Hybrid Archive - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

In-Person Schooling and Juvenile Violence

This study comprehensively explores the effect of in-person schooling on contemporaneous juvenile violence.

While investments in schooling generate large private and external returns, negative peer interactions in school may generate substantial social costs.

Using data from four national sources (Uniform Crime Reports, National Incident-Based Reporting System, National Crime Victimization Survey, National Electronic Injury Surveillance System) and a variety of identification strategies, this study comprehensively explores the effect of in-person schooling on contemporaneous juvenile violence. Using a proxy for in-person schooling generated from anonymized smartphone data and leveraging county-level variation in school calendars - including unique, large, localized changes to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic - we find that in-person schooling is associated with a 28 percent increase in juvenile violent crime. A null finding for young adults is consistent with a causal interpretation of this result.

The effects are largest in larger schools and in jurisdictions with weaker anti-bullying policies, consistent with both concentration effects and a peer quality channel. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that relative to closed K-12 schools, in-person schooling generates $233 million in monthly violent crime costs.

Trade Shocks: Next generation

This paper explores the effects of childhood import shocks on long-run outcomes using linked full-count Census data.

This paper explores the effects of childhood import shocks on long-run outcomes using linked full-count Census data between 1910 and 1940 and a novel identification strategy that isolates quasi-random variation in local import competition.

We show that individuals exposed to import competition in their first 10 years of life report lower incomes and reduced upward mobility 30 years later, with effects that fall most heavily on the left tail of the income distribution. More exposed individuals also exhibit lower educational attainment and increased mobility between states.

Intergenerational structural change plays a critical role in our results, with import competition reducing the probability that sons work in high-earning, high-education occupations regardless of their father’s income level.

(Joint work with John Lopresti and Andrew Greenland).

Matching with preferences: Caring who cares for the old

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data.

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data from a matchmaking agency that records households' and workers' ex-ante preferences, realized matches, wages, and job durations.

I estimate a structural matching model to recover each party's valuation of match attributes as a function of preferences, and their impact on employment stability. Linking the data to population registers shows that demand is rising fastest where preferences over workers' origin are stronger, while gender preferences will weaken.

Simulations predict welfare changes under varying care worker compositions and suggest that losses from a shift toward distant immigrant workers are modest.

The Effect of Public Sector Relocations on Regional Development in Germany

This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local labor markets.

Regional economic disparities within countries have become increasingly large, often surpassing the disparities observed between countries. To address regional inequality, governments have been turning away from standard subsidies and are experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy.

This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local labor markets. I study the ‘Heimatstrategie,’ which relocates around 3,000 public sector jobs from Munich to economically lagging regions in Bavaria, Germany. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations between 2015 and 2025, I exploit the government’s quantitative selection criteria for receiving municipalities and implement a long-differences design comparing treated Bavarian municipalities to Mahalanobis-matched control municipalities in other German states.

My estimates show that relocations increased private sector employment shares by up to 2.3%, reduced unemployment rates by up to 11.9%, and increased local population by up to 1.6% without harming sending locations. These results provide new causal evidence on public employment multipliers from non-capital city relocations, addressing external validity concerns in the existing literature.

The Economics of Paid Sick Leave

This article examines the economics of paid sick leave from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.

This article examines the economics of paid sick leave from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Research on paid sick leave has evolved dynamically over the last decade, primarily driven by U.S. sick pay mandates, which have increased paid sick leave access from 63 percent to 77 percent in all U.S. jobs.

We begin by discussing the economic rationales for government regulation, particularly the negative externalities associated with contagious diseases when individuals work while sick. Then, we review economic modeling approaches to study optimal paid sick leave policies. After that, we discuss key trade-offs in the general design of paid sick leave schemes along with trade-offs when setting specific policy parameters.

Methodological Experiments to Inform Adaptive Survey Designs in Longitudinal Research

This presentation reports on recent experimental work aimed at improving survey performance.

