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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.

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.

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.

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.

The presentation is about the nature and how to clean errors in occupational coding in order to measure patterns of occupational mobility (US, UK and Canada). Furthermore it is shed light on how occupational mobility matters for cyclical earnings inequality (based on Carrillo-Tudela, Visschers and Wiczer, 2019), unemployment and its duration distribution (based on Carrillo-Tudela and Visschers, 2019) and cleansing and sullying effects of the business cycle (based on Carrillo-Tudela, Sumerfield and Visschers, 2019).

Starting with a comparison between the life-course approach and Bourdieu, the study focuses the relation between social origin and habitus on typical patterns of education- and employment trajectories. Therefore, it tries to provide a test of the social reproduction theory of Pierre Bourdieu using a subsample of longitudinal data from the adult cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Theoretically, we assume that the social class of one’s origin-family defines the process of socialization and hence the habitus of its members and is cumulative predictive for the generalizable patterns of educational- and employment sequences starting with school entry up to age 30. The individual or class-specific habitus as a “whole set of practices (or those of a whole set of agents produced by similar conditions)” (Bourdieu 1984:170) should hence correspond to differences in successful sequence-patterns, measured personality-traits and attitudes suggesting a stable class-specific realization of the habitus.

This talk will summarize two studies, which respectively study the role of caseworkers and public employment services for the labor market outcomes of unemployment benefit recipients. A first study asks whether and how much caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. It exploits exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss unemployment insurance caseworkers. A second study evaluates a large-scale policy change in which the public employment service of one Swiss canton changed its strategy by removing restrictions on job search and granting increased autonomy to job seekers.

We estimate heterogeneous returns to a STEM education in Switzerland based on individual-level data, exploiting the regional distribution of relative distances to technical and cantonal universities as a cost factor driving college major choice.

Overall, individuals strongly gain in terms of earnings by graduating from a STEM major, with equally large effects for men and women. Ascending Marginal Treatment Effect curves suggest heterogeneous returns while inverse selection on gains implies that individuals with a higher resistance for a STEM education gain the most, where the latter emerges stronger for men. Eventually, we utilize the recent formation of the University of Lucerne, changing relative distances, to estimate the policy-relevant treatment effect for a counterfactual scenario that this university had been established as a technical one: people shifted into a STEM education significantly gain in terms of earnings, with stronger effects for men.

This paper studies the adoption of local preferences and norms by refugees over time. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the allocation of refugees across German regions between 2013 and 2018, we examine the path of their convergence towards local culture in the short-run. We assemble a novel data set on values, habits, and preferences for 8,000 refugees, and combine it with information on more than 34,000 locals. We find strong evidence that refugees converge to local culture, closing the gap by 5% every year. This effect is stronger for regions whose culture is more distinct from the national one and more internally homogeneous. We also provide evidence that refugees' cultural convergence is faster where support for anti-immigrant parties is stronger, where there are more hate-crimes against refugees, and where locals are less open to diversity - patterns consistent with what we label the ``threat hypothesis''. Despite the positive effect of a threatening environment on the pace of refugees' cultural convergence, we document that the former slows down their economic integration.

The California Policy Lab (CPL) is part of a growing number of research centers in the United States that do applied economic research in partnership with local or state government agencies. The goals of such long-term research partnerships is to work on problems that are directly policy relevant, help implement relevant findings, and integrate administrative data that otherwise would be difficult to access. The presentation reviews CPL’s approach to government partnerships and reviews examples of joint research projects, including nudge experiments, predictive work on homelessness, COVID-19 related projects, with particular focus on studies of unemployment insurance benefits

Employment and Social Developments in Europe (ESDE) 2020: “Leaving no one behind and striving for more: fairness and solidarity in the European social market economy”

The review provides evidence-based analysis on how to achieve greater fairness across the EU in the face of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and of long-term challenges arising from structural change due to demographic ageing, climate change and digitalisation.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having profound health, economic, employment and social effects, hitting society’s most vulnerable disproportionately hard and threatening much of the progress that the EU had achieved previously in labour markets and social outcomes. Against this background, this year’s ESDE analyses the state of play of and challenges to social fairness and inclusivity of growth in the EU. It also explores specific policies and tools that can improve the prospects of greater social fairness and enhanced solidarity in the future. ESDE provides evidence-based groundwork for the reflection on how policy can help achieve recovery and further normalisation while meeting Europeans’ expectations regarding fairness and solidarity.