In-person Archive - Page 6 of 9 - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

TASKS V: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

Technological advances in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence are increasingly making it possible for machines to perform tasks that previously could only be done by humans. This development has sparked scientific and public debates on the future of work, often dealing with automation and the substitution of labor. The transformation of the working environment goes hand in hand with a reorganization of company structures, occupational and workplace-related content and skill requirements. New inequality paths are emerging and labor market participants are being confronted differently with these changes. In addition, educational and other institutional frameworks keep influencing the labor market. The aim of this conference is to bring together economists, sociologists and researchers from related fields to discuss frontier research on labor market effects of automation and digitization. Special focus is on the following questions:

How do new technologies affect the level and structure of employment?
How are new technologies changing work content?
What are the (non-)monetary returns to work content?
How do new technologies shape skill demands and which role do social skills play?
How does technology affect overall inequality and also inequality between firms and workers?
How does the role of educational and labor market institutions change?
How do firms and workers adapt to changing requirements?
How can policy help firms and workers who are struggling to adapt to digital transformation?

The scientific committee encourages theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented contributions from all areas of labor economics, labor sociology and related fields.

Secure Access Data Center (CASD) / IAB Conference

We are very pleased to announce the first CASD / IAB Conference on the advances in social sciences using administrative and survey data. The CASD and the IAB have recently established cross-country access to confidential administrative data in France and Germany. The aim is to foster and facilitate the use of rich register datasets – which can be partly combined with detailed survey data – from both countries and to improve the data sources for comparative research in social sciences.

The conference aims to bring together researchers using confidential administrative data in France and Germany and also welcomes researchers using similar data from other countries.

23rd Conference “Theories and Methods in Macroeconomics” (T2M)

For the T2M 2019 conference, the program committee has selected special sessions organized by leading researchers in these fields:

“Expectations in macroeconomics” by Ruediger Bachmann (University of Notre Dame)
“Safe assets and the macroeconomy” by Kenza Benhima (Université de Lausanne)
“IAB data and macro applications” by Britta Gehrke (IAB and FAU)
“Vacancies and recruitment” by Leo Kaas (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
“Real exchange rate dynamics” by Gernot Müller (Universität Tübingen)

School-to-Work Transitions and Consequences for Individual Life Courses

This Anglo-German network is being set up to explore the dynamics of the school-to-work transition and its consequences across the life course in the context of educational expansion and technological change. Educational expansion, in particular of higher education, changes school-to-work transition patterns and individual career development in the labour market. At the same time, technological change affects the school-to-work transition by altering the process of individual skill acquisition and the fields of training and study available. The implications of these macro developments for social and educational inequality remain unclear.

The benefit of an Anglo-German comparison in this context is the different timing and degree of educational expansion and technological change in their respective labour markets. Aligning research strategies using German and British data will enable us to generalise our findings given the different institutional settings. The first meeting of the network will focus on innovative empirical designs and on longitudinal data to provide new insights to these broad themes.

Participants in the network should be close to completing a PhD or be within seven years of receipt of a PhD. They should be quantitative education or labour market researchers (economists, sociologists, psychologists, or a related social science discipline) and carry out research on the school-to-work transition and its consequences in the UK or Germany using (quasi-)experimental designs or longitudinal data. Ten will be based in Germany and 10 in the UK.

A successful academic career relies on building strong international networks; however, opportunities for early career researchers to do this are limited. At the same time, there is uncertainty about how Brexit will affect the research funding landscape, particularly for international collaborations. The United Kingdom and Germany have strong research institutions and excellent sources of longitudinal data that can be used to answer questions about education, skills, and life outcomes.

A follow-up workshop will take place at University College London in the autumn.

Senior academics

Prof. Michael Gebel (University of Bamberg)
Prof. Sandra McNally (University of Surrey and London School of Economics)

The Gender Wage Gap in Europe: What Can We Learn Using Linked Employer-Employee Data?

There is growing interest in the gender wage gap (GWG) in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Recent policy initiatives have tried to increase pressure on employers to ensure their policies and practices do not discriminate, either directly or indirectly, against women. In Germany and the UK, for instance, there are new requirements for large employers to report their GWG.

