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Veranstaltungsformat: Hybrid

This paper analyzes these “labor market divorces” in a novel model of simultaneous search in labor and marriage markets.

Married women’s greater allocation of time towards household chores and childcare suggests that an increase in their labor supply may result in reduced marital surplus and stability. This mechanism can explain persistent gender gaps in labor supply if the potential reduction is considered in decisions about reservation wages and job search efforts. An implication is that divorces may be caused by transitions into employment. This paper analyzes these “labor market divorces” in a novel model of simultaneous search in labor and marriage markets. Labor market search intensity choices depend on marital status and the partner’s type. The model matches key trends in German household survey data: declining marriage rates, increasing employment rates of married women, and a reduction of married women’s domestic time inputs. Our laboratory to quantify the role of labor market divorces is a period of rapid employment growth in Germany that started in the mid-2000s. This development in the labor market was not neutral with respect to marriage. Although more married women entering employment led to more divorces, the decrease in divorces caused by job loss among married men was greater, resulting in a net decrease in the overall divorce rate.

Using a large-scale experimental vignette study, we investigated people’s affective attitudes toward care robots.

A growing gap is emerging between the supply of and demand for professional caregivers, not least because of the ever-increasing average age of the world’s population. One strategy to address this growing gap in many regions is the use of care robots. Although there have been numerous ethical debates about the use of robots in nursing and elderly care, an important question remains unexamined: how do the potential recipients of such care perceive situations with care robots compared to situations with human caregivers? Using a large-scale experimental vignette study, we investigated people’s affective attitudes toward care robots. Specifically, we studied the influence of the caregiver’s nature on participants’ perceived comfort levels when confronted with different care scenarios in nursing homes. Our results show that the care-robot-related views of actual care recipients (i.e., people who are already affected by care dependency) differ substantially from the views of people who are not affected by care dependency. Those who do not (yet) rely on care placed care robots’ value far below that of human caregivers, especially in a service-oriented care scenario. This devaluation was not found among care recipients, whose perceived level of comfort was not influenced by the caregiver’s nature. These findings also proved robust when controlled for people’s gender, age, and general attitudes toward robots.

We model the effect of collective turnover on workplace performance as the sum of its costs and possible benefits occurring through changes in workforce match quality.

Building on job matching theory, we model the effect of collective turnover on workplace performance as the sum of its costs and possible benefits occurring through changes in workforce match quality. The resulting theoretical turnover-performance relationship is generally curvilinear, nesting all the hitherto known patterns -- linear, ``U-shape'' and ``inverted U-shape'' -- as special cases. We show how one can estimate this relationship empirically, for matched worker-plant data, and calculate the implied costs and benefits of turnover. Applications to data from two retail networks reveal that turnover is more costly than beneficial.

We investigate whether BERT is more effective at automated coding of answers to open-ended questions than non-pre-trained statistical learning approaches.

Answers to open-ended questions are often manually coded into different categories. This is time consuming. Automated coding uses statistical/machine learning to train on a small subset of manually coded text answers. The state of the art in NLP (natural language processing) has shifted: A general language model is first pre-trained on vast amounts of unrelated data, and then this model is adapted to a specific application data set. After reviewing some earlier results, we empirically investigate whether BERT, the currently dominant pre-trained language model, is more effective at automated coding of answers to open-ended questions than non-pre-trained statistical learning approaches. In the second part of the talk, I discuss the hammock plot for visualizing categorical or mixed categorical data.

We provide evidence for intensive margin adjustments in hours worked consistent with estimates.

After the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly abandoned a minimum exchange rate policy in 2015, the Swiss franc appreciated by more than 10 percent against the Euro. The appreciation implied a sudden increase in real wage incomes for over 40,000 German cross-border commuters into Switzerland. We use this exchange rate shock to estimate the own-wage and cross-spouse labor supply elasticities from administrative tax returns data and find a 5% drop in taxable income for cross-border workers and a 1.5% reduction in taxable income for cross-border worker spouses. We provide evidence for intensive margin adjustments in hours worked consistent with these estimates.

