work, particularly in male-dominated industries, alongside a significant increase in the desirability of masculine traits for women even in female-dominated contexts compared to society at large. In contrast, desirability for men’s masculinity remain largely stable, while feminine traits are less desirable outside female-dominated occupations.

We further extend the identity-based framework of Akerlof and Kranton (2000) to interpret these context-dependent trade-offs and their implications for workplace behavior.

Coauthor: Stefano Piasenti

This study is about how carbon prices affect labor market outcomes.

This study is about how carbon prices affect labor market outcomes by exploiting a policy change in the EU Emissions Trading System that led to a sharp rise in permit prices.

Using population-wide employer-employee matched data from the Netherlands and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find no adverse aggregate effects on employment or wages. However, the distributional effects are sizable: workers in firms with large permit surpluses experience wage gains, as do STEM-educated workers-especially those with stronger outside options. Plants employing more STEM workers achieve larger reductions in energy costs, highlighting the role of skills in facilitating the transition to low-carbon technologies.

Our results illustrate that distributional effects of carbon pricing depend on market design and worker skills.

This study comprehensively explores the effect of in-person schooling on contemporaneous juvenile violence.

While investments in schooling generate large private and external returns, negative peer interactions in school may generate substantial social costs.

Using data from four national sources (Uniform Crime Reports, National Incident-Based Reporting System, National Crime Victimization Survey, National Electronic Injury Surveillance System) and a variety of identification strategies, this study comprehensively explores the effect of in-person schooling on contemporaneous juvenile violence. Using a proxy for in-person schooling generated from anonymized smartphone data and leveraging county-level variation in school calendars - including unique, large, localized changes to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic - we find that in-person schooling is associated with a 28 percent increase in juvenile violent crime. A null finding for young adults is consistent with a causal interpretation of this result.

The effects are largest in larger schools and in jurisdictions with weaker anti-bullying policies, consistent with both concentration effects and a peer quality channel. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that relative to closed K-12 schools, in-person schooling generates $233 million in monthly violent crime costs.

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