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Veranstaltungsformat: Hybrid

This study is about prevalence, perceived costs and consequences of sexual harassment (SH) in German workplaces.

We study the prevalence, perceived costs and consequences of sexual harassment (SH) in German workplaces. We first use a discrete choice experiment to estimate workers' willingness to pay (WTP) for workplaces without a history of known SH cases and preventive firm measures. Women, particularly early in their careers, display the highest WTP. Preventive measures significantly increase the attractiveness of workplaces, even when there is a history of SH.

Motivated by these results, we then document SH experiences using new data from the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP) and the IAB-OPAL online panel. SH is widespread: 20 percent of employees have either experienced SH at work personally or in their close work environment. Women are affected significantly more often than men. Women are also less likely to trust that leadership will respond appropriately to reported cases, and this lack of trust correlates with higher experienced incidence rates. Firms with active complaint procedures and preventive measures report greater employee awareness and more open discussion of SH. Taken together, our findings provide a strong economic rationale for preventive policies.

This study evaluates the Education Maintenance Allowance in England.

We evaluate the Education Maintenance Allowance, a large conditional cash transfer that paid teenagers from lower-income backgrounds up to $3,200 per year to remain in full-time education beyond the compulsory school-leaving age.

Exploiting the program's staggered rollout in England, we find that it increased education participation and reduced crime. However, we find no improvements in test scores, no effect on qualifications beyond the lowest level, and a small negative effect on labour market outcomes up to age 30. A key channel appears to be delayed labour market entry without offsetting gains in human capital.

This study shows us that the city-size wage premium is larger for low-skilled than for high-skilled workers in Peru.

We use individual geocoded data from Peru and document that the city-size wage premium is larger for low-skilled than for high-skilled workers, in contrast with most developed countries. We interpret this evidence using a model of location choice with private amenity goods and non-homothetic preferences.

Skilled workers enjoy higher incomes and devote a higher expenditure share to amenity goods, such as private schools or upper-class neighborhoods. The supply of these amenities is subject to a fixed cost, and only sufficiently large cities have enough demand to offer them. Thus, skilled workers demand a higher wage premium to live in small cities, and the returns to working in a large city are smaller for them than for their unskilled counterparts. Our quantitative exercises indicate that the mechanism accounts for two-thirds of the gap in the city-size wage premium between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.

joint with Andrii Parkhomenko and Daniel Velásquez-Cabrera

This study rationalizes intuition and evidence altogether using a nonsequential search model.

Employers hire more selectively between heterogeneous productivity workers when applicants' queues are longer. Consistently, CPS data reveal a positive and concave relation between unemployment rates and wage inequality.

We rationalize intuition and evidence altogether using a nonsequential search model in which selective hiring stretches out the right tail of the wage distribution and compresses the left one. Using GMM-estimated parameters, we show that mean worker productivity distribution shifts are consistent with the evidence.

Welfare analysis suggests that regressive taxation may enhance efficiency because expected good matches stimulate vacancies, creating a positive externality for other job seekers.

(joint work with Alessandra Pizzo)

This study is about the Increase in Refugees to Germany by Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and local district-level administrative data.

In 2015–16, Germany experienced a rapid and controversial increase in refugees that varied substantially across German districts. This increase provides unique leverage for analyzing how fractionalization, threat, and contact shape the consequences of immigration and ethnolinguistic heterogeneity.

Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and local district-level administrative data on refugee shares, we innovatively focus on within-person/within-district change in six exclusionary beliefs and behaviors. We demonstrate a two-level cross-cutting process that integrates threat and contact theory but contradicts fractionalization theory.

As the refugee share increased nationally, concerns about immigration and Far Right party support increased. However, district-level refugee shares significantly reduced concerns about immigration and Far Right party support. Also, rising district-level refugee shares are not associated with concerns about social cohesion, trust, residential moves, and subjective fair tax rates. While districts with fewer refugees drove the national-level threat, rising district-level refugee shares reduced or did not heighten exclusionary beliefs and behaviors.

The presentation focuses on the relevance of the labour market in strategies of people living in poverty securing their livelihood.

With the reproach of ‘dependency’, the receipt of welfare benefits is given a pejorative connotation, whereas securing one’s livelihood through paid work is seen as the epitome of ‘independence’ (Fraser/Gordon 1994). However, the assumption that receiving welfare benefits reduces work incentives has been disproved. Research has shown that employment continues to be an important goal for the long-term unemployed and poor (Dörre et al. 2013; Shildrick et al. 2012; Patrick 2017). Yet, access to the labour market is often difficult for people living in poverty for a variety of reasons such as health impairments, unpaid care responsibilities or lack of educational qualifications. When they do find work, it is mostly in precarious jobs with working conditions that are harmful to their health, leading to insecurity and, consequently, other forms of dependency.

Based on an ongoing research project on the welfare production of people living in poverty, the presentation focuses on the relevance of the labour market in their strategies of securing their livelihood: How do they position themselves in the face of the alternative of 'welfare dependency' and the insecurities of the labour market? It will be analysed how their labour market strategies develop and change in the context of individual biographies as well as labour market and welfare state conditions. The data include three interview waves with 40 poor households in Switzerland. Four standpoints with regard to welfare production were taken into account, which also imply different labour market positions: Working poor, who forego welfare benefits; single parents with limited availability for paid work; migrants, whose educational qualifications are often not recognised; and old-age pensioners, who are exempted from the obligation to work.

