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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.

Gemeinsamer Workshop der Arbeitsgruppe „Soziale Sicherung im Wandel“ und der Kompetenzfelder „Erwerbsbeteiligung, Armut und Sozialpolitik“ und „Bildung vor und im Erwerbsleben“

Die von der Bundesregierung geplante Kindergrundsicherung sieht finanzielle Leistungen vor. Darüber hinaus können weitere Maßnahmen Kinder und Familien unterstützen. Hierzu zählen ein einfacherer Zugang zu staatlichen Leistungen sowie kind- und familienbezogenen Diensten, eine Stärkung der Infrastruktur bei Betreuungseinrichtungen und Schulen sowie die Förderung von Bildung und Teilhabe. Der Workshop thematisiert diese Aspekte, die über die Transferzahlungen für Familien hinausgehen, mit zwei Vorträgen.

Familiale Armutslagen, soziale Teilhabe und Zugänge von Kindern und Familien zu Leistungen und sozialer Infrastruktur

Dr. Christina Boll, Deutsches Jugendinstitut (DJI), Abteilung „Familie und Familienpolitik“

Der Vortrag beleuchtet die Erscheinungsformen von materieller und sozialer Deprivation von Familien sowie die Zugangshürden bei der Inanspruchnahme von kind- und familienbezogenen Leistungen und Diensten. Er zeigt auf, welche politischen Handlungsfelder sich flankierend zu einer ausreichenden materiellen Versorgung für ein gutes Aufwachsen von Kindern ergeben.

Auswirkungen von Sachleistungen und Unterstützungsmaßnahmen für benachteiligte Kinder und Jugendliche

Dr. Malte Sandner, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Forschungseinheit „Bildung, Qualifizierung und Erwerbsverläufe“

Die aktuelle Diskussion über die Einführung einer Kindergrundsicherung schließt Unterstützungsleistungen für die Bildung und Teilhabe von Kindern ein. In der Forschungseinheit „Bildung, Qualifizierung und Erwerbsverläufe“ befassen sich zwei Projekte mit diesem Themenkomplex. Das Projekt „Corona und Du“ (CoDu) fragt, wie sich ein kostenfreies Online-Nachhilfeangebot und die Bereitstellung von E-Book-Readern für benachteiligte Familien auf den Schulerfolg auswirken. Das Projekt „Pro Kind“ untersucht die Wirksamkeit einer aufsuchenden Unterstützungsmaßnahme im Rahmen der sog. Frühen Hilfen. Der Vortrag stellt Ergebnisse aus beiden Projekten vor und diskutiert sie vor dem Hintergrund der Kindergrundsicherung.

Gemeinsamer Workshop der Arbeitsgruppe „Soziale Sicherung im Wandel“ und der Kompetenzfelder „Erwerbsbeteiligung, Armut und Sozialpolitik“ und „Bildung vor und im Erwerbsleben“

Die von der Bundesregierung geplante Kindergrundsicherung sieht finanzielle Leistungen vor. Darüber hinaus können weitere Maßnahmen Kinder und Familien unterstützen. Hierzu zählen ein einfacherer Zugang zu staatlichen Leistungen sowie kind- und familienbezogenen Diensten, eine Stärkung der Infrastruktur bei Betreuungseinrichtungen und Schulen sowie die Förderung von Bildung und Teilhabe. Der Workshop thematisiert diese Aspekte, die über die Transferzahlungen für Familien hinausgehen, mit zwei Vorträgen.

Familiale Armutslagen, soziale Teilhabe und Zugänge von Kindern und Familien zu Leistungen und sozialer Infrastruktur

Dr. Christina Boll, Deutsches Jugendinstitut (DJI), Abteilung „Familie und Familienpolitik“

Der Vortrag beleuchtet die Erscheinungsformen von materieller und sozialer Deprivation von Familien sowie die Zugangshürden bei der Inanspruchnahme von kind- und familienbezogenen Leistungen und Diensten. Er zeigt auf, welche politischen Handlungsfelder sich flankierend zu einer ausreichenden materiellen Versorgung für ein gutes Aufwachsen von Kindern ergeben.

