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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.

In recent years, research on education in developing countries has shifted its focus from increasing school inputs and improving infrastructure to enhancing the quality of interactions within the classroom, both between teachers and students and between the students themselves. Focusing on the latter, we design and implement a randomized experiment within Indian schools at post-primary levels to detect the effects of collaborative learning practices on student academic and non-academic outcomes. Of particular focus is whether collaborative learning benefits both high-achieving and low-achieving students alike, and whether they aid the learning process of first-generation learners and children drawn from disadvantaged populations.

Migrant selectivity refers to the notion that immigrants differ in certain characteristics from individuals who stay behind. This talk considers patterns and consequences of selectivity. The first part depicts the selectivity profiles of recently arrived immigrants in Germany and thus provides an illustration of the sociodemographic composition of current migration streams. The second part is dedicated to the consequences of educational selectivity for new immigrants’ language acquisition in different European destinations. We start by describing the selectivity profiles of recent migrants to Germany with respect to educational attainment, age and sex. We illustrate how refugees differ from labor migrants, and we compare the profiles of Syrian refugees who overcame the distance to Europe to Syrian refugees who settled in the neighboring countries Lebanon or Jordan. We rely on destination-country data from the IB-BMF-GSOEP Survey of Refugees, the Arab Barometer, and the German Microcensus as well as on a broad range of origin-country data sources. Regarding sex selectivity, males dominate among refugees in Germany, while, among economic migrants, sex distributions are more balanced. Relative to the societies of origin, labor migrants are younger than refugees. At the same time, both types of migrants are drawn from the younger segments of their origin populations. In terms of educational attainment, many refugees perform rather poorly relative to German standards, but compare positively to their origin populations. The educational profiles for labor migrants are mixed. Finally, Syrians who settle in Germany are younger, more often male and relatively better educated than Syrians migrating to Jordan or Lebanon.

Many industrialized countries show a huge undersupply of workers and students in the area of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM). The low share of students who engage in STEM subjects is particularly noticeable among girls, whose share in many STEM subjects is still far below 20% (DESTTIS, 2017). The explanations for the gender gap are manifold and range from individual characteristics to social norms and expectations (Kanny et al., 2014). nother approach highlights the role of psychological resources and the perception of STEM fields. In a nutshell, it is hypothesized that girls refrain from STEM fields, which are commonly regarded as one of the most demanding fields of study, due to a lack of self-confidence/self-efficacy and the belief that they are able to master the challenge of a STEM study programme (van-alderen-Smets and van der Molen, 2018). In this paper, we build on this theoretical argument and analyse whether a counselling workshop for high school pupils intended to foster psychological resources increases the intention to choose a MINT subject among programme participants in general and girls in particular. We rely on a pre-post design with randomized treatment assignment to analyse the effect of the workshop. To account for two-sided non-compliance, we run instrumental variable (2SLS) regression with treatment assignment as IV and actual treatment status as endogenous regressor. Our estimates show mixed results on both groups of outcomes. When it comes to psychological resources, we find a positive impact on some but not all psychometric scales that is surprisingly stronger for boys. When it comes to MINT choice, we find a positive effect for both genders but only for soft (nature) but not for hard (maths, IT and technology) MINT subjects for both genders. These results suggest that psychological counselling can promote STEM choice, while there is little evidence that the effect is stronger for girls.

We present a sharp test for the efficiency of job separations. First, we document a dramatic increase in the separation rate – 11.2ppt (28%) over five years – in response to a quasi-experimental extension of UI benefit duration for older workers. Second, after the abolition of the policy, the “job survivors” in the formerly treated group exhibit exactly the same separation behavior as the control group. Juxtaposed, these facts reject the “Coasean” prediction of efficient separations, whereby the UI extensions should have extracted marginal (low-surplus) jobs and thereby rendered the remaining (high-surplus) jobs more resilient after its abolition. Third, we show that a formal model of predicted efficient separations implies a piece-wise linear function of the actual control group separations beyond the missing mass of marginal matches. A structural estimation reveals point estimates of the share of efficient separations below 4%, with confidence intervals rejecting shares above 13%. Fourth, to characterize the marginal jobs in the data, we extend complier analysis to difference-indifference settings such as ours. The UI-induced separators stemmed from declining firms, blue-collar jobs, with a high share of sick older workers, and firms more likely to have works councils – while their wages were similar to program survivors. The evidence is consistent with a “non-Coasean” framework building on wage frictions preventing efficient bargaining, and with formal or informal institutional constraints on selective separations.

