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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This paper studies the role of wages and job benefits in job search behavior. We use wage and benefit data from a market-leading employer review platform and run a large-scale randomized control trial on an online job board to estimate the elasticity of job seekers' applications to posted wages and their willingness to pay for job benefits. A 10% higher wage increases job seekers' probability to view and apply to an ad by 3-5%. Many job benefits are highly valued by job seekers: Home office and company cars are valued at around 15 percent of wages, company-provided child care at 10 percent and and parking spots at around 7 percent of wages. The average vacancy offers job benefits worth 25 percent of wages. We further document that higher-paying firms typically offer more amenities. Taking the distribution and valuation of job benefits into account, we show that job value inequality is significantly higher than wage inequality. 

Legal rights continue to differ between women and men, particularly in developing countries. In this paper, we examine whether economic integration can improve gender equality by the law during working life. We design a novel instrumental variable strategy based on regional waves of globalization, which serve as strong exogenous predictors of national globalization trends. Our main estimate suggests that an increase in globalization by one relative standard deviation, equivalent to a permanent transition from Indonesia to the United States, is associated with an 12.1% increase in gender equality, measured by the extent to which men and women are treated equally by law. We also find that this effect is almost entirely driven by de facto globalization. Linking globalization to more than 300,000 individuals from over 100 countries, we provide evidence for a microfoundation of the macroeconomic effects.

In this talk, a larger project that seeks to understand the role of employers in the inheritance of economic status, is discussed.

Intergenerational mobility, the extent to which individuals can achieve economic success regardless of their family background, is a key indicator of equality of opportunity. While labor market outcomes reflect both individual traits and firm-level pay-setting, research on intergenerational mobility has largely focused on the former.

In this talk, I discuss a larger project that seeks to understand the role of employers in the inheritance of economic status. In contemporary Sweden, sorting across workplaces accounts for between one-quarter (employers) and two-fifths (establishments) of the intergenerational correlation in labor earnings. Privileged workers tend to sort into firms that both generate higher value-added and distribute a larger share of surplus to employees. Although workers from less advantaged backgrounds benefit equally when employed by high-paying firms, they are much less likely to gain access to them. I quantify the roles of education, occupation, parental job networks, and the inheritance of industry, employer, and local labor market. I then conclude by outlining a broader research agenda using linked employer-employee data to systematically assess how workplace-level mechanisms shape inequality by social origin.

Why do only few couples choose the female spouse as main provider of labour income?

Why do only few couples choose the female spouse as main provider of labour income? To understand gender imbalances among family breadwinners, I present a collective household production model with identity concerns that illuminates different channels through which gender norms can affect household specialisation decisions. To test the predictions of the model regarding identity, I develop a novel experimental paradigm to study the specialisation choices of real heterosexual couples in the lab.

Women are less likely to become breadwinners than men are, but this is mainly due to gender differences in productivity. While I find little evidence that concerns for gender identity affect specialisation choices, the results suggest they amplify gender differences in labour supply at the intensive margin. The design further allows me to shed light on two additional factors that contribute to the gender imbalance among breadwinners: men’s overconfidence and women’s reluctance to assume sole responsibility for household income.

This paper investigates whether power vacua lead to collective action of marginalised groups.

In this paper, we investigate whether power vacua lead to collective action of marginalised groups. Specifically, we examine whether the large share of men missing during WWI in Germany led to an increase in the suffragette movement fighting for women's right to vote. We exploit exogenous variation in the drafting probability arising from regional differences in recruitment responsibility and link it to the presence of local suffragette clubs.

Our results suggest that women were more likely to keep open local suffragette clubs in regions with higher male absences during the war. We further explore two additional outcomes of male absences related to women's empowerment. First, we show that male absences led to increased political participation among women once female voting rights were introduced. Second, using data on employment by industry and gender, we show that missing men contributed to the growing importance of women in the economic sphere.

This study shows how new digital technology reshapes vocational training and skill acquisition.

We study how new digital technology reshapes vocational training and skill acquisition and its impact on workers' careers. We construct a novel database of legally binding training curricula and changes therein, spanning the near universe of vocational training in Germany over five decades, and link curriculum updates to breakthrough technologies using Natural Language Processing techniques.

Our findings reveal that technological advances drive training updates, with curriculum content evolving towards greater use of digital and social skills, and less routine intensive tasks, mostly through new skill emergence. Using administrative employer-employee data, we show that educational updates help workers adapt to new demands for their expertise, and earn higher wages compared to workers with outdated skills. These findings highlight the role of changes in within-occupational skill supply in meeting evolving labor market demands for non-college educated workers.

Joint with Anna Salomons and Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage.

This study examines the case of a multilingual digital information platform designed to support migrant integration.

This study examines the case of a multilingual digital information platform designed to support migrant integration at the level of German districts and cities. Utilizing a dataset of 11.8 million website logs from 2018 to 2024, covering over 100 participating regions, the research investigates how local administrations prioritize information provision given their typically limited capacities - and to what extent this prioritization aligns with users' demands.

Descriptive findings reveal significant disparities in thematic focus and language offerings across districts. Additionally, multivariate logistic regressions are employed to map the probability of users' page views (demand) over 20 topics and levels of content provision (supply). Thus, topics providing immediate practical value, such as opening hours and mobility information, show high demand relative to supply. Topics representing the acquisition of key resources or knowledge - like language learning, housing, or legal issues - demonstrate both high demand and responsiveness to increased supply. This indicates that users are motivated to navigate even through detailed, deeply nested pages for these topics.

Furthermore, the research reveals varying information demand across language groups, likely reflecting their distinct integration contexts. Overall, the findings highlight the need for tailored, demographically informed content strategies that account for language-specific needs in supporting refugee integration locally. Multilingual and locally relevant information is in high demand by newcomers, but providing it effectively requires careful attention, especially given local administrations’ limited resources.

This paper addresses the gap by exploring how immigration background intersects with gender wage inequalities.

Worldwide, significant progress has been made towards gender equality in recent decades. However, persistent disparities remain: women continue to earn less than men and face greater obstacles in career advancement. The enduring issue of the "gender pay gap" reflects these challenges. Surprisingly, despite the growing gender-migrational diversity of the European workforce, research has largely treated women as a homogeneous group, overlooking critical intersections between gender and immigration background.
This paper addresses this gap by exploring how immigration background intersects with gender wage inequalities and how these inequalities vary across European countries. Using pooled data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2011–2020), it seeks to enhance our understanding of cross-national differences in wage disparities between immigrant and native women. Specifically, it addresses two key questions: (1) To what extent do European countries differ in the wage penalties faced by immigrant women compared to their native counterparts? (2) To what extent can these cross-national differences be explained by structural features of the labour market?

The findings reveal that immigrant women, particularly those from non-EU countries, experience the most pronounced wage penalties compared to native women, with substantial variation across EU countries. These disparities appear partly attributable to structural labour market factors, underscoring the need for nuanced, intersectional analyses.