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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.

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.

This paper estimates experimental impacts of a supported work program on employment, earnings, benefit receipt, and other outcomes over a four-year follow-up period.

This paper estimates experimental impacts of a supported work program on employment, earnings, benefit receipt, and other outcomes over a four-year follow-up period.

Case managers addressed employment barriers and provided targeted financial assistance while participants were eligible for 30 weeks of fully subsidized employment. Program access increased employment rates by 21 percent and earnings by 16 percent while participants were receiving services. Though gains attenuated after services stopped, treatment group members experienced lasting improvements in employment stability, job quality, and well-being, and we estimate the program's marginal value of public funds to be in line with other adult workforce programs. Post-program impacts are concentrated among participants who were hired by their host-site employer post-program, suggesting that encouraging employer learning about potential match quality is a key mechanism underlying the program’s impact, and additional descriptive evidence supports this interpretation.

Machine learning methods provide no evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity in a broad sample of job seekers using a rich set of baseline characteristics from a detailed application survey. We conclude that subsidized employment programs with a focus on creating permanent job matches can be beneficial to a wide variety of unemployed workers in the low-wage labor market.

This study documents how the application of causal machine learning methods can successfully increase sales revenue.

If treatment effects vary systematically, customizing treatment status at the individual level may help increasing the overall effectiveness of an intervention. We document how the application of causal machine learning methods can successfully increase sales revenue generated within a loss framing treatment in an online field experiment. We combine this data with a behavioral experiment measuring sensitivity to loss aversion at the individual level. Our results show that treatment status as assigned by causal machine learning is consistent with treatment assignment based on economic theory.

Joint: Kevin Bauer, Andreas Grunewald, Florian Hett, Johanna Jagow, Maximilian Speicher

This paper proposes novel natural language methods to measure worker rights from collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) for use in empirical economic analysis.

This paper proposes novel natural language methods to measure worker rights from collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) for use in empirical economic analysis. Applying unsupervised text-as-data algorithms to a new collection of 30,000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015, we parse legal obligations (e.g. “the employer shall provide...”) and legal rights (e.g. “workers shall receive...”) from the contract text. We validate that contract clauses provide worker rights, which include both amenities and control over the work environment. Worker-rights clauses increase with firm size, and companies that provide more worker rights score highly on a survey indicating pro-worker management practices. Using time-varying province-level variation in labor income tax rates, we find that higher taxes increase the share of worker-rights clauses while reducing pre-tax wages in unionized firms, consistent with a substitution effect away from taxed compensation (wages) toward untaxed amenities (worker rights). Further, an exogenous increase in the value of outside options (from a Bartik instrument for labor demand) increases the share of worker rights clauses in CBAs. Combining the regression estimates, we infer that a one-standard-deviation increase in worker rights is valued at about 5.4% of wages.

How does labor demand and the generosity of welfare benefits affect the labor market integration of refugees? We analyze the effect of both factors in a common framework.

How does labor demand and the generosity of welfare benefits affect the labor market integration of refugees? We analyze the effect of both factors in a common framework. For identification, we exploit the exogenous placement of refugees in Austria, business cycle fluctuations, and large variation in benefit levels between federal states and type of protection. Higher labor demand at the time of receiving protection status increases employment rates and decreases the likelihood to receive welfare benefits. But the effects are short-lived. Higher benefit levels reduce employment rates initially but the effect is economically small and also temporary. Higher benefit levels also reduce marginal effects of variation in labor demand. Both shocks do not affect the likelihood of remaining in Austria but do affect internal migration.

This paper studies the long-term consequences on firms and workers of the credit crunch triggered by the 2007-2008 global financial crisis.

This paper studies the long-term consequences on firms and workers of the credit crunch triggered by the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Relying on a unique matched bank-employer-employee administrative dataset, we construct a firm-specific credit supply shock and examine firms’ and workers’ outcomes for 11 years after the crisis. We find that highly-exposed firms shrink permanently and invest less; these effects are larger for high capital-intensive firms. The impact on workers’ earnings is also long-lasting, especially for high skilled workers, who are more complementary to capital. Displaced workers reallocate mostly to low capital-intensive firms, experiencing persistent wage losses.

This paper investigates whether task overlap can equalize the effects of automation for unemployed job seekers displaced from routine jobs.

This paper investigates whether task overlap can equalize the effects of automation for unemployed job seekers displaced from routine jobs. Using a language model, we establish a novel job-to-job task similarity measure. Exploiting the resulting job network to define job markets flexibly, we find that only the most similar jobs affect job finding. Since automation-exposed jobs overlap with other highly exposed jobs, task-based reallocation provides little relief for affected job seekers. We show that this is not true for more recent software exposure, for which task overlap mitigates the distributional consequences.

We harness detailed administrative data from Finland to provide new empirical facts on the economic effect of rape on victims and its spillovers.

Rape and sexual assault are common worldwide: one in twelve women across 28 EU countries have experienced a rape (European Institute for Gender Inequality, 2012). Yet there is no systematic evidence on how sexual violence affects women's economic outcomes.

We harness detailed administrative data from Finland to provide new empirical facts on the economic effect of rape on victims and its spillovers. A third of police reports for rape involved victims younger than 21 years old at the time of the assault. We show that the age-25 employment and college completion rates of younger victims are 12.8 p.p and 10 p.p lower respectively than those of other young women with the same (pre-event) GPA and family background. For older victims, we use a matched difference-in-difference design to show that rape has a large and persistent economic impact on women: victims' employment falls by 7.8 percentage points and their labor market earnings decline 16.5 % relative to observationally equivalent women in the five years following the assault.

These results are robust to controlling for a variety of shocks preceding rape that could make it more likely for a woman to be victimized and independently suppress her economic outcomes. We also document important spillovers of these crimes to the victim's parents and peers. Mothers and fathers experience significant declines in their employment and female schoolmates experience a deterioration in mental health. Last, we show that higher clearance rates of rape cases mitigate the negative impacts on victims. Together, these results indicate that preventing and addressing sexual violence is a vital economic issue.