The findings suggest that particularly migrants without recognised formal qualifications pursue professional plans linked to the goal of social advancement and accept almost any full-time job in the low-wage sector. For single mothers, reconciling paid work with caring responsibilities is crucial, often leading them into fragmented work arrangements with no prospects for advancement. Lone mothers living on social assistance accept adverse working conditions in order to comply with the social norm of working, even if this does not significantly improve their standard of living, as they have to hand over most of their wages to the welfare office. For about half of the sample, labour market opportunities are reduced over the life course due to health impairments. A small number of cases deliberately refuse available employment opportunities in order to realise alternative life plans or roles, while at the same time refusing welfare benefits.

The presentation focuses on interviewees’ labour market strategies and examines the work and employment forms into which they lead them: regular low-wage work, marginal employment in private households, gig work, self-employment and various forms of informal work. It also looks at strategies beyond conventional employment, such as investing in cryptocurrencies, trading second-hand goods or subletting rooms.

This presentation analyzes the agency of poor people from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach.

Multidimensional poverty concepts conceptualize poverty as a combination of material and immaterial lack: a lack of material means which constitutes an important, albeit not the only cause for a lack of self-determination. At the same time, such multidimensional approaches have a strong normative impetus towards acknowledging and promoting the agency of people living in poverty. Thus, while this broader understanding of poverty has its sociological merits, it also leads to a theoretical dilemma: if the lack of self-determination is a defining dimension of poverty, can the poor have agency at all while they are living in poverty? Empirical poverty research mirrors this dilemma in that it mainly focuses on the limited choices of the poor and the detrimental effects of their choices and actions. Finally, there is no doubt that the lack of material means poses countless dilemmas in daily life for the poor, not least because choosing one course of action may jeopardize one’s welfare in other respects, e.g. risking one’s health by accepting a hazardous job (Wollf/de-Shalit 2007).

In this presentation I will analyse the agency of poor people from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach (CA). Agency as the freedom of leading one’s life according to one’s own values constitutes the empirical and normative yardstick for the CA. Moreover, the CA champions a view of human beings as “doers” and “judges” capable of having aspirations and shaping their lives, given adequate individual and social conversion factors (Bonvin/Laruffa 2018). I will discuss three theoretical issues. (1) If value-based choices are a marker of agency, how can we distinguish autonomous choices from adapted preferences stemming from habituation to poor circumstances? (2) All the different strands of the CA posit minimum standards (basic capabilities) for various material and immaterial conversion factors as conditions for genuine agency. For political and measurement purposes these standards must be the same for everyone. In contrast, in qualitative research individual cases constitute the starting point of analysis. How can we thus bring together general standards with individual ideas of ‘good enough’ living conditions expressed in qualitative interviews? (3) Agency is not a binary phenomenon but a gradual one. Referring to the debate on autonomy in feminist philosophy I propose to distinguish ranges of agency in different domains of life (Mackenzie 2014).

The presentation is based on empirical data from a qualitative long-term study of the practices of welfare production of poor households in Switzerland comprising three waves of interviews with 40 households and financial diaries over one month.

This paper analyzes the consequences of a recent, major Danish welfare reform for employment and welfare participation.

This paper uses register-based data to analyze the consequences of a recent, major Danish welfare reform for employment and welfare participation, while paying attention to the roles of a broad range of individual level barriers to work.

In addition to work requirements, the reform introduced substantial reductions to welfare transfers. We make use of a comparative event study that compares individuals on welfare at the time of reform announcement before and after the implementation of the reform with the development in outcomes for a comparison group, consisting of those on welfare exactly one year prior. We find that the reform reduced the propensity to receive welfare and we observe a small – albeit large in a relative sense – increase in hours worked. Groups with family responsibilities react considerably more to the incentives inherent in reform and those in poor mental health and criminal offenders, who are disadvantaged in many respects, react the least.

Joint: Marianne Simonsen, Lars Skipper, Jeffrey Smith

This talk will outline the theoretical development and provide some key methodological developments.

Conventional models of inequality focus on the attributes of individuals and their connection to important inequality markers such as occupations and earnings. These models focus on the supply side of the labor market but are ill equipped to deal with employers as actors in the inequality generation process.

Relational Inequality Theory explicitly theorizes this joint supply and demand process as one of actors – employees and employers and other potential stakeholders – making claims on organizational resources. The outcomes of those claims are understood to lie in the relative power and status of actors in the claims making process.

To produce evidence consistent with this theoretical account requires data on both sides or the employment relationship. It is here that linked employer-employee data have become a crucial tool, complementing evidence from more qualitative work. This talk will outline this theoretical development, provide some key methodological developments, and suggest where fruitful lines if new work might develop.

This Special Lecture Series is presented in collaboration with the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU)

This paper studies the potential downside to poor knowledge of Dutch.

Poor knowledge of Dutch is one of the main obstacles to the integration of newcomers on the labour market in Flanders. Notwithstanding the many vacancies and the often adequate technical skills and expertise that newcomers have, finding a job is a challenge, and if so, it is below the level of their degree. Consequently, the newcomers, in our case Ukrainians displaced by the war, take Dutch courses and many of them take a lot of Dutch courses, up to an advanced level.

This paper studies the potential downside to it, to wit the cost for the newcomer, in essence the lower number of days worked because the newcomer is spending a lot of time in the classroom. The paper uses detailed data on the labour market behaviour and Dutch learning effort of Ukrainian newcomers in Flanders since February 2022, obtained from the Flemish Employment Agency (VDAB).

We find that men without academic degree work more days after they have learned Dutch, compared to never-learners, but only if they stop taking language courses after one year. Women with an academic degree who study Dutch, work less compared to never-learners, in particular when they continue studying Dutch after one year. From the point of view of days worked, this group overstudies Dutch, but they may have other reasons to do so.