These initiatives come after a period in which the GWG has been falling, albeit slowly. The GWG remains large, despite the fact that women have overtaken men in terms of academic attainment and have been closing the work experience gap. Compared to a few decades ago, human capital variables explain relatively little of the GWG. The question arises: how do we account for the remaining GWG?
One issue that remains poorly understood is the role of the employer. This seems ironic in light of popular conceptions about where the GWG originates and in light of policy initiatives targeting employers. It arises because most of the analysis of the GWG undertaken by economists and other academics is not based on linked employer-employee data (LEED). Consequently, we only know a limited amount about the role played by employer heterogeneity and worker-firm matches in accounting for the GWG. There are theoretical grounds for thinking that worker sorting and segregation across workplaces and firms could play a sizeable role in accounting for the GWG, and that there may be substantial across-employer heterogeneity in terms of women’s earnings progression.
Some papers have been written using LEED to understand the GWG but, as yet, there is little consensus about the role of workplaces and firms in helping to explain the GWG.

The purpose of the workshop is four-fold, namely to:

Promote understanding of the role employers play in accounting for the GWG;
Establish the size of the GWG across countries and how the gap varies when accounting for the identity of the employer;
Identify mechanisms, which help explain the size of the GWG, e.g. discrimination, worker sorting, worker segmentation, monopsony employer power, rent-sharing, compensating wage differentials;
Discuss methodological challenges and avenues for future research for academics using LEED to investigate the GWG.

Labor Market Challenges in Times of Globalization, Technological, and Demographic Change

Technological progress, especially recent changes through automation and digitalization, international trade, and demographic developments have far-reaching consequences for the way we work and study. In a one-day workshop, we want to discuss the challenges to the labor market and the educational and vocational system in a globalized and digitalized world facing demographic change and migration. The special focus lies on how these developments affect firms and workers (e. g., employment, skill demand and supply, task requirements, wages, working conditions, and workload). Moreover, we want to examine the political sphere, and draw conclusions which policies are effective to foster the benefits and limit the negative consequences for the society. We invite researchers to submit empirical and theoretical contributions on this topic from all areas of economics and social sciences.

CANCELLED – Higher Education Dropout and Labor Market Integration: Experimental Evidence

Thousands of students leave higher education without graduating, and worry about the negative consequences of dropping out on labour market success. However, research on how employers evaluate higher education dropouts is lacking. And while studies on school-to-work transitions are plentiful, most of them focus on the consequences of successfully attained educational qualifications – and ignore the consequences of unsuccessfully attempted qualifications.

Drawing on human capital, signalling, and credentialism theories, we conducted a series of factorial survey experiments with random samples of employers (N = 1350) to answer the following research questions: First, what is the causal effects of a dropout on the hiring prospects for different types of positions? Second, which factors facilitate labor market entry for dropouts?

Our findings indicate that employment chances depend heavily on the type of job dropouts compete for, and on the mode and duration of the study episode.

Sustainable growth in the EU: enhancing productivity growth while respecting the planetary boundaries

In the light of global megatrends such as ageing, globalisation, technological transformation and climate change, the 2019 ESDE is dedicated to sustainability.

One of the major sustainability challenges is sluggish productivity growth despite accelerating technological change and the increasing qualification levels of the EU labour force. We explore the preconditions for sustained economic growth, based on region-level and firm-level data analysis, focusing on complementarities between efficiency, innovation, human capital, job quality, fairness and working conditions. We identify policies that could boost productivity without increasing inequality.

We examine the impact of climate action on the economy and on employment, income and skills. In the light of EU welfare losses from climate inaction, we examine the sectors in which employment and value generation are taking place in the EU economy, estimate the overall impact of climate action in EU Member States, following a full implementation of the Paris agreement, on GDP and employment, as well as its potential impact on job polarisation.

Our main conclusion is that tackling climate change and preserving growth go hand in hand. We highlight a number of policy options to preserve the EU's competitiveness, sustain growth and spread its benefits to the entire EU population, while pursuing an ambitious transition to a climate-neutral economy.

What is the Value Added by Using Causal Machine Learning Methods in a Welfare Experiment Evaluation?

Recent studies have proposed causal machine learning (CML) methods to estimate conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). In this study, I investigate whether CML methods add value compared to conventional CATE estimators by re-evaluating Connecticut’s Jobs First welfare experiment. This experiment entails a mix of positive and negative work incentives. Previous studies show that it is hard to tackle the effect heterogeneity of Jobs First by means of CATEs. I report evidence that CML methods can provide support for the theoretical labor supply predictions. Furthermore, I document reasons why some conventional CATE estimators fail and discuss the limitations of CML methods.