IAB-Colloquium (en) Archive - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Working Hours, Workplace Hazards, and Health: The Long-Term Impact of the Eight-Hour Day

This study is about a nationwide policy trial from Sweden in 1920 that reduced the standard workweek from 55 to 48 hours.

Despite the well-known negative correlation between long working hours and workers’ health, credible causal evidence for the short- and particularly long-run is scarce.

We study a nationwide policy trial from Sweden in 1920 that reduced the standard workweek from 55 to 48 hours--but only for selected occupations--while keeping earnings constant. Using full population data and difference-in-differences designs, we demonstrate that reduced working hours led to a 15% decline in annual mortality rates over the first six years, driven by fewer workplace accidents, serious injury at work, and deaths from heart disease. Causal forest estimators indicate particularly strong effects for older workers. Long-run effects were substantial: affected workers lived up to one year longer over the next 50 years.

Our results suggest that reducing working hours, particularly in labour-intensive occupations, could yield large and lasting health benefits globally.

Vocational Education and Earnings Growth: Human Capital vs. Firm Sorting

This paper examines how post-16 educational tracking into academic and vocational pathways shapes early-career earnings trajectories.

This paper examines how post-16 educational tracking into academic and vocational pathways shapes early-career earnings trajectories, and through which mechanisms these differences arise.

Using population-wide linked education and tax records from England, we document not only differences in earnings levels, but mainly substantial divergence in earnings growth between academically and vocationally educated workers over the first twelve years of labor market experience. While the previous literature has favored skills-based explanations, we explore the role of firm sorting as a potential driver of this divergence. For this, we (statistically) decompose earnings growth into instantaneous returns to job moves, sorting into firms with different returns to tenure, and education-specific returns to experience. Between-job mobility (i.e., switching to firms with higher AKM fixed effects) plays a limited role beyond the very beginning of workers’ careers. The vast majority of the gap in earnings growth is due to differential sorting into firms with higher returns to tenure and higher returns to experience among academically educated workers across firms (each accounting for roughly 40%).

Overall, the results highlight the importance of firm heterogeneity and sorting in understanding the labor market consequences of educational tracking, complementing human-capital-based explanations.

Refugee Inflows, Task Upgrading, Wages and Productivity in Turkey’s Dual Labor Market

This paper studies how large-scale refugee inflows affect native workers, firms, and aggregate productivity.

This paper studies how large-scale refugee inflows affect native workers, firms, and aggregate productivity, using the arrival of almost 4 million Syrian refugees by the end of 2018 in Turkey as a natural experiment.

Linking matched employer-employee administrative data to firm balance sheets, we trace effects across three levels of analysis. At the worker level, refugee exposure raises wages of formally employed native men and shifts them away from manual tasks toward more cognitive-intensive occupations; person-firm fixed effects reveal that task upgrading occurs substantially within existing employment relationships. At the firm level, refugee exposure increases total factor productivity - by approximately 4% for a 10 percentage point increase in the refugee-to-native ratio - without corresponding increases in capital intensity or outsourcing. At the aggregate level, we implement Olley-Pakes and dynamic Melitz-Polanec decompositions to quantify the relative contributions of within-firm improvements, reallocation across firms, and firm entry and exit to aggregate productivity growth.

These findings are consistent with task-based specialization operating through Turkey's dual labor market: Syrian refugees, working predominantly in the informal sector, provide low-cost manual labor that complements formal native workers, enabling firms to reorganize production toward higher-value activities.

Mental Health Challenges Among Teachers: The Role of the Workplace

This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health.

Teacher mental health is a growing societal and economic concern with important implications for educational quality and student outcomes.

This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health. Using comprehensive population-wide Danish register data linking teachers to schools, students, and health care utilization, we document large and persistent differences in mental health outcomes across schools.

These differences reflect causal workplace effects rather than selection, as a quasi-experimental mover design shows: teachers’ mental health deteriorates after moving to schools with worse mental health environments, with effects unfolding over the subsequent years. The variation across schools correlates only to a small degree with observable school and student characteristics. Auxiliary analyses point to unobserved dimensions of workplace quality, such as leadership and organizational climate, as potential drivers of heterogeneity in teacher mental health.

joint with Antonia Entorf and Miriam Gensowski

A New Horizon? The Effect of a National Education Reform on Student Achievement and the Academic Environment

This study is about the effects of New Horizon, a large-scale national education reform implemented in Israeli elementary schools.

We study the short-run effects of New Horizon, a large-scale national education reform implemented in Israeli elementary schools. The reform combined multiple school-level interventions, including expanded small-group instruction, increased teachers’ on-site working hours, higher salaries, new promotion and professional development requirements, and strengthened school leadership. Using the staggered rollout of the reform, we find that mathematics and English test scores increased by 0.1–0.2 standard deviations within four years, alongside immediate improvements in student–teacher relationships, teachers’ efforts to support students, and classroom behavior. At the same time, teachers reported substantially higher workloads, pointing to short-run adjustment costs that may have contributed to relatively modest achievement gains. Overall, the results suggest that comprehensive, whole-school reforms can improve both academic outcomes and the learning environment, with small-group learning and changes in teachers’ working conditions playing a central role.

