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Veranstaltungsformat: In-person

This worksphop is about using Linked employer-employee data to study worker and firm heterogeneity in wages as well as the importance of labour market sorting.

Linked employer-employee data offer a wide range of possibilities for researchers. For example, this type of data is used to understand the role of worker and firm quality in the development of wage inequality, as for example in Card, Heining, Kline (2013). A widely used approach to identify worker and firm quality was developed by Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999).

Since then, many researchers have used the AKM model to study worker and firm heterogeneity in wages, as well as the importance of labour market sorting. While the model continues to be heavily used until today, recent developments discuss potential biases and propose corrections (for example Abowd et al, 2004; Andrews et al, 2008, 2012; Kline, Saggio, Sølvsten 2020; Bonhomme et al, 2023). As with the first edition of the workshop that took place in 2023, the purpose of the second edition continues to be to bring together researchers working on or interested in topics related to worker and firm quality to discuss current work.

The workshop brings together junior and senior researchers working on issues about Urban Labor Markets and Local Income Inequality.

Urban labor markets provide agglomeration advantages to workers and firms. However, the distributional consequences are not fully understood. Agglomeration benefits are unevenly shared among low- and high-skilled workers. At the same time, many large urban labor markets around the world have experienced strongly rising housing costs in recent decades, especially for renters and young first-time homebuyers, putting these groups at risk of being priced out of the local labor market. The workshop aims to bring together junior and senior researchers working on these and related issues and welcomes both empirical and theoretical contributions. The list of topic includes, but is not limited to

  • Distributional consequences of agglomeration benefits
  • Labor market outcomes and housing affordability
  • Highly-local income inequality
  • Spatial extent of local labor markets and commuting patterns
  • Neighborhood effects and segregation
  • Interactions between local housing and labor markets

This conference marks the third international conference of the ELMI Network (Network of European Labour Market Research Institutes).

Organised by the Institute for Structural Research (IBS), Institute for Employment Research (IAB), and Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), the international scientific conference Jobs, Skills, and Productivity in Structural Transformations aims to bring together leading scholars in the social sciences to address the challenges of the employability, skill mismatches and skill upgrading, social cohesion, and public policy responses to industrial and structural transitions.

The conference marks the third international conference of the ELMI Network (Network of European Labour Market Research Institutes), composed of 11 research institutes to facilitate the international exchange of best practices, ideas and people (www.elmi-network.eu). It promotes multi-disciplinary European research collaborations, and the exchange of best practices in data management, data access, and discussions with policy-makers and stakeholders.

We are particularly interested in papers that address the following issues:

  • Labour market consequences and long-term career trajectories of workers affected by deindustralisation and large structural shifts
  • The impact of green and digital transitions on skill demand and skill mismatches
  • Labour market consequences of military rearmament
  • Regional disparities in labour market adaptation to structural change
  • The role of education systems in preparing workers for structural transitions
  • The effectiveness of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in addressing structural transformations

The workshop will feature empirically-oriented research examining factors that impede the smooth functioning of labor markets and policy interventions.

The workshop will feature empirically-oriented research examining factors that impede the smooth functioning of labor markets and/or policy interventions that correct for or exacerbate these frictions. Specifically, the objective of the workshop is to discuss recent developments in the following research areas:

  • Job Search, Recruitment, Matching
  • Imperfect Competition in the Labor Market
  • Labor Shortages
  • Information Deficiencies in the Labor Market
  • Collective Bargaining, Unions, Codetermination
  • Minimum Wages
  • Employment Protection Legislation
  • Anti-Discrimination Legislation
  • Other Labor Market Frictions or Labor Market Institutions

The workshop aims to bring together social scientists to discuss the most recent findings related to migration and integration.

Since February 2022 millions of people from Ukraine were forced to flee their homes to seek protection in less waraffected regions of the country and abroad, others have stayed under the war-related risks. Europe experienced the largest influx of refugees since the second world war.

Unlike labor migrants, refugees have no time to prepare for migration and, thus, face particular challenges in their host countries including limited knowledge of the local institutions, a lack of language skills and social networks as well as traumatic experiences that may have long-lasting effects on people’s lives. At the same time, the socioeconomic circumstances of the men and women who remained in Ukraine changed drastically, affecting their employment, their families and other areas of life.

