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Veranstaltungsformat: Online

This paper examines how and why returning to education to attain a high school diploma combats earnings penalties due to negative employment shocks. High school dropout continues to be a problem, particularly as employment is increasingly skilled over time. Following a policy expanding a Norwegian vocational certification scheme, displaced workers certify their skills at significantly higher rates relative to those displaced pre-expansion. Increases in certification post-expansion significantly reduce income losses after job loss. Certifying skills fosters recovery among early career displaced workers through the retention of relevant industry-specific human capital, which increases job stability over 20 years later.

Student dropout from higher education constitutes a serious challenge: In recent years, almost 30 percent of students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programmes in Germany have left university without a degree. Moreover, dropout entails substantial costs. These include the costs of students’ (unsuccessful) stay in the higher education system as well as indirect costs due to the loss of tax and contribution payments these students would have made had they entered the labour market immediately after school. On an individual level, dropout entails a lower lifetime income as well as psychological costs, as dropouts have to cope with their academic “failure” and also need to realign the plans for their professional future. Therefore, understanding – and potentially avoiding – student dropout is a topic of high relevance, not only for researchers but also for policy makers and students themselves.

The conference aims to provide insights and different perspectives on the link between higher education and the labour market. It offers sessions with general contributions on the topic – as, for example, on returns to tertiary education, graduates’ placement on the labour market, or regional mobility of graduates – as well as sessions on this year’s focus topic, dropout from higher education.

In this framework, we are particularly interested in contributions on topics such as:

  • (Labour-market) perspectives of university dropouts.
  • Selectivity of dropout with respect to students’ social background.
  • Reasons for student dropout, with papers on the current Covid-19 pandemic’s impacts on dropout being particularly welcome.
  • Returns to alternative educational tracks (e.g., vocational education) vs. immediate entry into the labour market after dropout.
  • Potential measures to reduce dropout rates.

People who say that they are better off socioeconomically are healthier than those who say that they are worse off, even when only comparing people whose objective socioeconomic status is the same. This association between perceived socioeconomic status and health has intrigued social scientists for various reasons. Some suggest that the finding shows that it is feelings of inferiority by which social conditions "come under the skin." Others suggest that it shows how our objective measures of  socioeconomic status fail to capture stratification in contemporary societies. In our study, we take a step back to re-examine the perceived socioeconomic status-health association in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). Using hybrid, within-between panel regression models and allostatic load as biomarker health outcome, we show that perceived socioeconomic status is only associated with health in comparisons across individuals, in within-specifications where participants serve as their own controls, no association can be found. In a further step, we show how the between-participant association is driven by personality traits and childhood experiences. We discuss the implications of our findings. This is joint work with Lindsay Richards, University of Oxford, and Asri Maharani, University of Manchester.

Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, because managers are evaluated on team performance, they have an incentive to hoard talented workers, thus jeopardizing the efficient allocation of talent within firms. This study documents talent hoarding using the universe of application and hiring decisions at a large manufacturing firm. When managers rotate to a new position and temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers' applications for promotions increase by 128%. Marginal applicants, who would not have applied in the absence of manager rotations, are three times as likely average applicants to land a promotion, and perform well in higher-level positions. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent within the firm. Female workers react more to managerial talent hoarding than their male counterparts, meaning that talent hoarding perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm.

Motivated by a reduced-form evaluation of the impacts of the German nationally uniform minimum wage on labour, goods and housing markets, we develop a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model with monopsonistic competition and monopsonistic labour markets. The model predicts that the employment effect of a minimum wage is a bell-shaped function of the minimum wage level. Consistent with the model prediction, we find the largest positive employment effects in regions where the minimum wage correspond to 46\% of the pre-policy median wage and negative employment effects in regions where the minimum exceeds 80\% of the pre-policy median wage. After estimating the structural parameters and inverting the structural fundamentals, we use the quantified model to derive minimum wage schedules that maximize employment or welfare.

Social distancing has become worldwide the key public policy to be implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic and reducing the degree of proximity among workers turned out to be an important dimension. An emerging literature looks at the role of automation in supporting the work of humans but the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to influence the need for physical proximity on the workplace has been left largely unexplored. By using a unique and innovative dataset that combines data on advancements of AI at the occupational level with information on the required proximity in the job-place and administrative employer-employee data on job flows, our results show that AI and proximity stand in an inverse U-shape relationship at the sectoral level, with high advancements in AI that are negatively associated with proximity. We detect this pattern among sectors that were closed due to the lockdown measures as well as among sectors that remained open. We argue that, apart from the expected gains in productivity and competitiveness, preserving jobs and economic activities in a situation of high contagion may be the additional benefits of a policy favouring digitization.

Germany has a strong skill development system. The country’s 15 year old students performed above the OECD average in the last (2018) edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), continuing a trend of significant improvement since PISA’s first edition in 2000. Its adult population also has above average literacy and numeracy skills, according to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). A strong and well-respected vocational education and training system is seen as one of the success factors behind these achievements. However, participation in learning beyond initial education lags behind other high-performing OECD countries and varies considerably across different groups of the population. This is problematic in a rapidly changing labour market, where participation in continuing education and training is a precondition for individuals, enterprises and economies to harness the benefits of these changes. This report assesses the current state of the German continuing education and training (CET) system. It examines how effectively the system prepares people and enterprises for the changes occurring in the world of work, and identifies what changes are necessary to make the CET system more future ready. The report makes recommendations for the further development of the CET system based on international good practice.

Ms. Meierkord plans to give the lecture in German.