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Veranstaltungsreihe: IAB-Colloquium (en)

The discussion series “Labour Market and Occupational Research (IAB-Colloquium zur Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung)” is a forum where primarily external researchers present the results of their work and discuss these with experts from IAB. Practitioners from the political, administrative and business fields are naturally also welcome.

We study how lifetime labor-market returns to cognitive and social skills have changed across Swedish birth cohorts. We combine administrative records for cohorts born 1951–1980 with skills measured at military enlistment and follow earnings, employment, and wages from 1985 to 2023. Because complete working lives are not observed for every cohort, we estimate age profiles and predict lifetime outcomes. Social skills are a stronger predictor of labor-market success than cognitive skills, largely through employment, although both skills predict wages. Across cohorts, lifetime returns to cognitive skills decline markedly, while returns to social skills increase. We also compare men and women, using brothers’ skills as proxies for own skills in both groups. Skill returns increased more among women than among men, with the largest relative increase for women’s social skills. The results highlight substantial variation in skill returns by skill type, age, cohort, and gender.

Joint with Erika Forsberg, Peter Fredriksson, Georg Graetz, and Björn Öckert

The study addresses this gap through a cross-nationally harmonised factorial survey experiment.

While ethnic discrimination in hiring is well documented, little is known about why some organisations – including private companies and public institutions – discriminate more than others. We address this gap through a cross-nationally harmonised factorial survey experiment (FSE) embedded in a comprehensive questionnaire, combining the rigour of experimental design with detailed organisational data.

The survey was conducted among more than 2,000 recruiters evaluating candidates for medium-skilled jobs in four European countries: Germany, Norway, Poland, and Romania. Results show that hiring discrimination is lower in organisations that make hiring decisions collectively, but higher in positions involving frequent customer interaction. Moreover, diversity policy measures implemented within organisations are strongly associated with lower levels of discrimination. Among these, inclusive hiring practices, mentoring or buddy programmes, and support systems for foreign workers appear particularly effective.

The study further demonstrates that the relationship between discrimination and organisational characteristics, such as size and ownership, is largely mediated by the presence of diversity policy measures.
Co-autors: Dominik Buttler, Vegar Bjørnshagen, Marta Palczyńska, Mateusz Smoter

The study shows that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood is prone to produce biased results.

We show that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood - so-called “child penalties” - is prone to produce biased results, as it pools first-time mothers of all ages without accounting for their differences in characteristics and outcomes. We propose a novel method building on the recent advances in the difference-in-differences literature to address this issue.

Applied to German administrative data, our method yields 28 percent larger post-birth earnings losses than the conventional approach. We document meaningful effect heterogeneity by maternal age in both magnitude and interpretation, highlighting its key role in understanding the impact of motherhood.

Joint with Valentina Melentyeva

This study leverages a digital field experiment in a labour market setting to examine whether attitudinal effects translate into real-world behaviour.

This study leverages a digital field experiment in a labour market setting to examine whether attitudinal effects translate into real-world behaviour, while offering broader lessons for the design and interpretation of such experiments.

Gender-inclusive language in job descriptions has been shown to impact perceived fit, belonging, and occupational attractiveness, but its impact on actual behaviour remains uncertain. We used a crowdworking platform as an experimental labour market, where sign-up for our advertised study itself serves as an outcome variable. In this setting, we thus tested whether the use of gender-inclusive language in a job advertisement for a maths task increases both the share of women who sign-up and their subsequent performance.

We find no effect of gender-inclusive language on either the share of women or their performance. We provide a look behind the scenes of running a digital field experiment, reflecting on challenges along the way. We used the opportunity to learn about design elements that may have prevented the predicted effect from arising, and the moderating theoretical variables they allude to. One key conjecture that emerged from our assessment is that in tight labour markets, such as the crowdfunding platform we studied, participation is less gendered, with an attenuating effect on gendered performance expectations.

The paper is co-authored with Klarita Gërxhani and Arnout van de Rijt.

The study is about children’s adult outcomes are influenced by both their parents’ socioeconomic status (SES) and the SES of the neighborhood.

Children’s adult outcomes are influenced by both their parents’ socioeconomic status (SES) and the SES of the neighborhood where they grew up. We explicitly distinguish between these factors to identify long-run neighborhood effects. We estimate an ordered probit model of neighborhood choice and use it to infer how population shares of parental SES in each neighbor hood vary along both observed and unobserved dimensions. We then regress the average observed outcomes in neighborhoods on these population shares to identify potential outcomes.

Using race based neighborhood sorting as an instrument, we estimate that about half of recent racial inequality in intergenerational mobility is explained by residential segregation.

