This paper examines the incidence and consequences of individual wage bargaining. We collected survey data on the bargaining policies of more than 700 German firms. Using these data, we validate a new survey measure of firm bargaining policies. We then examine what drives heterogeneity in firm policies. Using the link between these data, administrative Social Security records, and a survey we fielded to 135,000 German workers, we examine the dynamics of bargaining in the labor market. In the last part of the paper we examine the implications of individual-bargaining for wage inequality. We also draw a link between individual specific pay premia and bargaining behavior.
Veranstaltungsformat: In-person
EALE Job Market Tour 2023
During the tour, three excellent job market candidates in Labour Economics, Pauline Carry, Elio Nimier-David and Raoul van Maarseveen will present their job market papers.
The IAB is excited to host one station of the EALE Job Market Tour 2023 on Wednesday, April 19th 2023. The EALE Job Market Tour is an annual event devised to promote research and interaction among young scholars from European institutions. The event takes place after the job market, but the candidates are selected beforehand by a committee based on their paper and participation at the EALE conference.
During the tour, three excellent job market candidates in Labour Economics, Pauline Carry (Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST)), Elio Nimier-David (CREST) and Raoul van Maarseveen (Uppsala University) will present their job market papers. PhD students, junior and senior staff are welcome to attend.
The event also includes a keynote by Wolfgang Dauth (IAB) and a presentation of the IAB data by Dana Müller (IAB). With the event, we aim to foster exchange between the job market candidates and researchers from the IAB as well as local institutions.
Imperfect competition in the labor market
The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) is pleased to host a workshop on imperfect competition in the labor market from 26-27 May. Topics that will be covered at the workshop are:
- Models of monopsonistic and oligopsonistic competition and their empirical assessment
- Quantifying the elasticities of labor supply, recruits and separations to the firm
- The role of firms in wage-setting
- Outside options and wages
- Employment concentration and wages
- Rent sharing
- Policies that may remedy imperfect competition, e.g. minimum wage and collective bargaining
International Workshop on Establishment Panel Analyses
This workshop invites empirical contributions using either the IAB Establishment Panel, one of its derivatives (LPP/LIAB), or other matched employer-employee data.
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the IAB Establishment Panel Survey, this workshop invites empirical contributions using either the IAB Establishment Panel, one of its derivatives (LPP/LIAB), or other matched employer-employee data. Research projects from all areas of labour market research are welcome, including personnel economics, sociology and economics of vocational education and training, industrial relations, or industrial economics. Papers may address research questions in any of these areas as well as methodological questions.
4th Networking Meeting on Migration and Gender
The conference aims to discuss the meaning of gender, gender roles and gender relations in the context of migration and flight and to reflect on possible solutions in practice.
With the war in Ukraine, the topic of migration and gender is (again) present in the public media. Especially at the beginning of the coverage of Russia's war of aggression, images of women with children in need of care dominated, seeking protection in Ukraine's neighboring countries and EU member states, including Germany. The EU's decision to apply the so-called mass influx directive for the first time is associated with new social inequalities in regard to other groups of immigrants, including racial exclusion at border crossings.
Due to the increased relevance of activating integration policy for different immigrant groups, not only in Germany, policies started to focus on labor market integration of female and male refugees and the participation of refugee girls and boys in education and training. The labor market integration of refugees is also associated with the discourse on a shortage of skilled workers, the Skilled Worker Immigration Act that came into force in 2020, and the reform proposals currently being discussed by the German government that may increase the chances of migrant women and men entering the German labor market. For female migrants, integration into the labor market after moving usually takes more time than for male migrants. The visible differences in migration circumstances and integration trajectories of immigrant men and women highlight the need for gender-specific research. In addition to occupational and labor market perspectives, there are multiple research gaps on the relationship between gender and migration.
The conference aims to discuss the meaning of gender, gender roles and gender relations in the context of migration and flight and to reflect on possible solutions in practice. To this end, we bring together researchers from sociology, demography, economics, political science, and law. In particular, we welcome submissions on the following topics, but submissions outside of the focus areas are also welcome:
- Integration in education and the labor market
- Legal and institutional framework for participation
- Linguistic and cultural integration
- Health and illness
- Consequences of the COVID-19 crisis
- Subjective experiences of flight, migration and arrival
- Queer and non-binary perspectives
- Intersectional research approaches
- Power relations in asylum, migration, and labor market regimes
Who wants (them) to work longer?
This paper examines age-specific individual preferences for the legal retirement age. Based on a theoretical model we develop the hypothesis that retirees prefer a higher legal retirement age than workers, whereby just retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age. We corroborate the hypothesis empirically with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and show that just retired individuals are indeed most in favor of an increasing retirement age. We conclude that in aging societies the political feasibility of raising the legal retirement age increases. This result is of political relevance especially with regard to the expected retirement wave of the baby boomer generation.
Perspectives on (Un-)Employment
The workshop took place from January 18th to 20th 2023. Read the complete event report.
