Skip to content

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.

This study is about the return intentions of Ukrainians and how these intentions may depend on the feeling of national identity and pride.

We conducted a poll of 1139 Ukrainians who currently live in Poland. 937 of them took refuge after the start of the full-scale russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, and the other 202 migrated earlier. Our major focus was on the return intentions of Ukrainians and how these intentions may depend on the feeling of national identity and pride. In the pre-registered hypotheses, we stated that a stronger national identity was positively associated with the willingness to return home and that we could amplify this willingness by making the identity more salient.

In the survey, we randomly exposed individuals to three priming settings. Two of them primed subjects towards enhancing identity and pride feelings, while the third group contained neutral questions for a control group. Then, we measured the key variables of interest (return intentions) and found strong support for the first hypothesis and unexpected results for the other.

One of the most unexpected findings is the negative average effect of “pride priming” on return intentions of forced displaced persons, with a positive gradient along the levels of national pride. In fact, people with initially low levels of pride express strictly negative return intentions, whereas people with high pride are more likely to return. At the same time, pre-war migrants have not been affected by our priming experiment, which suggests more stable staying preferences in this group.

This study is about moving an establishment survey from telephone administration to online administration.

The European Company Survey (ECS) 2019 – commissioned by two European Agencies, Eurofound and Cedefop, and carried out by Ipsos – was the first large-scale, cross-national survey of establishments to use a push-to-web approach. Establishments across all EU Member States were contacted via telephone to identify a management respondent, and, where possible, an employee representative respondent. Respondents are then asked to fill out the 20-25 minute survey questionnaire online. The questionnaire captured a wide range of practices and strategies implemented by European companies in terms of work organisation, human resource management, skills use and skills development, and employee voice. Fieldwork for the survey took place in the first half of 2019, in all EU Member States.

Around a quarter of respondents to the ECS 2019 consented to being re-contacted for follow-up research. In November 2020 Eurofound and Cedefop approached these respondents, inviting them to complete a 10-15-minute follow-up questionnaire on the impact of COVID-19 on workplace practices.
In my presentation I will discuss the survey design, fieldwork outcomes, and the lessons we have drawn from conducting the ECS 2019 and the ECS 2020 follow-up – including the results from an experiment we ran as part of the ECS 2020 follow-up with offering customised reports to entice survey respondents. I will also briefly reflect on our plans for the next ECS which is scheduled for 2028.

This paper estimates the medium-run effect of duration of residence in reception centers of asylum seekers.

After arrival, asylum seekers are often housed in reception centers. The type, quality and duration of stay in such centers varies considerably across or within countries. In the context of the so-called “EU refugee crisis” in 2014-2016, reports emerged that some asylum seekers remained in reception centers for several years due to limited capacity of municipalities, lengthy asylum procedures and tight housing markets. It is often argued that reception centers have a detrimental effect on integration processes of asylum seekers and refugees, yet empirical, inferential evidence is still lacking. This paper estimates the medium-run effect of duration of residence in reception centers on language skills, contacts to the host population, and employment status. We use high-quality panel data on refugees living in Germany and apply inverse-probability-weighting (IPW). The results suggest that a quick transition from reception centers into private housing modestly increases refugees’ interactions with the host population and their language proficiency. We find no effects on labor market participation. Using additional analyses, we find that moving into private housing is often associated with a shift to more precarious neighborhoods, potentially hindering a stronger realization of the benefits linked to independent living in general.

This study is about the influence of family members, neighbors and coworkers on retirement behavior.

We study the influence of family members, neighbors and coworkers on retirement behavior. To estimate causal retirement spillovers between individuals, we exploit a pension reform in the Netherlands that creates exogenous variation in peers' retirement ages, and we use administrative data on the full Dutch population.

We find large spillovers in couples, primarily due to women reacting to their husband's retirement choices. Consistent with homophily in social interactions, the influence of the average sibling, neighbor and coworker is modest, but sizable spillovers emerge between similar individuals in these groups.

Additional evidence suggests both leisure complementarities and the transmission of social norms as mechanisms behind retirement spillovers. Our findings imply that pension reforms have a large social multiplier, amplifying their overall impact on retirement behavior by 40%.

The principal effects on the probability of engagement in the criminal justice system are much larger for Black than for non-Black males.

