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This paper examines age-specific individual preferences for the legal retirement age. Based on a theoretical model we develop the hypothesis that retirees prefer a higher legal retirement age than workers, whereby just retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age. We corroborate the hypothesis empirically with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and show that just retired individuals are indeed most in favor of an increasing retirement age. We conclude that in aging societies the political feasibility of raising the legal retirement age increases. This result is of political relevance especially with regard to the expected retirement wave of the baby boomer generation.

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

We evaluate two policies that provide financial incentives for re-employment of job seekers at risk of long-term unemployment: (i) a re-employment voucher that incentivizes a specialized third party to match the job seeker with an employer; and (ii) a re-employment bonus that incentivizes the job seeker directly. We combine administrative records and data generated by an experimental implementation of these policies in northern Italy during 2017-2018 and involving more than 10,000 job seekers. Each policy is no less effective than conventional job search assistance. We argue that a dual voucher-bonus system based on self-selection would be cost effective.

Jointly organized with DGS

Jointly organized with: Spatial Mobility Working Group of the Urban and Regional Sociology Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS)

In the context of the digital transformation driven by COVID-19-induced changes in the labor market, educational system, and society in general, processes of spatial mobility are as relevant as ever. For instance, the widespread use of telework is decoupling individuals’ and households’ decisions about where to live and where to work. COVID-19 and lockdowns changed perceptions of what constitutes desirable and appropriate places to work, study, and live.

The influx of refugees into European countries following 2015 entailed many newcomers whose decisions about where to work and where to live are shaping their host countries in many respects. Research on refugees’ spatial mobility within host countries is therefore indispensable, especially in light of current events following the military conflict in Ukraine.

There have been significant methodological advances in recent years, with new data types being used for spatial mobility research. In particular, small-scale neighborhood-level and geolocated data allow for granulated analysis, while digital trace data from smartphones, sensors, or the Internet provide new and unique information. Combining these data with established survey or administrative data opens up promising new avenues for research.

In addition to these topics, the workshop will focus on a broad range of issues related to research on spatial mobilities, including internal migration, commuting, residential multi-locality, student mobility, virtual mobility, and others. Timely research on changing spatial mobility patterns and their implications for existing and emerging social inequalities is crucial. The workshop aims to bring together current research from sociologists, labor economists, demographers, geographers, and scholars from related fields.

A non-exhaustive list of topics is:

  • Spatial mobility in the labor market and the educational system
  • Mobility decisions of the unemployed
  • Gendered and household mobility patterns
  • Spatial mobility and social networks
  • Spatial mobility in the context of neighborhoods
  • (Im-)mobility patterns and mobility decision-making
  • Applications of innovative data sources, like geo-coded, linked, or digital trace data
  • New methods for analyzing spatial mobility

Research on earnings inequalities in heterosexual couples has shown that women tend to earn substantially less than their male partners (e.g.Bianci et al. 1999; Estevez-Abe 2008; Dotti-Sani 2015) and also that these inequalities have been quite consistent over time and resistant to institutional change (Dieckhoff et al. 2020). These inequalities are problematic as they impact women’s future labour market outcomes. We know from existing work that women who earn less than their partner are more likely to drop out of the labour market (Shafer 2011); switch from full-time to part-time (Dieckhoff et al. 2016) and less like to advance their careers (Bröckel et al. 2015). Earnings inequalities in couples are hence not only the result of inequalities in the labour market, they can also further enhance them. It is thus important to understand these inequalities and how these evolve over the life-course. In this effort, we investigate using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) 1992-2018 how earnings inequalities evolve with duration of couple’s cohabiting relationships based on German panel data. We also examine whether different patterns can be observed for different cohorts.

We characterize work hour constraints in the labor market and quantify welfare gains to workers
from moving from their current hours to their optimal hours. There is a firm component
to work hours that explains approximately 27% of the overall variability in hours. Contrary to
predictions from established models of work hours determination, there is virtually no correlation
between worker preference for hours and employer hour requirements. Instead, high-wage
workers are more likely to sort to firms offering more hours even though they have a preference
for fewer hours. Using a revealed preference approach, we find that workers are off their labor
supply curve, on average. The typical worker has an inelastic labor supply and prefers firms
that offer more hours. Workers are willing to trade off 25% of earnings on average to move
from their current employer to an employer that offers the ideal hours, at a given wage level.

​The workshop took place from January 18th to 20th 2023. Read the complete event report.

