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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) is pleased to invite submissions for a workshop on “Vacancies, Hiring and Matching” in Nuremberg on October 1 and 2, 2019. In 2019, the IAB celebrates the 30th anniversary of the German Job Vacancy Survey, which has been collecting representative data
on vacancies and hiring processes since 1989. Given that the nature of employers’ vacancy posting
and hiring processes is an important, but still under-researched topic, the workshop’s objective is to
discuss recent developments in the following research areas:

  • Empirical research based on employer-level and/or vacancy data (also online vacancy data)
  • Macroeconomic work dealing with vacancies, labor market flows or the matching process
  • Other empirical studies on labor demand and the hiring of workers
  • Methodological work discussing employer-level data collection and/or the measurement of vacancies and labor flows

People who say that they are better off socioeconomically are healthier than those who say that they are worse off, even when only comparing people whose objective socioeconomic status is the same. This association between perceived socioeconomic status and health has intrigued social scientists for various reasons. Some suggest that the finding shows that it is feelings of inferiority by which social conditions "come under the skin." Others suggest that it shows how our objective measures of  socioeconomic status fail to capture stratification in contemporary societies. In our study, we take a step back to re-examine the perceived socioeconomic status-health association in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). Using hybrid, within-between panel regression models and allostatic load as biomarker health outcome, we show that perceived socioeconomic status is only associated with health in comparisons across individuals, in within-specifications where participants serve as their own controls, no association can be found. In a further step, we show how the between-participant association is driven by personality traits and childhood experiences. We discuss the implications of our findings. This is joint work with Lindsay Richards, University of Oxford, and Asri Maharani, University of Manchester.

Different Paths – Different Outcomes? Changes in the Acquisition of the Higher Education Entrance Qualification and Educational Pathways of Graduates

Today, the majority of the 18-19 year olds acquires a higher education entrance qualification. While most of them do so by obtaining a general secondary school certificate (e.g., Abitur, Matura, Baccalauréat, A-Levels), alternative paths to acquiring a higher education entrance qualification might apply. Moreover, cooperative education programmes integrating vocational and tertiary education (“Duales Studium”), which provide an alternative path to university studies and vocational training, have become increasingly popular.

How these changes shape education and career paths of students/degree holders is the focus topic of this year’s 2nd Forum „Higher Education and the Labour Market“. Of particular interest are papers focusing on the education and career paths of the new (non-traditional) student groups or analysing (and ideally comparing) students following the different educational tracks (university studies, vocational training, cooperative education programmes). Contributions might, for example, cover topics like:

  • Who chooses (traditional) higher education programmes, who chooses vocational education, and who opts for cooperative education programmes? Are there systematic differences in students’ choices between these options, for example due to gender, academic or migration background, the type of entrance qualification, and/or individual competences?
  • What determines the choice of subjects in higher education or vocational training?
  • Does the type of higher education entrance qualification influence the success in vocational and higher education?
  • Are training and/or study decisions revised later on? And if so, when will this be the case, who will be most likely to revise her or his decision, are some decisions more likely to be revised than others, and which alternative paths are taken?
  • It is often argued that vocational and tertiary education convey different types of competencies (more specific vs. more general). How do these differences in competence endowments affect degree holders’ labour market chances?

In addition to the focus topic we are also interested in contributions that deal with the link between higher education and the labour market in general. Examples are papers focusing on topics like returns to education, overeducation among holders of tertiary degrees, labour market transitions of university drop-outs, graduates’ placement on the labour market – especially with regard to graduates with different types of degrees (e.g., B.A./M.A), or differences over time resulting from the increase in take-up of university studies.

The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the Labor and Socio-Economic Research Center (LASER) of the University of Erlangen Nuremberg are pleased to announce a workshop on field experiments in policy evaluation. Randomized experiments are the golden standard of causal analysis and have become an important tool in policy evaluations. However, conducting field experiments poses several methodical challenges like external validity, spillover effects, or dynamic selection. The two-day workshop seeks to bring together researchers focusing on policy evaluations using a field experimental design. Studies addressing one of the following fields are particularly welcome:

  • Labor economics
  • Economics of education
  • Health economics

The 4th Workshop on “Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market” focuses on topics concerning regional labour markets. This year, a special focus is placed on the causes and consequences of agglomeration effects, and on local labour markets. The workshop aims to bring together frontier researchers from the areas of labour economics, regional economics, geography and other related fields. Theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented contributions are welcome.