Using rich Texas administrative data, we estimate the impact of middle school principals on post-secondary schooling, employment, and criminal justice outcomes. The results highlight the importance of school leadership, though striking differences emerge in the relative importance of different skill dimensions to different outcomes. The estimates reveal large and highly significant effects of principal value-added to cognitive skills on the productive activities of schooling and work but much weaker effects of value-added to noncognitive skills on these outcomes.

In contrast, there is little or no evidence that middle school principals affect the probability a male is arrested and has a guilty disposition by raising cognitive skills but strong evidence that they affect these outcomes through their impacts on noncognitive skills, especially those related to the probability of an out-of-school suspension. In addition, the principal effects on the probability of engagement in the criminal justice system are much larger for Black than for non-Black males, corresponding to race differences in engagement with the criminal justice system.

Stressing strict privacy policies and changing the location of the survey URL have no response-enhancing effect.

Researchers collect data in most experiments not all at once but sequentially over a period of time. This allows to observe outcomes early and to adapt the treatment assignment to reduce the costs of inferior treatments. This talk discusses multi-armed-bandit-type adaptive experimental designs and algorithms for balancing exploration of treatment effects and exploitation of better treatments. By design, bandits break usual asymptotic and make inference difficult. We show how a batched bandit design allows for valid confidence intervals and compare coverage of the batched bandit estimator in Monte Carlo simulations. In a real-world application, we investigate elements of a survey invitation message targeted to businesses. We implement a full factorial experiment with five elements adaptively.

Our results indicate that personalizing the message, emphasizing the authority of the sender, and pleading for help increase survey starting rates, while stressing strict privacy policies and changing the location of the survey URL have no response-enhancing effect. As a tool for researchers, we introduce bandits in Stata, which facilitates running Monte Carlo simulations to assist the design and implementation of experiments before data are collected, interactively running own bandit experiments, and analyzing adaptively collected data. Bandits implement three popular treatment assignment algorithms: ε-first, ε-greedy, and Thompson sampling. Bandits facilitates estimation, inference, and visualization.

The results indicate an important role played by union wage spillovers in lowering wages over the 1980-2010 period.

In this paper we provide new estimates of the impact of unions on nonunion wage setting. We allow the presence of unions to affect nonunion wages both through the typically discussed channel of nonunion firms emulating union wages in order to fend off the threat of unionisation and through a bargaining channel in which nonunion workers use the presence of union jobs as part of their outside option.
We specify these channels in a search and bargaining model that includes union formation and, in our most complete model, the possibility of nonunion  firm responses to the threat of unionisation.

Our results indicate an important role played by union wage spillovers in lowering wages over the 1980-2010 period. We  find de-unionisation can account for 38% of the decline in the mean hourly wage between 1980 and 2010, with two-thirds of that effect being due to spillovers. Both the traditional threat and bargaining channels are operational, with the bargaining channel being more important.

A typical reaction in unemployment insurance (UI) is to impose requirements (backed by sanctions) on the quantity of job search. We evaluate the job seeker’s reaction.

A typical reaction to the moral hazard problem in unemployment insurance (UI) is to impose requirements (backed by sanctions) on the quantity of job search, aimed at ensuring sufficient levels of effort. However, is this the most effective policy strategy? It does neither take into account the intrinsic motivation of the job seeker nor the quality of the targeted search. An alternative policy strategy that encompasses such goals is to focus on job search autonomy.

Exploiting a policy change in a region in Switzerland which followed this aim, we evaluate the job seeker’s reaction to being granted more autonomy. Using rich procedural register data, we document the effects on quantitative effort, scope of search and ultimately on unemployment duration and earnings in the found job.

Our results show that the policy change increased the average duration of unemployment spells in the area by about 8%, while increasing average re-employment earnings by about 3%. Results are heterogenous, a main driver of the variety is the interplay of effort delivery and local labour market conditions, notably tightness. This finding highlights the relevance of search externalities. Furthermore, we provide some evidence of labour demand effects.

Joint work: Patrick Arni, Amelie Schiprowski

This study sheds light on the impact of different types of job retention programs such as short-time work.

This study sheds light on the impact of different types of job retention programs such as short-time work (STW).

We analyze the causal effect of an episode of STW on labor market outcomes up to five years later and compare this to the effects of sudden unemployment episodes. Using data from German Socio-Economic Panel (1992–2022), we employ an event-study approach to analyze the effect of unemployment and STW on career trajectories and unpaid care work.

Results show that workers with periods of short-time work have higher employment and wage stability than workers with periods of unemployment. There are no gender differences in the effects of STW on employment and hours worked.