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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

In light of the debate over inclusive education, this paper evaluates the impact of exposure to special needs (SN) peers. More classroom peers with SN lower performance, the probability of entering postcompulsory education, and earnings at ages 17-25. SN students and students at the lower end of the achievement distribution suffer most from higher inclusion. We analyze reallocation policies and government interventions to alleviate negative externalities. We demonstrate that inclusion is preferable to segregation in terms of maximizing average test scores and that teacher quality is key to alleviating negative classroom externalities, while financial resources are not.

We present evidence on the employment outcomes among refugees who obtained legal access to the Austrian labour market between 2001 and 2017. The analyses are based on comprehensive administrative data sets from Austrian social security registers matched to process-based data from the Public Employment Service. We focus on prime-working age refugees from 31 origin countries. Our presentation will elaborate on three factors related to differential employment outcomes: The role of the education attained in the source country, the role of source country characteristics, and the length of the asylum proceedings. We find that higher levels of education are not associated with better employment outcomes. Instead, we find higher educated male refugees to be less successful on the Austrian labour market compared to their counterparts with compulsory education. This pattern of findings holds across different source countries. Moreover, there is some evidence that female refugees from countries with a low rate of female labour force participation (proxy for gender culture) are less likely to enter the host labour market. We also find that the length of the asylum proceedings is positively related to employment outcomes following legal labour market access. Related employment gaps, which are robust to various specifications and outcome measures, are larger among men than among women.

Replicability is at the core of the scientific enterprise. In the past 30 years, recurring concerns about the extent of replicability (or lack thereof) of the research in various disciplines have surfaced, including in economics.

In this talk, I describe the context in which the current discussion in the social science is occurring: what are the definitions of replicability and reproducibility, what is failing, and to what extent. In particular, I discuss the concerns in economics: to what extent is this a problem in economics, what are the approaches that are being considered, and what are the possible broader implications of those approaches. Finally, I discuss the concrete measures that are being implemented under my guidance at the American Economic Association, and that are being discussed in the broader economics community.

The solutions to these problems will change the way research will be taught and conducted, in economics in particular, and in the social sciences more broadly. The implications affect undergraduate and graduate teaching, research infrastructure, and habits.

About 1.4 million refugees and irregular migrants arrived in Europe in 2015 and 2016. We model how refugees and irregular migrants are self-selected. Using unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls, we provide the first large-scale evidence on reasons to emigrate, and the self-selection and sorting of refugees and irregular migrants for multiple origin and destination countries. Refugees and female irregular migrants are positively self-selected with respect to education, while male irregular migrants are not. We also find that both male and female migrants from major conflict countries are positively self-selected in terms of their predicted income. For countries with minor or no conflict, migrant and non-migrant men do not differ in terms of their income distribution. We also analyze how border controls affect destination country choice.

In recent years, research on education in developing countries has shifted its focus from increasing school inputs and improving infrastructure to enhancing the quality of interactions within the classroom, both between teachers and students and between the students themselves. Focusing on the latter, we design and implement a randomized experiment within Indian schools at post-primary levels to detect the effects of collaborative learning practices on student academic and non-academic outcomes. Of particular focus is whether collaborative learning benefits both high-achieving and low-achieving students alike, and whether they aid the learning process of first-generation learners and children drawn from disadvantaged populations.

Migrant selectivity refers to the notion that immigrants differ in certain characteristics from individuals who stay behind. This talk considers patterns and consequences of selectivity. The first part depicts the selectivity profiles of recently arrived immigrants in Germany and thus provides an illustration of the sociodemographic composition of current migration streams. The second part is dedicated to the consequences of educational selectivity for new immigrants’ language acquisition in different European destinations. We start by describing the selectivity profiles of recent migrants to Germany with respect to educational attainment, age and sex. We illustrate how refugees differ from labor migrants, and we compare the profiles of Syrian refugees who overcame the distance to Europe to Syrian refugees who settled in the neighboring countries Lebanon or Jordan. We rely on destination-country data from the IB-BMF-GSOEP Survey of Refugees, the Arab Barometer, and the German Microcensus as well as on a broad range of origin-country data sources. Regarding sex selectivity, males dominate among refugees in Germany, while, among economic migrants, sex distributions are more balanced. Relative to the societies of origin, labor migrants are younger than refugees. At the same time, both types of migrants are drawn from the younger segments of their origin populations. In terms of educational attainment, many refugees perform rather poorly relative to German standards, but compare positively to their origin populations. The educational profiles for labor migrants are mixed. Finally, Syrians who settle in Germany are younger, more often male and relatively better educated than Syrians migrating to Jordan or Lebanon.