Joint with Daniel Hartley and Chris Muris

This talk argues that as AI systems are deployed into high-risk labor market domains like matching and profiling.

As social scientists, we focus heavily on how AI is changing the labor market. Historically, our discipline has not viewed itself as central to shaping these computational models. This perspective falls short. Both methodologically and substantively, data-producing institutions like the IAB have an urgent opportunity and responsibility, to actively intervene in AI development.

Generative AI pipelines are currently saturated with unscientific behavioral measurements. AI agents routinely deploy unstandardized, fixed-choice questions generated by the models themselves, while Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on non-probability annotator pools that introduce systemic selection bias. The fundamental machine learning challenge - determining whose values and life circumstances a model represents - is, at its core, a target-population estimation problem. Social science possesses the exact estimation machinery required to diagnose and repair these data structures.

This talk argues that as AI systems are deployed into high-risk labor market domains like matching and profiling, compliance with the EU AI Act demands rigorous auditability. This regulatory shift creates an immediate mandate for the methodologies we produce. In this presentation, we will map how labor market data can directly shape AI pipelines through representative benchmarks, validated instruments, and advanced error diagnosis - including adapting record-linkage traditions to measure what models get wrong about specific demographic groups. Furthermore, we will explore how sampling theory and classic survey methodology can govern the ways AI agents ask questions.

At the UN level, AI readiness for data collected by official institutions has become a central theme. I hope to discuss this element and its broader institutional implications following the presentation.

This study is the first to explore the extent of job offers with remote work options.

Promoting remote work among women living in peripheral areas is a potential tool to limit gender and geographical imbalances in the labour market. This study is the first to explore the extent to which women living in peripheral municipalities (compared with those from metropolitan ones) are attracted to job offers with remote work options.

The study is based on a CAWI survey with a conjoint experiment conducted in Spring 2026 among 3,785 prime-aged women living in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Sweden.

The initial results indicate that, on average, fully remote work (compared to fully on-site work) increases the probability of accepting a job offer to the same degree in both metropolises and peripheral municipalities, by around 14 percentage points. What is relevant, remote work remains attractive for peripheral respondents with lower than higher education, as well as for those with poor digital skills.

This paper explores how the motherhood effect on earnings evolves amid rising childlessness.

This paper explores how the motherhood effect on earnings evolves amid rising childlessness, using population-wide administrative data from South Korea, where fertility has fallen to the world's lowest level.

Using an event study design, we find that earnings losses after childbirth have increased across recent cohorts of mothers. Evidence suggests that the expansion of parental leave and increasingly positive selection into motherhood - toward women with higher earnings and stronger family preferences - contributed to this trend.

The results indicate that as fertility declines and selection grows more salient, the motherhood effect may persist, even as overall gender earnings gaps narrow.

This study exploits exogenous variation in the pricing of childcare caused by a nationwide reform.

We exploit exogenous variation in the pricing of childcare caused by a nationwide reform to estimate the impact of lower childcare costs and the propensity of individuals to start a firm. The reform capped the childcare prices, whereas the exogenous variation in the reduction of childcare prices comes from the pre-reform prices, which depended on the place of residence and family type. Decreasing the cost of childcare lowers both the capital and time constraint, which can lead to individuals becoming entrepreneurs.

We evaluate such potential mechanisms both for males and females separately in a difference-in-difference setting up to 5 years post reform. We find that reducing childcare costs increases entrepreneurial activity for both mothers and fathers.

This paper investigates the optimal design and implementation of labor market institutions within an open economy framework.

This paper investigates the optimal design and implementation of labor market institutions within an open economy framework. We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) DSGE model featuring search and matching frictions to analyze the interaction between labor market flexibility and international trade, with a specific focus on the German experience. Our findings suggest that labor market institutions, when analyzed in isolation, have a marginal impact on aggregate unemployment and welfare. However, their efficacy is significantly amplified when an economy is exposed to international trade.

We show that while import competition exerts upward pressure on unemployment in the short run, more flexible labor market institutions are essential for maximizing welfare in the long run. Crucially, we study the optimal policy sequence and find that a stepwise, sequential implementation of reforms is superior to a "big bang" approach. Such a trajectory maximizes aggregate welfare over a longer time horizon by effectively shielding heterogeneous agents from the regressive distributive effects of globalization shocks during the transition phase. Our results provide a normative rationale for gradualism in structural reform agendas within integrated economies.

Joint work with Andreas Hauptmann (IAB) and Benjamin Schwanebeck (FernUniversität in Hagen).

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