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The dilemma of poor people’s agency

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.

Effects of Welfare Reform: the Role of Barriers to Work

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

Moving from Individual to Relational Models of Inequality, and the important role of linked employer-employee data

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)

Can Newcomers overstudy the host language? Evidence from Ukrainians in Flanders

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.

Religious change among immigrants: trends, meanings and implications for integration

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.

Evaluating Labor Market Policies: Methods and Results

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

Fake it till you (don’t) make it: Fake diplomas and signaling in labor markets

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.

Minimum Wage, Workforce Composition, and Robot Adoption in Germany

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.

Immigration, Monopsony and the Distribution of Firm Pay

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.