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Veranstaltungsformat: Hybrid

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.

This study brings together research on trends in religiosity among migrants with work on how immigrants understand and relate to religion.

Religion is a salient boundary marker between migrants and non-migrants in Europe and therefore there is much interest in the question how religion changes among immigrants after migration. In this presentation, I will bring together research on trends in religiosity among migrants with work on how immigrants understand and relate to religion, and how different understandings, in turn, relate to multiple dimensions of the broad concept of ‘immigrant integration’.

First, relying on a four-wave panel study of recent immigrants to the Netherlands from four different origin countries, I will depict trends in different aspects of religiosity and how they relate to migrants’ orientations towards their co-ethnic community and the receiving society. Results from latent growth models show that after an post-migration drop in religiosity from pre-migration levels, there is an initial recovery followed by a consistent downward trend, which applies to all indicators of religiosity and similarly to Muslim and Christian immigrants. Subsequently, I will problematize research on religious changes based on existing survey measures as this fails to capture individual differences in religious meaning-making, or literal vs. symbolic cognitions about religion, that are conceived to be independent of individuals’ levels of religiosity. Based on a two-dimensional framework that separates religious cognition from religiosity, I will present findings from a German survey among Turkish-origin Muslims that assess the relative importance of both dimensions for migrants participation in education and the labour market, along with social, cultural and political dimensions of immigrant integration.

Bio: Fenella Fleischmann is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Programme Group Institutions, Inequalities and Life Courses and the University of Amsterdam. Trained in interdisciplinary social scientific research with a topical focus on migration and quantitative methods, she received her PhD in 2011 from the universities of Utrecht and Leuven for her dissertation ‘Second-generation Muslims in European societies: Comparative perspectives on education and religion’. She worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) and held positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at Utrecht University (Netherlands). Her research focuses on the social position of immigrants and their children in European societies, with a particular focus on religion, identity and discrimination. Her work has been published in multiple fields including Migration Studies, Sociology, Social and Cross-Cultural Psychology.

We invite submissions on program evaluation of policy issues related to the labor market.

This workshop is planed by the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) and The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU). It will be expected to have around 10 presentations and poster session. We invite submissions on program evaluation of policy issues related to the labor market. Papers including innovative approaches or methodological contributions are particularly welcome.

Specific Topics

  • Policies towards the unemployment (UI, training, activation policies)
  • Lobor market policy effects on inequality (in wages, occupations, job tasks, etc.)
  • Policies to integrate migrants into the labor market
  • Policies aiming at curbing discrimination on the labor market / or gender norms
  • Relationships between labor market policies and health
  • Labor policies for firms
  • Innovative methods for policy evaluation
  • Machine learning in policy design and in policy evaluation

Does schooling create new skills or does it just provide signals of individuals’ underlying abilities?

Does schooling create new skills or does it just provide signals of individuals’ underlying abilities? This is a classic question in economics, and to date, it has been difficult empirically to measure the extent to which one theory dominates.

We provide new, innovative evidence on this important question in the context of adult education in Brazil. In 2018, police in Rio de Janeiro abruptly shut down eleven high schools, showing evidence that these schools sold diplomas without providing any training whatsoever. These schools thus provided signals but not human capital. We match student records to historical employment records. We find that initially the return to high school degrees is similar regardless of whether students earned legitimate or fake diplomas. Average returns are sizeable for both. However, within a couple of years, the fake diplomas start losing their value. Employment rates drop to pre-treatment levels, and wage premiums erode. By contrast, true diplomas enjoy larger and stable employment rates and rising wages. We also find additional evidence that the speed at which the fake credential loses its value increases in situations where productivity is more likely to be observable.

Overall, the results provide strong evidence that, at least in the short-run, the signaling model seems to explain labor market outcomes, but that the saliency of the signal erodes quickly.

This study is about the effect of the minimum wage on robot adoption in Germany.

We study the effect of the minimum wage on robot adoption in Germany. By exploiting the variation of whether and to what extent a plant is affected by the minimum wage introduced in 2015, we document a positive effect of the minimum wage exposure on plant-level robot adoption. Using administrative worker-level data, we find that the minimum wage introduction raises the incentives for plants to adopt robots only when it affects the workers in simple manual occupations.

The empirical findings are consistent with the prediction through the relative factor price channel based on a task-based model of robot adoption.

This study is about changes in wage premia and employment across the firm pay distribution, during a large immigration wave in Germany.

The arrival of migrants with low reservation wages strengthens the monopsony power of firms. Firms can exploit this supply of “cheap” migrant labor by offering lower wages, though at the cost of forgoing potential native hires who demand higher pay. This monopsonistic trade-off can lead to large negative effects on native employment, which are concentrated among low-paying firms.

To validate these predictions, we study changes in wage premia and employment across the firm pay distribution, during a large immigration wave in Germany. These adverse effects can be mitigated through policies which constrain firms’ monopsony power over migrants directly, such as collective bargaining, or indirectly, such as policies that facilitate the labor market integration of migrants.

The paper develops a theoretical framework to study the effect of minimum wages on poverty and bring this framework to the data.

We develop a theoretical framework to study the effect of minimum wages on poverty and bring this framework to the data using a detailed individual-level panel dataset combined with information on county-level minimum wages from urban China and both a first-differenced multinomial logit model and a difference-in-differences approach. We show that theoretically the impact of minimum wages on poverty is ambiguous while empirically China’s minimum wages have had a moderate yet significant poverty reducing effect.

Digging deeper, we demonstrate two countervailing mechanisms at work: higher minimum wages help pull some workers out of poverty, while simultaneously pushing a smaller number of workers into poverty. Results are robust to a wide range of sensitivity checks including using various different poverty lines, while subgroup analyses notably show that the effect of minimum wages on poverty is most pronounced for women.

Joint with:
Sylvie Démurger, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and CNRS
Carl Lin, Bucknell University
Dewen Wang, The World Bank

This study is about linking post-partum experience to fertility intentions on over forties.

While motherhood is often portrayed positively, many women experience significant emotional post-partum challenges. These negative experiences may shape future family planning decisions, yet their impact on fertility intentions remains understudied.
Using a sample of Italian mothers, emotional distress was measured using a four-item scale assessing tiredness, sadness, inadequacy, and loneliness. Regression analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between emotional distress and fertility intentions, controlling for relevant socio-demographic factors.

A significant negative association was found between post-partum emotional distress and fertility intentions. Mothers experiencing higher levels of emotional distress reported lower intentions for subsequent childbearing, with this effect primarily driven by mothers over 35 years old.
Post-partum emotional distress is associated with a reduction in mothers' fertility intentions, particularly among older mothers, challenging idealized narratives of motherhood and highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of maternal experiences.
These findings underscore the importance of addressing maternal emotional well-being in reproductive health policies and suggest the need for enhanced post-partum support services, especially for older mothers.

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.