This presentation reports on recent experimental work aimed at improving survey performance with respect to the joint optimization of response rates, nonresponse bias, and fieldwork costs in a long-running large-scale household panel. Drawing on the main study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), including the IAB-SOEP Migration Samples and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Refugee Survey, I discuss four field experiments designed to identify leverage points for more efficient and less biased data collection.
First, I present two incentive experiments: (1) a study testing the effectiveness of prepaid incentives in combination with post-paid incentives in a panel study, and (2) an experiment evaluating unconditional pre-paid and “early-bird” incentives in a mature panel context. Second, I summarize preliminary findings from two multimode experiments. One assigns respondents at random to one of three interviewing modes: video interviewing (CALVI), interviewer-administered face-to-face (CAPI), or web self-completion (CAWI). The other experiment randomly transitions 50% of households from CAPI to a CAWI-with-CAPI-follow-up design, while the remaining 50% continue in their familiar CAPI mode.

Using evidence from these studies, I outline the derivation of an adaptive mode-assignment strategy for household panels - an approach that tailors data-collection modes to household characteristics and response propensities with the goal of stabilizing data quality while reducing costs. I conclude by highlighting methodological pitfalls encountered in the experiments and by outlining next steps toward fully operational adaptive survey designs.

This presentation draws partly on joint work with colleagues from the SOEP team, researchers at the Federal Institute for Population Research, and GESIS.

Gender Differences in Performance: The Role of External Testing Environments

This study is whether evaluation settings shape early gender gaps using population-level administrative records.

Gender occupational segregation remains a central barrier to closing the earnings gap, with women underrepresented in high-paying, math-intensive careers.

We study whether evaluation settings shape early gender gaps using population-level administrative records covering all 6th-graders in Madrid and multiple rounds of school-level randomization to identical standardized exams administered either internally or externally. Girls’ mathematics performance declines under external administration, while verbal performance is unaffected. To examine mechanisms, we link administrative records to contemporaneous student-level attitudes and beliefs from a post-exam survey. We provide causal evidence that girls’ underperformance in mathematics under external administration is explained by higher stress.

These findings establish evaluation settings as an overlooked determinant of early gender gaps with lasting consequences for career segregation.

Left Behind? West-East German Disparities in the Cost of Job Loss

This paper studies regional disparities in the cost of job loss between West and East Germany.

Based on German administrative data, I document that, relative to their pre-displacement level, earnings losses of displaced workers are on average lower in East Germany than in West Germany. A shift–share decomposition shows that roughly one-third of this West–East gap is due to differences in the industry mix of job destruction: after the early deindustrialization of the East, job losses there were less concentrated in manufacturing and more in construction than in the West.

The remaining two thirds reflects smaller earnings losses in the East within industries, which are linked to lower firm wage premia among East German employers. Structural effects - the earnings losses associated with the same job lost across different regions - allow identifying an earnings penalty for displaced workers in the East that is more in line with the weaker labor market performance of the East. Although regional mobility to the West offsets earnings losses among movers, the vast majority of East Germans do not relocate to the West after job loss.

Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills

While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of-school learning.

English-language skills are a near necessity in today’s global economy. Are they influenced by historically rooted differences in whether countries subtitle or dub foreign TV content?

While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of-school learning. We identify the causal effect of subtitling in a difference-in-differences specification that compares English to math skills in European countries that do and do not use subtitles. We find a large positive effect of subtitling on English-language skills of over one standard deviation.

The effect is robust to accounting for linguistic similarity, economic incentives to learn English, and cultural protectiveness. Consistent with oral TV transmission, the effect is larger for listening and speaking skills than for reading.

Joint: with Frauke Baumeister and Eric A. Hanushek

The Network Origin of Slow Labor Reallocation

This paper introduces a new network framework to analyze how skill frictions shapes the speed of labor market adjustment.

How fast do labor markets adjust to technology shocks? This paper introduces a new network framework to analyze how skill frictions shapes the speed of labor market adjustment.

Using expert data, I construct an occupation network where links capture feasible transitions based on shared skills. This network is sparse and clustered, with a few critical “bridge occupations” connecting otherwise separate clusters of occupations. Leveraging French administrative data, I show that workers transitioning through these bridges reach higher-wage, lower-unemployment occupations. Next, I develop a job-search model embedded in this occupation network and find that bridge occupations disproportionately influence overall reallocation speed. Quantitatively, the model predicts that robot adoption induces a slow reallocation process - lasting around ten years - and reduces welfare gains by 40%, an order of magnitude higher than previous estimates.

Policies targeting bridge occupations significantly accelerate reallocation, outperforming interventions focused on expanding sectors.

These findings highlight the crucial role of occupation networks in shaping labor market adjustments and provide new insights for policy design.