IAB-Veranstaltungen Archiv - Page 2 of 32 - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Revisiting the Integration Paradox: Higher Education and Perceived Discrimination Among Jews

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.

The U-Shaped Cost of Job Loss

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 evolution of gender in the labour market: Inequality, (in)efficiency and stereotypes

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.

Navigating Two Realities: The Gendered Double Bind Between Society and the Workplace

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

Wage Setting in Multiproduct Firms

This is a lesson about Wage Setting in Multiproduct Firms.

tba

The Labor Market Effects of Carbon Pricing

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.

In-Person Schooling and Juvenile Violence

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.

Trade Shocks: Next generation

This paper explores the effects of childhood import shocks on long-run outcomes using linked full-count Census data.

This paper explores the effects of childhood import shocks on long-run outcomes using linked full-count Census data between 1910 and 1940 and a novel identification strategy that isolates quasi-random variation in local import competition.

We show that individuals exposed to import competition in their first 10 years of life report lower incomes and reduced upward mobility 30 years later, with effects that fall most heavily on the left tail of the income distribution. More exposed individuals also exhibit lower educational attainment and increased mobility between states.

Intergenerational structural change plays a critical role in our results, with import competition reducing the probability that sons work in high-earning, high-education occupations regardless of their father’s income level.

(Joint work with John Lopresti and Andrew Greenland).

Matching with preferences: Caring who cares for the old

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data.

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data from a matchmaking agency that records households' and workers' ex-ante preferences, realized matches, wages, and job durations.

I estimate a structural matching model to recover each party's valuation of match attributes as a function of preferences, and their impact on employment stability. Linking the data to population registers shows that demand is rising fastest where preferences over workers' origin are stronger, while gender preferences will weaken.

Simulations predict welfare changes under varying care worker compositions and suggest that losses from a shift toward distant immigrant workers are modest.

The Effect of Public Sector Relocations on Regional Development in Germany

This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local labor markets.

Regional economic disparities within countries have become increasingly large, often surpassing the disparities observed between countries. To address regional inequality, governments have been turning away from standard subsidies and are experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy.

This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local labor markets. I study the ‘Heimatstrategie,’ which relocates around 3,000 public sector jobs from Munich to economically lagging regions in Bavaria, Germany. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations between 2015 and 2025, I exploit the government’s quantitative selection criteria for receiving municipalities and implement a long-differences design comparing treated Bavarian municipalities to Mahalanobis-matched control municipalities in other German states.

My estimates show that relocations increased private sector employment shares by up to 2.3%, reduced unemployment rates by up to 11.9%, and increased local population by up to 1.6% without harming sending locations. These results provide new causal evidence on public employment multipliers from non-capital city relocations, addressing external validity concerns in the existing literature.