The IAB’s Graduate School (GradAB) invites young researchers to its 14th interdisciplinary Ph.D. workshop “Perspectives on (Un-)Employment”. The workshop provides an opportunity for graduate students to present their ongoing work in the field of theoretical and empirical labor market research and receive feedback from leading scholars in the discipline. We seek papers that cover any one of the following topics:

  • Labor supply, labor demand and unemployment
  • Evaluation of labor market institutions and policies
  • Education, qualification and job tasks
  • Inequality, poverty and discrimination
  • Gender and family
  • Migration and international labor markets
  • Health and job satisfaction
  • Technological change and digitization
  • The impact of climate change on the labor market
  • Applications of machine learning and big data in labor market research
  • Survey methodology (in labor market research)
  • Data quality (in labor market research)
  • Innovative data collection methods

Call for Papers

Submission

We invite Ph.D. students to submit an extended abstract (maximum of 500 words) or a full (preliminary) paper in pdf format to IAB.PHD-WORKSHOP@iab.de.

  • The submission should include your contact information and CV
  • Please use the format lastname_firstname_paper.pdf
  • Please name up to five keywords (or JEL classification) at the beginning of your submission to categorize your research

Deadline

The deadline for submission is 14 October 2022. We will notify you about whether your paper has been accepted by 8 November 2022.

Travel Costs

For presenters without funding, a limited number of travel grants are available. Please indicate along with your submission whether you would like to apply for a travel grant. We will provide more information about the application with the notifications of acceptance.

Job adverts include detailed descriptions of skills, knowledge and behaviours relevant to carry out occupational and professional roles in firms. In addition, they (occasionally) show earnings information, provide firm characteristics and contextualise to local labour markets. Such data, validly extracted from job adverts, are an invaluable resource to inform education and labour market policy about crucial aspects of matching job seekers and vacancies and, together with further data sources, likely returns from skills investment and potential skills shortages affecting different sectors or localities in the economy.

With improving information technologies, online job search engines grew since the 1980s. Since then they created huge amounts of data, which can be used to provide systematic descriptions of job skills at a granular level and to understand changes affecting occupational roles. However, the use of such sources for research in economics, business and education only emerged recently with better availability of off-the-shelves packages for text analytics allowing individual researchers to navigate the complexities of unstructured “big” data and to derive high-quality structured information from millions of vacancies. And finally, the analytical work for descriptions and econometric modelling offers new opportunities and challenges as with many “Big Data” applications.

Our workshop aims at interested researchers working with such data, with a focus on the analysis of knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to jobs. A non-exhaustive list of topics includes:

  • Understanding broader or specific aspects of skills from vacancy data, for example specific to tasks, jobs, sectors or localities
  • Longitudinal studies on changes in occupational profiles and skills requirements
  • Topical research about skills changes, e.g. resulting from decarbonisation or increasing digitalisation of job roles
  • Understanding skills relevant to making transitions into the labour market, for example data used in vocational education institutions and universities from placements
  • Methodological innovations in the work with large data from online vacancies

We are pleased to announce the 6th user conference of the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the Federal Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers who work with the data provided by the FDZ and to promote exchange between researchers and FDZ staff. The program committee invites submissions on any topic related to labor markets using FDZ data.

This year’s conference will also host an extra session on the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the panel. Therefore, submissions relying on the LPP or LPP-ADIAB data are especially welcome.

We also plan an extra session on data from other data providers within the International Data Access Network (IDAN). Therefore, we are looking forward to submissions relying on country comparisons. 

Logo LISER - Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

With the COVID-19 pandemic in its third year, the question how the former has affected labour markets and economic policies continues to be of prime importance. Has the pandemic led to lasting changes in the organization of work? Which workers, firms or regions will benefit from such changes? Thus far, research has mainly focussed on the pandemic’s initial impact. Much less is known about its effects in the medium run and if early adjustments have turned into permanent changes. As more data is becoming available, it is now possible to assess how individual labour market biographies have been affected; how firms adapted to disruptions in their production processes; how the effects of the pandemic differed between regions, sectors or occupations; and whether certain policies have been changed permanently as a result of the crisis. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers to present and discuss current work on the labour market consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  1. How have individual labour market biographies been affected by the pandemic?
  2. Do pandemic effects differ between groups of individuals and have there been changes in labour market inequality?
  3. Has the pandemic led to labour market scarring?
  4. How have school-to-work transitions, entries into training or transitions from training into employment been affected?
  5. How has the allocation of household or care tasks changed during the pandemic?
  6. Has occupational mobility changed as a result of the pandemic?
  7. How have firms responded to the pandemic?
  8. How has the adoption of working-from-home schemes affected firms’ production processes?
  9. Has the pandemic led to more investment in digital technologies and how has this affected the workers at the firm?
  10. Has occupation- or task-specific labour demand changed during the pandemic?
  11. How has short-term work been used during the pandemic?
  12. Have firms adjusted their (international) supply chains?
  13. Have urban labour markets become less attractive?
  14. Have regional labour market disparities increased as a result of the pandemic?

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