Civil society has played an important role in meeting the challenges of refugee migration in recent years. This policy report studies the importance of civic engagement for the integration of refugees by employing several waves of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey data. Using the density of newly established associations at the county level as a measure of civic engagement of a region, we exploit regional differences in civic engagement in order to estimate its association with individual integration outcomes of refugees. We find that in regions with particularly high levels of civic engagement, refugees have significantly more frequent contact to Germans, higher life satisfaction and better German language skills. This correlation is robust to controlling for the local population structure, economic strength and labor market situation. In terms of language acquisition, women and refugees with a low level of education benefit the most from high civic engagement. Moreover, refugees with university degrees find significantly better-paying jobs in areas with higher civic engagement. However, no direct correlation could be established between civic engagement and the likelihood that refugees are active in the labor market. Nonetheless, the results suggest that support from civil society translates into improved access to government benefits. Our findings stress that local civic engagement is an important complement to public assistance services and policy makers should give a high priority to team up with civil society to improve refugees' integration outcomes.
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.
Disruptive Effects of Natural Disasters: The 1906 San Francisco Fire
Natural disasters are growing in frequency globally. Understanding how vulnerable populations respond to these disasters is essential for an effective policy response. This paper explores the short- and long-run consequences of the 1906 San Francisco Fire, one of the largest urban fires in American history. Using linked Census records, I follow residents of San Francisco and their children from 1900 to 1940. Historical records suggest that exogenous factors such as wind and the availability of water determined where the fire stopped. I implement a spatial regression discontinuity design across the boundary of the razed area to identify the effect of the fire on those who lost their home to it. I find that in the short run, the fire displaced affected residents, forced them into lower-paying occupations and out of entrepreneurship. Experiencing the disaster disrupted children’s school attendance and led to an average loss of six months of education. While most effects attenuated over time, the negative effect on business ownership persists even in 1940, 34 years after the fire. Therefore, my findings reject the hope for a “reversal of fortune” for the victims, in contrast to what is found for more recent natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina.
Martial Property Regimes and Investments
This paper presents estimates of the causal effect of the default marital property regime on female labour supply, fertility, marriage, and marital dissolution rates utilising the regional variation in the default marital property system in Spain and the 2005 divorce reform. Property rights theory predicts that under contractual incompleteness ownership of physical assets affects investments, and that joint ownership provides the strongest incentives to make relationship-specific investments, while non-integration encourages non-specific investments. My findings are consistent with these predictions: separation of property promotes higher female labour supply, having no more than two children, and a lower marriage rate than community property. The divorce rate remains largely unaffected by the property regime type.
The Work-to-School Transition: The Work-to-School Transition: Job Displacement and Skill Upgrading Among Young High School Dropouts
This paper examines how and why returning to education to attain a high school diploma combats earnings penalties due to negative employment shocks. High school dropout continues to be a problem, particularly as employment is increasingly skilled over time. Following a policy expanding a Norwegian vocational certification scheme, displaced workers certify their skills at significantly higher rates relative to those displaced pre-expansion. Increases in certification post-expansion significantly reduce income losses after job loss. Certifying skills fosters recovery among early career displaced workers through the retention of relevant industry-specific human capital, which increases job stability over 20 years later.
The Long-Run Effects of Soft Commitments and Reminders on Academic Performance
We study the long-run effects of soft commitments and reminders on academic performance. In a randomized field experiment, our first treatment consisted of sending students in a 7-semester bachelor's degree program reminders about the recommended study structure each semester. The second treatment group received the same reminders but in the first semester were on top offered the opportunity to commit to the recommended study structure with a non-binding agreement. After 5 years, we find that the reminders did not generate any effects on academic performance. The soft commitment device treatment on the other hand is highly effective: after 5 years, students in the commitment treatment are 14 percentage points more likely to have graduated, 9 percentage points less likely to have dropped out, and their time to graduation is 0.35 semesters shorter than that of the controls – while maintaining the same GPA as the controls.
Perceived Socioeconomic Status and Health: A Longitudinal Biomarker Approach
People who say that they are better off socioeconomically are healthier than those who say that they are worse off, even when only comparing people whose objective socioeconomic status is the same. This association between perceived socioeconomic status and health has intrigued social scientists for various reasons. Some suggest that the finding shows that it is feelings of inferiority by which social conditions "come under the skin." Others suggest that it shows how our objective measures of socioeconomic status fail to capture stratification in contemporary societies. In our study, we take a step back to re-examine the perceived socioeconomic status-health association in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). Using hybrid, within-between panel regression models and allostatic load as biomarker health outcome, we show that perceived socioeconomic status is only associated with health in comparisons across individuals, in within-specifications where participants serve as their own controls, no association can be found. In a further step, we show how the between-participant association is driven by personality traits and childhood experiences. We discuss the implications of our findings. This is joint work with Lindsay Richards, University of Oxford, and Asri Maharani, University of Manchester.
Talent Hoarding in Organizations
Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, because managers are evaluated on team performance, they have an incentive to hoard talented workers, thus jeopardizing the efficient allocation of talent within firms. This study documents talent hoarding using the universe of application and hiring decisions at a large manufacturing firm. When managers rotate to a new position and temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers' applications for promotions increase by 128%. Marginal applicants, who would not have applied in the absence of manager rotations, are three times as likely average applicants to land a promotion, and perform well in higher-level positions. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent within the firm. Female workers react more to managerial talent hoarding than their male counterparts, meaning that talent hoarding perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm.
Employment-maximizing minimum wages
Motivated by a reduced-form evaluation of the impacts of the German nationally uniform minimum wage on labour, goods and housing markets, we develop a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model with monopsonistic competition and monopsonistic labour markets. The model predicts that the employment effect of a minimum wage is a bell-shaped function of the minimum wage level. Consistent with the model prediction, we find the largest positive employment effects in regions where the minimum wage correspond to 46\% of the pre-policy median wage and negative employment effects in regions where the minimum exceeds 80\% of the pre-policy median wage. After estimating the structural parameters and inverting the structural fundamentals, we use the quantified model to derive minimum wage schedules that maximize employment or welfare.
The Intergenerational Effects of Requiring Unemployment Benefit Recipients to Engage in Non-Search Activities
Labour and technology at the time of Covid-19. Can artificial intelligence mitigate the need for proximity?
Social distancing has become worldwide the key public policy to be implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic and reducing the degree of proximity among workers turned out to be an important dimension. An emerging literature looks at the role of automation in supporting the work of humans but the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to influence the need for physical proximity on the workplace has been left largely unexplored. By using a unique and innovative dataset that combines data on advancements of AI at the occupational level with information on the required proximity in the job-place and administrative employer-employee data on job flows, our results show that AI and proximity stand in an inverse U-shape relationship at the sectoral level, with high advancements in AI that are negatively associated with proximity. We detect this pattern among sectors that were closed due to the lockdown measures as well as among sectors that remained open. We argue that, apart from the expected gains in productivity and competitiveness, preserving jobs and economic activities in a situation of high contagion may be the additional benefits of a policy favouring digitization.