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Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

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.

Can marriage increase gender equality by estimating the causal effect of marriage vs cohabitation on labour market trajectories of new parents.

Traditionally, a "marriage surplus" was created through specialization of household activities, but in modern times gains from a more egalitarian marriage can be through increased coordination.

We ask for the first time whether marriage can increase gender equality by estimating the causal effect of marriage vs cohabitation on labour market trajectories of new parents. Applying a Marginal Treatment Effects framework, the average treatment effect of marriage is consistent with specialization - marriage causes women to work less and men more. This average effect hides treatment effect heterogeneity across unobservables, whereby the couples "more resistant" to marry - i.e. the more modern couples, exhibit coordination of labour market activities.

There is no longer a marriage penalty to women and the coordinating men earn less if married than if cohabiting. Given this, we ask whether increased gender equality for the coordinators lowers or raises household welfare, finding no effect of marriage on children for specializers or coordinators, and a reduction in separation from marriage for coordinators - suggesting that moving away from masculine male breadwinner norms can improve relationship contentedness.

This seminar is about understanding how individuals form expectations about future wages.

Understanding how individuals form expectations about future wages and how these prospects evolve over time is crucial for assessing the acceptability of existing wage disparities. Providing a novel metric of wage prospects, we propose using probit regressions to assess individual ex-ante expectations of earning a wage from a specific quintile of the wage distribution and relate these estimates to realized (i.e., ex-post) wage outcomes.

Utilizing a large dataset of almost 250,000 observations from the German Socio-Economic Panel, covering the period from 1992 to 2020, our study reveals strong segmentations in the German labor market by gender and region, with women and East German workers more likely to earn lower wages. The 2003-2005 labor market reforms increased the probability of earning lower wages overall but slightly reduced gender and regional segmentation. For the bottom income quintiles, the reforms worsened wage prospects, particularly affecting part-time workers, minijobbers, and workers in West Germany.

Conversely, higher income earners saw improved wage prospects post-reforms. Finally, the new measure of wage prospects is predictive of actual wage transitions and exhibits theory-conform correlation with life satisfaction, which underscores its importance for understanding individual fairness considerations.

This paper quantifies the share of dismissals distorted by conflict and identifies the drivers.

Dismissal costs are shaped by firm and worker behavior. While they might coordinate to minimize costs, adversarial separations may also entail cost-seeking actions ("conflict").

This paper quantifies the share of dismissals distorted by conflict and identifies the drivers. Our strategy exploits the choice between two modes of separation in France: personal dismissals and ''separations by mutual agreement'' (SMAs). Since SMAs waive dismissal red tape costs and enable severance pay bargaining, they should always be preferred to dismissals in an efficient bargaining model. In contrast, we find that only 12% of potential dismissals are resolved through SMAs. We then identify the sources of conflict that lead to the choice of the costlier separation mode in 88% of dismissals.

Our survey of HR directors reveals three crucial drivers, which account for 63% of the failures to convert dismissals into SMAs: (i) hostility between the employer and the employee, (ii) employers using dismissals as a discipline device, and (iii) asymmetric beliefs about labor court outcomes following a dismissal.