Many industrialized countries show a huge undersupply of workers and students in the area of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM). The low share of students who engage in STEM subjects is particularly noticeable among girls, whose share in many STEM subjects is still far below 20% (DESTTIS, 2017). The explanations for the gender gap are manifold and range from individual characteristics to social norms and expectations (Kanny et al., 2014). nother approach highlights the role of psychological resources and the perception of STEM fields. In a nutshell, it is hypothesized that girls refrain from STEM fields, which are commonly regarded as one of the most demanding fields of study, due to a lack of self-confidence/self-efficacy and the belief that they are able to master the challenge of a STEM study programme (van-alderen-Smets and van der Molen, 2018). In this paper, we build on this theoretical argument and analyse whether a counselling workshop for high school pupils intended to foster psychological resources increases the intention to choose a MINT subject among programme participants in general and girls in particular. We rely on a pre-post design with randomized treatment assignment to analyse the effect of the workshop. To account for two-sided non-compliance, we run instrumental variable (2SLS) regression with treatment assignment as IV and actual treatment status as endogenous regressor. Our estimates show mixed results on both groups of outcomes. When it comes to psychological resources, we find a positive impact on some but not all psychometric scales that is surprisingly stronger for boys. When it comes to MINT choice, we find a positive effect for both genders but only for soft (nature) but not for hard (maths, IT and technology) MINT subjects for both genders. These results suggest that psychological counselling can promote STEM choice, while there is little evidence that the effect is stronger for girls.

We present a sharp test for the efficiency of job separations. First, we document a dramatic increase in the separation rate – 11.2ppt (28%) over five years – in response to a quasi-experimental extension of UI benefit duration for older workers. Second, after the abolition of the policy, the “job survivors” in the formerly treated group exhibit exactly the same separation behavior as the control group. Juxtaposed, these facts reject the “Coasean” prediction of efficient separations, whereby the UI extensions should have extracted marginal (low-surplus) jobs and thereby rendered the remaining (high-surplus) jobs more resilient after its abolition. Third, we show that a formal model of predicted efficient separations implies a piece-wise linear function of the actual control group separations beyond the missing mass of marginal matches. A structural estimation reveals point estimates of the share of efficient separations below 4%, with confidence intervals rejecting shares above 13%. Fourth, to characterize the marginal jobs in the data, we extend complier analysis to difference-indifference settings such as ours. The UI-induced separators stemmed from declining firms, blue-collar jobs, with a high share of sick older workers, and firms more likely to have works councils – while their wages were similar to program survivors. The evidence is consistent with a “non-Coasean” framework building on wage frictions preventing efficient bargaining, and with formal or informal institutional constraints on selective separations.

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with an instrumental variables approach to estimate the long-term, post-reunification effect of government surveillance. We find that a larger spying density led to persistently lower levels of interpersonal and institutional trust in post-reunification Germany. We also find substantial and long-lasting economic effects of Stasi surveillance, resulting in lower income, higher exposure to unemployment and lower self-employment.

In recent decades, women’s labor market participation in the Netherlands and other Western European countries has dramatically increased. However, earnings of men and women still show substantial gaps around childbirth (Budig & England, 2001; Kleven, Landais, Posch, Steinhauer, & Zweimüller, 2019). t an early age, childbirth might be even more crucial to the emergence of inequalities (Chevalier & Viitanen, 2003; Gibb, Fergusson, Horwood, & Boden, 2015). To understand this process, we study young women’s education and employment trajectories around first childbirths. We observe monthly activities up to two years before and five years after. In line with previous research (Vlasblom & Schippers, 2006), we find substantial path dependence of pre to post birth trajectories. In a next step, we aim to explain this path dependence by means of human capital and social capital theories.