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with an instrumental variables approach to estimate the long-term, post-reunification effect of government surveillance. We find that a larger spying density led to persistently lower levels of interpersonal and institutional trust in post-reunification Germany. We also find substantial and long-lasting economic effects of Stasi surveillance, resulting in lower income, higher exposure to unemployment and lower self-employment.

In recent decades, women’s labor market participation in the Netherlands and other Western European countries has dramatically increased. However, earnings of men and women still show substantial gaps around childbirth (Budig & England, 2001; Kleven, Landais, Posch, Steinhauer, & Zweimüller, 2019). t an early age, childbirth might be even more crucial to the emergence of inequalities (Chevalier & Viitanen, 2003; Gibb, Fergusson, Horwood, & Boden, 2015). To understand this process, we study young women’s education and employment trajectories around first childbirths. We observe monthly activities up to two years before and five years after. In line with previous research (Vlasblom & Schippers, 2006), we find substantial path dependence of pre to post birth trajectories. In a next step, we aim to explain this path dependence by means of human capital and social capital theories.

In many countries, important thresholds in examinations act as a gateway to higher levels of education and/or good employment prospects. This paper examines the consequences of just failing a key high stakes national examination in English taken at the end of compulsory schooling in England. It uses unique administrative data, including key information on both initial and regraded exam marks, to show that students of the same ability have significantly different educational trajectories depending on whether or not they just pass or fail this exam. Three years later, students who just fail to achieve the required threshold have a lower probability of entering an upper-secondary high-level academic or vocational track and of starting tertiary education. Those who fail to pass the threshold are also more likely to drop out of education by age 18, without some form of employment. The moderately high effects of just passing or failing to pass the threshold in this high stakes exam are therefore a source of educational inequality with high potential long-term consequences for those affected.

We present the first evidence on the role of occupational choices and acquired skills for migrant selection. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have higher manual skills and lower cognitive skills than non-migrants. Results hold within narrowly defined region-industry-occupation cells and for all education levels. Consistent with a Roy/Borjas-type selection model, differential returns to occupational skills between the United States and Mexico explain the selection pattern. Occupational skills are more important to capture the economic motives for migration than previously used worker characteristics.

There is ample evidence from different research disciplines that locational factors such as employment opportunities or the availability of amenities and facilities are a powerful predictor of settlement behaviour. Recent research suggests that citizens’ mean personality traits might be an additional predictor of where young people settle themselves.

We therefore explore
(1) to what extent recent graduates in the Netherlands are geographically clustered with respect to five different personality traits,
(2) whether or not the geographical clustering is intensified after graduation
(3) how regional characteristics are related to personality traits, and
(4) to what extent personality traits play a role in graduates’ location choice.

Our results reveal a distinct geographical clustering of personality traits between the North and South of the Netherlands. We also show that this geographical clustering becomes more blurred as respondents age. The results furthermore show robust associations between personality traits and several regional demographic, health, political and physical outcomes. In addition to this, we show that personality traits play a role in graduates’ location choices. The impact of economic factors seem to be larger in determining location choice than the impact of personality traits in shaping location choice.

Almost one in four Dutch graduates states that they rather would have chosen a different field of study. Even when one has a job, regret of one’s study choice can reduce workers’ job satisfaction, productivity and wages. The analyses in this study rely on the assumption that youngsters choose a field of study partly based on expectations they have about future field-specific returns to education. We examine how the discrepancy between labour market conditions at the time of study choice and the actual labour market conditions faced upon labour market entry relates to regret of the field-of-study choice. Using data for Dutch secondary vocational graduates, we show that regret among male graduates is positively and significantly related to unfavourable changes in labour market conditions: a 1%-point higher discrepancy between the field-specific unemployment rate when choosing a study programme and the unemployment rate at labour market entry is associated with a 14%-point greater likelihood of reporting regret. Especially poorer employment prospects compared to expectations affect males’ regret. For females, we do not find such a relation. From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that mid-term labour market forecasts by field of study provide relevant information that potentially could improve educational choices.