The workshop aims to bring together social scientists to discuss the most recent findings related to migration and integration, labor market and family outcomes of Ukrainian refugees, stayers and IDPs and encourages contributions
on the following topics:

  • selection of refugees, decision to stay, emigrate and return
  • family and labor market dynamics in Ukraine
  • refugee socioeconomic integration
  • health, social networks, and social inequality
  • gender, paid and unpaid work
  • refugee uncertainty and its outcomes
  • ethnic discrimination of refugees
  • human capital investment and skills transfer of refugees
  • effects on home and host countries’ economy and population

Legal rights continue to differ between women and men, particularly in developing countries. In this paper, we examine whether economic integration can improve gender equality by the law during working life. We design a novel instrumental variable strategy based on regional waves of globalization, which serve as strong exogenous predictors of national globalization trends. Our main estimate suggests that an increase in globalization by one relative standard deviation, equivalent to a permanent transition from Indonesia to the United States, is associated with an 12.1% increase in gender equality, measured by the extent to which men and women are treated equally by law. We also find that this effect is almost entirely driven by de facto globalization. Linking globalization to more than 300,000 individuals from over 100 countries, we provide evidence for a microfoundation of the macroeconomic effects.

The effectiveness of the minimum wage on gender wage differences is examined.

With its introduction in 2015, the national minimum wage intends to benefit primarily low-wage workers in Germany. I examine the effectiveness of the minimum wage on gender wage gaps of full-time workers among the lower half of the wage distribution. Using administrative data, distinct regional differences in the extent of wage differentials and responses to the minimum wage occur. Overall, wage gaps between men and women at the 10th percentile decrease by 2.46 and 6.34 percentage points in the West and East of Germany after 2015. Applying counterfactual wage distributions, I provide new evidence that the introduction of the minimum wage decreases wage differentials by 60% to 95%. Group-specific analyses show various responses on the basis of age, educational level and occupational activity. Counterfactual aggregate Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions indicate a decrease in discriminatory remuneration structures in the West of Germany resulting from the introduced minimum wage.

The workshop provides an opportunity for graduate students to present their ongoing work in the field of theoretical and empirical labor market research.

The IAB’s Graduate School (GradAB) and the FAU invites young researchers to its 16th interdisciplinary Ph.D. workshop “Perspectives on (Un-)Employment”. The workshop provides an opportunity for graduate students to present their ongoing work in the field of theoretical and empirical labor market research and receive feedback from leading scholars in the discipline. The workshop will focus on but not be limited to empirical research in the following fields:

  • Labor supply, labor demand, and unemployment
  • Evaluation of labor market institutions and policies
  • Education, qualification, and job tasks
  • Wage determination and life-cycle earnings
  • Gender, family, and labor market discrimination
  • Inequality, poverty, and intergenerational mobility
  • Migration and international labor markets
  • Regional labor markets and spatial disparities
  • Impact of technological change, digitalization, and climate change on the labor market

We welcome papers that apply quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods.

This paper studies the allocation of time among workers across jobs that vary in their remote intensity.

The proportion of employees who work remotely has surged from under 5% to over 60% between January to March 2020, converging to roughly 28% of days working from home versus in the office as of 2023. Motivated by these large structural shifts in the nature of work, this paper studies the allocation of time among workers across jobs that vary in their remote intensity. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey between 2019 and 2022, I document three main results. First, time allocated to leisure increased and to work decreased among more remote jobs with no significant change in home production. Second, these changes were concentrated among males, singles, and those without children. Third, these declines in labor supply cannot explain the recent decline in productivity; in contrast, sectors with greater remote work intensity exhibited greater productivity growth. In addition, I will also present results from a complementary paper that draws on employee engagement and labor market data from over 70,000 workers. While there is a positive association between always WFH and satisfaction, it vanishes after controlling for employee compensation, occupation, demographics, and workplace environment characteristics (e.g., feeling appreciated at work). Employees who always WFH also have a higher intention to leave their job than employees who never work from home. In contrast, less frequent WFH arrangements relate to higher satisfaction but no difference in intention to leave, and their impact is limited relative to workplace environment characteristics.

We encourage contributions on these specific topics but also appreciate more general contributions on labor market-related research.

Aims and Topics

The labor market is subject to constant change. To meet the challenges of developments such as technological and ecological transformation, the shortage of skilled workers, or demographic change, education and training are becoming increasingly important. The workshop ‘Training, Education and the Labor Market’ focuses on education and training in the context of such societal challenges. We invite researchers to submit papers that study these developments with respect to educational decisions before and during working life, transitions out of and into education, returns to education, the role of institutional settings, as well as the relationship between occupations and education.
We encourage contributions on these specific topics but also appreciate more general contributions on labor market-related research that deals with the areas of vocational training and education, further training and higher education. While the following list is not exhaustive, we are looking for papers that address any of the following topics from a labor market perspective:


Research perspectives on education and training

  • Regional and national perspectives
  • Individual and firm perspectives

Characteristics of (non-)participants in education and training

  • Gender
  • Migration
  • Social Background
  • Occupations

Educational segments

  • School-to-work transitions
  • Vocational education and training
  • Higher education
  • Further training