Revisiting the Integration Paradox: Higher Education and Perceived Discrimination Among Jews

Research on migrants and ethno-racial minorities documents that those with higher education often report more experiences of discrimination, usually attributed to heightened expectations of equal treatment, increased exposure to majority institutions, and greater awareness of subtle forms of discrimination. This process is referred to as the “integration paradox”. While this paradox has been examined extensively among migrants and ethno-racial groups, and recently among women, it remains unclear whether similar mechanisms operate among other minorities. Jews constitute a particularly interesting minority to test this phenomenon, as anti-Jewish hostilities and antisemitic incidents are frequent despite low public visibility and relatively high levels of education among Jews on average.

To fill this gap, this study examines the relationship between higher educational attainment and perceived personal discrimination on religious grounds among Jews in Europe and the US, based on data from the second survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews in the EU 2018 and PEW’s Jewish Americans in 2020 survey. Our findings show that, unlike prior research on ethnic minorities and women, higher education is, on average, associated with lower levels of perceived discrimination among Jews. Deeper analyses reveal that this is mostly the case for those who are religious or visibly Jewish, e.g., by regularly wearing a Kippa. In contrast, there is no significant education effect for those who are not religious or not visible as Jews in everyday life. These results suggest that visibility does not have a uniform effect across minority groups and that the social conditions under which minority status becomes salient are central to understanding when education reduces or amplifies perceptions of discrimination.

Navigating Two Realities: The Gendered Double Bind Between Society and the Workplace

The study examines how the desirability of masculine and feminine traits for men and women varies across societal and occupational settings.

Women are often encouraged to display warmth and tenderness in society, while professional success is associated with stereotypically masculine traits such as assertiveness. This creates a potential double bind in which the desirability of gendered traits differs across social and workplace contexts.

Using a large online experiment with U.S. participants (N = 1,867), we examine how the desirability of masculine and feminine traits for men and women varies across societal and occupational settings. We show that women face a sharp shift: feminine traits are highly desirable in society but substantially less at work, particularly in male-dominated industries, alongside a significant increase in the desirability of masculine traits for women even in female-dominated contexts compared to society at large. In contrast, desirability for men’s masculinity remain largely stable, while feminine traits are less desirable outside female-dominated occupations.

We further extend the identity-based framework of Akerlof and Kranton (2000) to interpret these context-dependent trade-offs and their implications for workplace behavior.

Coauthor: Stefano Piasenti

The Labor Market Effects of Carbon Pricing

This study is about how carbon prices affect labor market outcomes.

This study is about how carbon prices affect labor market outcomes by exploiting a policy change in the EU Emissions Trading System that led to a sharp rise in permit prices.

Using population-wide employer-employee matched data from the Netherlands and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find no adverse aggregate effects on employment or wages. However, the distributional effects are sizable: workers in firms with large permit surpluses experience wage gains, as do STEM-educated workers-especially those with stronger outside options. Plants employing more STEM workers achieve larger reductions in energy costs, highlighting the role of skills in facilitating the transition to low-carbon technologies.

Our results illustrate that distributional effects of carbon pricing depend on market design and worker skills.

In-Person Schooling and Juvenile Violence

This study comprehensively explores the effect of in-person schooling on contemporaneous juvenile violence.

While investments in schooling generate large private and external returns, negative peer interactions in school may generate substantial social costs.

Using data from four national sources (Uniform Crime Reports, National Incident-Based Reporting System, National Crime Victimization Survey, National Electronic Injury Surveillance System) and a variety of identification strategies, this study comprehensively explores the effect of in-person schooling on contemporaneous juvenile violence. Using a proxy for in-person schooling generated from anonymized smartphone data and leveraging county-level variation in school calendars - including unique, large, localized changes to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic - we find that in-person schooling is associated with a 28 percent increase in juvenile violent crime. A null finding for young adults is consistent with a causal interpretation of this result.

The effects are largest in larger schools and in jurisdictions with weaker anti-bullying policies, consistent with both concentration effects and a peer quality channel. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that relative to closed K-12 schools, in-person schooling generates $233 million in monthly violent crime costs.

Matching with preferences: Caring who cares for the old

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data.

This paper quantifies effects of preferences in home-based long-term care using unique internal data from a matchmaking agency that records households' and workers' ex-ante preferences, realized matches, wages, and job durations.

I estimate a structural matching model to recover each party's valuation of match attributes as a function of preferences, and their impact on employment stability. Linking the data to population registers shows that demand is rising fastest where preferences over workers' origin are stronger, while gender preferences will weaken.

Simulations predict welfare changes under varying care worker compositions and suggest that losses from a shift toward distant immigrant workers are modest.