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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This study rationalizes intuition and evidence altogether using a nonsequential search model.

Employers hire more selectively between heterogeneous productivity workers when applicants' queues are longer. Consistently, CPS data reveal a positive and concave relation between unemployment rates and wage inequality.

We rationalize intuition and evidence altogether using a nonsequential search model in which selective hiring stretches out the right tail of the wage distribution and compresses the left one. Using GMM-estimated parameters, we show that mean worker productivity distribution shifts are consistent with the evidence.

Welfare analysis suggests that regressive taxation may enhance efficiency because expected good matches stimulate vacancies, creating a positive externality for other job seekers.

(joint work with Alessandra Pizzo)

This worksphop is about using Linked employer-employee data to study worker and firm heterogeneity in wages as well as the importance of labour market sorting.

Linked employer-employee data offer a wide range of possibilities for researchers. For example, this type of data is used to understand the role of worker and firm quality in the development of wage inequality, as for example in Card, Heining, Kline (2013). A widely used approach to identify worker and firm quality was developed by Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999).

Since then, many researchers have used the AKM model to study worker and firm heterogeneity in wages, as well as the importance of labour market sorting. While the model continues to be heavily used until today, recent developments discuss potential biases and propose corrections (for example Abowd et al, 2004; Andrews et al, 2008, 2012; Kline, Saggio, Sølvsten 2020; Bonhomme et al, 2023). As with the first edition of the workshop that took place in 2023, the purpose of the second edition continues to be to bring together researchers working on or interested in topics related to worker and firm quality to discuss current work.

This study is about the Increase in Refugees to Germany by Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and local district-level administrative data.

In 2015–16, Germany experienced a rapid and controversial increase in refugees that varied substantially across German districts. This increase provides unique leverage for analyzing how fractionalization, threat, and contact shape the consequences of immigration and ethnolinguistic heterogeneity.

Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and local district-level administrative data on refugee shares, we innovatively focus on within-person/within-district change in six exclusionary beliefs and behaviors. We demonstrate a two-level cross-cutting process that integrates threat and contact theory but contradicts fractionalization theory.

As the refugee share increased nationally, concerns about immigration and Far Right party support increased. However, district-level refugee shares significantly reduced concerns about immigration and Far Right party support. Also, rising district-level refugee shares are not associated with concerns about social cohesion, trust, residential moves, and subjective fair tax rates. While districts with fewer refugees drove the national-level threat, rising district-level refugee shares reduced or did not heighten exclusionary beliefs and behaviors.

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