We study a Dutch reform that raised the retirement age by 13 months and nearly tripled employment at targeted ages.

Government policies are encouraging older workers to delay retirement, which may curb younger workers' career advancement. We study a Dutch reform that raised the retirement age by 13 months and nearly tripled employment at targeted ages. Using monthly linked employer-employee data, we show that affected firms delay and decrease replacement hiring, and coworkers' earnings fall via reductions in hours worked, wages, and promotions. The hiring and coworker spillovers offset most of the additional hours worked by older workers. These spillovers exacerbate within-firm earnings disparities, redistributing earnings from low to high earners, young to old workers, and women to men.

Racial gaps in student loan accumulation and repayment are substantial. Using data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, we document that Black students are more likely to borrow than White students, and they accumulate larger student debt conditional on borrowing. Black borrowers are also more likely to be enrolled in income-based or extended repayment plans, so they have lower average monthly payments and pay off their debt more slowly. Nevertheless, Black borrowers are 2-4 times more likely to default on student loans. To what extent can initial conditions and lifecycle financial circumstances account for these racial differences in student loan repayment and default? We construct a lifecycle consumption-savings model that captures observed heterogeneity in initial wealth and student debt, as well as unobserved heterogeneity in parameters governing initial human capital and lifecycle human capital accumulation. The model produces earnings dynamics, labor supply choices, human capital accumulation, and financial asset accumulation that are consistent with lifecycle data. We use our model to quantify the relative contributions from each of these channels to the racial default rate gaps over the lifecycle. We aim to use our model to advance policy proposals that can mitigate racial gaps in student loan default.

Maternity protection policies have the objective of supporting mothers' access to equal opportunity and equal treatment in the workplace. We provide two examples showing that beside this direct goal, short-run policy incentives can also affect decisions involving long-term commitment. First, we examine how dismissal protection of pregnant women affects fertility decisions and show that women at the risk of job loss use pregnancy as  precautionary strategy. Second, we show that earnings dependent parental leave benefits available to the mother affect the father’s decision to acknowledge paternity.

We quantify aggregate effects of changes in the potential benefit duration (PBD) in Poland using administrative data containing the universe of unemployment spells over more than two decades. Individual workers’ PBD depends on the county unemployment rate relative to the national average in the previous calendar year. We exploit this sharp discontinuity with RDD estimates and construct impulse response functions to estimate effects of a longer PBD at the county-level. After 12 months, the effect of a PBD of 12 vs. 6 months is an increase in the log stock of all unemployed of 0.03 and an increase in the log stock of the directly affected by 0.1. In contrast, we find no evidence on spillovers on indirectly affected unemployed and no effect of PBD on labour market tightness. We document that inflows into unemployment respond strongly to PBD changes. A decomposition of the effects of a longer PBD on the stock of unemployed shows that the effect on inflows is more important than the one on the exit rate.

This paper documents and theoretically explains a nexus between globalization and wage inequality within plants through internal labor market organization. We document that the dominant component of overall and residual wage inequality is within plant-occupations and, combining within-occupation task information from labor force surveys with linked plant-worker data for Germany, establish three interrelated facts:

  1. larger plants and exporters organize production into more occupations,
  2. workers at larger plants and exporters perform fewer tasks within occupations, and
  3. overall and residual wages are more dispersed at larger plants.

To explain these facts, we build a model in which the plant endogenously bundles tasks into occupations and workers match to occupations. By splitting the task range into more occupations, the plant assigns workers to a narrower task range per occupation, reducing worker mismatch while typically raising the within-plant dispersion of wages. Embedding this rationale into a Melitz model, where fixed span-of-control costs increase with occupation counts, we show that inherently more productive plants exhibit higher worker efficiency and wider wage dispersion and that economy-wide wage inequality is higher in the open economy for an empirically confirmed parametrization. Reduced-form tests confirm main predictions of the model, and simulations based on structural estimation suggest that trade induces a stricter division of labor at globalized plants with an associated change in wage inequality.