Technological advances in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence are increasingly making it possible for machines to perform tasks that previously could only be done by humans. This development has sparked scientific and public debates on the future of work, often dealing with automation and the substitution of labor. The transformation of the working environment goes hand in hand with a reorganization of company structures, occupational and workplace-related content and skill requirements. New inequality paths are emerging and labor market participants are being confronted differently with these changes. In addition, educational and other institutional frameworks keep influencing the labor market. The aim of this conference is to bring together economists, sociologists and researchers from related fields to discuss frontier research on labor market effects of automation and digitization. Special focus is on the following questions:

  • How do new technologies affect the level and structure of employment?
  • How are new technologies changing work content?
  • What are the (non-)monetary returns to work content?
  • How do new technologies shape skill demands and which role do social skills play?
  • How does technology affect overall inequality and also inequality between firms and workers?
  • How does the role of educational and labor market institutions change?
  • How do firms and workers adapt to changing requirements?
  • How can policy help firms and workers who are struggling to adapt to digital transformation?

The scientific committee encourages theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented contributions from all areas of labor economics, labor sociology and related fields.

For the T2M 2019 conference, the program committee has selected special sessions organized by leading researchers in these fields:

  • “Expectations in macroeconomics” by Ruediger Bachmann (University of Notre Dame)
  • “Safe assets and the macroeconomy” by Kenza Benhima (Université de Lausanne)
  • “IAB data and macro applications” by Britta Gehrke (IAB and FAU)
  • “Vacancies and recruitment” by Leo Kaas (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
  • “Real exchange rate dynamics” by Gernot Müller (Universität Tübingen)

We are very pleased to announce the first CASD / IAB Conference on the advances in social sciences using administrative and survey data. The CASD and the IAB have recently established cross-country access to confidential administrative data in France and Germany. The aim is to foster and facilitate the use of rich register datasets – which can be partly combined with detailed survey data – from both countries and to improve the data sources for comparative research in social sciences.

The conference aims to bring together researchers using confidential administrative data in France and Germany and also welcomes researchers using similar data from other countries.

This Anglo-German network is being set up to explore the dynamics of the school-to-work transition and its consequences across the life course in the context of educational expansion and technological change. Educational expansion, in particular of higher education, changes school-to-work transition patterns and individual career development in the labour market. At the same time, technological change affects the school-to-work transition by altering the process of individual skill acquisition and the fields of training and study available. The implications of these macro developments for social and educational inequality remain unclear.

The benefit of an Anglo-German comparison in this context is the different timing and degree of educational expansion and technological change in their respective labour markets. Aligning research strategies using German and British data will enable us to generalise our findings given the different institutional settings. The first meeting of the network will focus on innovative empirical designs and on longitudinal data to provide new insights to these broad themes.

Participants in the network should be close to completing a PhD or be within seven years of receipt of a PhD. They should be quantitative education or labour market researchers (economists, sociologists, psychologists, or a related social science discipline) and carry out research on the school-to-work transition and its consequences in the UK or Germany using (quasi-)experimental designs or longitudinal data. Ten will be based in Germany and 10 in the UK.

A successful academic career relies on building strong international networks; however, opportunities for early career researchers to do this are limited. At the same time, there is uncertainty about how Brexit will affect the research funding landscape, particularly for international collaborations. The United Kingdom and Germany have strong research institutions and excellent sources of longitudinal data that can be used to answer questions about education, skills, and life outcomes.

A follow-up workshop will take place at University College London in the autumn.

Senior academics

  • Prof. Michael Gebel (University of Bamberg)
  • Prof. Sandra McNally (University of Surrey and London School of Economics)

There is growing interest in the gender wage gap (GWG) in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Recent policy initiatives have tried to increase pressure on employers to ensure their policies and practices do not discriminate, either directly or indirectly, against women. In Germany and the UK, for instance, there are new requirements for large employers to report their GWG.

These initiatives come after a period in which the GWG has been falling, albeit slowly. The GWG remains large, despite the fact that women have overtaken men in terms of academic attainment and have been closing the work experience gap. Compared to a few decades ago, human capital variables explain relatively little of the GWG. The question arises: how do we account for the remaining GWG?
One issue that remains poorly understood is the role of the employer. This seems ironic in light of popular conceptions about where the GWG originates and in light of policy initiatives targeting employers. It arises because most of the analysis of the GWG undertaken by economists and other academics is not based on linked employer-employee data (LEED). Consequently, we only know a limited amount about the role played by employer heterogeneity and worker-firm matches in accounting for the GWG. There are theoretical grounds for thinking that worker sorting and segregation across workplaces and firms could play a sizeable role in accounting for the GWG, and that there may be substantial across-employer heterogeneity in terms of women’s earnings progression.
Some papers have been written using LEED to understand the GWG but, as yet, there is little consensus about the role of workplaces and firms in helping to explain the GWG.

The purpose of the workshop is four-fold, namely to:

  • Promote understanding of the role employers play in accounting for the GWG;
  • Establish the size of the GWG across countries and how the gap varies when accounting for the identity of the employer;
  • Identify mechanisms, which help explain the size of the GWG, e.g. discrimination, worker sorting, worker segmentation, monopsony employer power, rent-sharing, compensating wage differentials;
  • Discuss methodological challenges and avenues for future research for academics using LEED to investigate the GWG.