The IAB’s Graduate School (GradAB) invites young researchers to its 14th 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. We seek papers that cover any one of the following topics:
- Labor supply, labor demand and unemployment
- Evaluation of labor market institutions and policies
- Education, qualification and job tasks
- Inequality, poverty and discrimination
- Gender and family
- Migration and international labor markets
- Health and job satisfaction
- Technological change and digitization
- The impact of climate change on the labor market
- Applications of machine learning and big data in labor market research
- Survey methodology (in labor market research)
- Data quality (in labor market research)
- Innovative data collection methods
Call for Papers
Submission
We invite Ph.D. students to submit an extended abstract (maximum of 500 words) or a full (preliminary) paper in pdf format to IAB.PHD-WORKSHOP@iab.de.
- The submission should include your contact information and CV
- Please use the format lastname_firstname_paper.pdf
- Please name up to five keywords (or JEL classification) at the beginning of your submission to categorize your research
Deadline
The deadline for submission is 14 October 2022. We will notify you about whether your paper has been accepted by 8 November 2022.
Travel Costs
For presenters without funding, a limited number of travel grants are available. Please indicate along with your submission whether you would like to apply for a travel grant. We will provide more information about the application with the notifications of acceptance.
Knowledge, skills, behaviours: An international workshop on the systematic analysis of job vacancy data
Job adverts include detailed descriptions of skills, knowledge and behaviours relevant to carry out occupational and professional roles in firms. In addition, they (occasionally) show earnings information, provide firm characteristics and contextualise to local labour markets. Such data, validly extracted from job adverts, are an invaluable resource to inform education and labour market policy about crucial aspects of matching job seekers and vacancies and, together with further data sources, likely returns from skills investment and potential skills shortages affecting different sectors or localities in the economy.
With improving information technologies, online job search engines grew since the 1980s. Since then they created huge amounts of data, which can be used to provide systematic descriptions of job skills at a granular level and to understand changes affecting occupational roles. However, the use of such sources for research in economics, business and education only emerged recently with better availability of off-the-shelves packages for text analytics allowing individual researchers to navigate the complexities of unstructured “big” data and to derive high-quality structured information from millions of vacancies. And finally, the analytical work for descriptions and econometric modelling offers new opportunities and challenges as with many “Big Data” applications.
Our workshop aims at interested researchers working with such data, with a focus on the analysis of knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to jobs. A non-exhaustive list of topics includes:
- Understanding broader or specific aspects of skills from vacancy data, for example specific to tasks, jobs, sectors or localities
- Longitudinal studies on changes in occupational profiles and skills requirements
- Topical research about skills changes, e.g. resulting from decarbonisation or increasing digitalisation of job roles
- Understanding skills relevant to making transitions into the labour market, for example data used in vocational education institutions and universities from placements
- Methodological innovations in the work with large data from online vacancies
Labour markets during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
With the COVID-19 pandemic in its third year, the question how the former has affected labour markets and economic policies continues to be of prime importance. Has the pandemic led to lasting changes in the organization of work? Which workers, firms or regions will benefit from such changes? Thus far, research has mainly focussed on the pandemic’s initial impact. Much less is known about its effects in the medium run and if early adjustments have turned into permanent changes. As more data is becoming available, it is now possible to assess how individual labour market biographies have been affected; how firms adapted to disruptions in their production processes; how the effects of the pandemic differed between regions, sectors or occupations; and whether certain policies have been changed permanently as a result of the crisis. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers to present and discuss current work on the labour market consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- How have individual labour market biographies been affected by the pandemic?
- Do pandemic effects differ between groups of individuals and have there been changes in labour market inequality?
- Has the pandemic led to labour market scarring?
- How have school-to-work transitions, entries into training or transitions from training into employment been affected?
- How has the allocation of household or care tasks changed during the pandemic?
- Has occupational mobility changed as a result of the pandemic?
- How have firms responded to the pandemic?
- How has the adoption of working-from-home schemes affected firms’ production processes?
- Has the pandemic led to more investment in digital technologies and how has this affected the workers at the firm?
- Has occupation- or task-specific labour demand changed during the pandemic?
- How has short-term work been used during the pandemic?
- Have firms adjusted their (international) supply chains?
- Have urban labour markets become less attractive?
- Have regional labour market disparities increased as a result of the pandemic?
Megatrends in times of Covid
The 5nd Workshop on Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market is jointly organized by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and focuses on a broad range of topics related to regional labour markets.
This year, a special focus is on aspects revolving around the Covid19 crisis. COVID-19 is hitting local labour markets at a time when megatrends related to globalisation, digitalisation, technological change, are reshaping the way we live and work. The pandemic causes enormous economic and social disruptions which might affect regional labour markets in various ways in the short and long term.
The two organizing institutions, Institute for Employment Research (IAB), and Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), aim to bring together frontier research of labour economists, regional economists, sociologists, geographers and scholars from related fields. Theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented contributions are very welcome. The workshop provides a forum that allows scientists to network while fostering the exchange of research ideas and results.
The workshop has a special focus on the spatial dimension of the consequences of the pandemic and changing economic activity. Apart from this interest, a non-exhaustive list of topics is:
- COVID-19 pandemic, it’s impact on local labour markets
- Telecommuting
- Spatial distribution of activities, disparities and inequalities
- Spatial mismatch, unemployment and spatial job search
- Mobility of labour and imperfect labour markets
- Location decisions and urban amenities
- Neighbourhoods, proximity, and urban density
- Regional dimensions of wage determination
- Evaluation of regional labour market policy and urban or regional policy
- Effects of globalization and technological change
- Methodological and data-driven innovations (e.g. use of geo-coded data)