Auswirkungen von Sachleistungen und Unterstützungsmaßnahmen für benachteiligte Kinder und Jugendliche

Dr. Malte Sandner, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Forschungseinheit „Bildung, Qualifizierung und Erwerbsverläufe“

Die aktuelle Diskussion über die Einführung einer Kindergrundsicherung schließt Unterstützungsleistungen für die Bildung und Teilhabe von Kindern ein. In der Forschungseinheit „Bildung, Qualifizierung und Erwerbsverläufe“ befassen sich zwei Projekte mit diesem Themenkomplex. Das Projekt „Corona und Du“ (CoDu) fragt, wie sich ein kostenfreies Online-Nachhilfeangebot und die Bereitstellung von E-Book-Readern für benachteiligte Familien auf den Schulerfolg auswirken. Das Projekt „Pro Kind“ untersucht die Wirksamkeit einer aufsuchenden Unterstützungsmaßnahme im Rahmen der sog. Frühen Hilfen. Der Vortrag stellt Ergebnisse aus beiden Projekten vor und diskutiert sie vor dem Hintergrund der Kindergrundsicherung.

We evaluate two policies that provide financial incentives for re-employment of job seekers at risk of long-term unemployment: (i) a re-employment voucher that incentivizes a specialized third party to match the job seeker with an employer; and (ii) a re-employment bonus that incentivizes the job seeker directly. We combine administrative records and data generated by an experimental implementation of these policies in northern Italy during 2017-2018 and involving more than 10,000 job seekers. Each policy is no less effective than conventional job search assistance. We argue that a dual voucher-bonus system based on self-selection would be cost effective.

Research on earnings inequalities in heterosexual couples has shown that women tend to earn substantially less than their male partners (e.g.Bianci et al. 1999; Estevez-Abe 2008; Dotti-Sani 2015) and also that these inequalities have been quite consistent over time and resistant to institutional change (Dieckhoff et al. 2020). These inequalities are problematic as they impact women’s future labour market outcomes. We know from existing work that women who earn less than their partner are more likely to drop out of the labour market (Shafer 2011); switch from full-time to part-time (Dieckhoff et al. 2016) and less like to advance their careers (Bröckel et al. 2015). Earnings inequalities in couples are hence not only the result of inequalities in the labour market, they can also further enhance them. It is thus important to understand these inequalities and how these evolve over the life-course. In this effort, we investigate using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) 1992-2018 how earnings inequalities evolve with duration of couple’s cohabiting relationships based on German panel data. We also examine whether different patterns can be observed for different cohorts.

We characterize work hour constraints in the labor market and quantify welfare gains to workers
from moving from their current hours to their optimal hours. There is a firm component
to work hours that explains approximately 27% of the overall variability in hours. Contrary to
predictions from established models of work hours determination, there is virtually no correlation
between worker preference for hours and employer hour requirements. Instead, high-wage
workers are more likely to sort to firms offering more hours even though they have a preference
for fewer hours. Using a revealed preference approach, we find that workers are off their labor
supply curve, on average. The typical worker has an inelastic labor supply and prefers firms
that offer more hours. Workers are willing to trade off 25% of earnings on average to move
from their current employer to an employer that offers the ideal hours, at a given wage level.

The opening of refugee shelters is regularly met with protest from the surrounding community. Often, such opposition is driven by the fear that the presence of a shelter devalues the neighbourhood, either because of a concrete decrease in the quality of local amenities and public life, or because of neighbours and prospective residents’ prejudicial beliefs (or a combination of both). At the same time, it is unclear whether protests by individual residents reflect the preferences of the entire community, and whether fears over the arrival of refugees are held strongly enough to affect residents’ concrete decisions over where to live. In this article I combine information on property listings between 2012 and 2019 with data on all refugee accommodation facilities in Munich, Germany to examine whether the opening of a refugee shelter affects the desirability of the surrounding neighbourhood, decreasing local property prices relative to elsewhere. Results from the staggered difference-in-difference design find no evidence that the presence of a shelter impacts the value of surrounding properties, or changes the demand for or supply of local housing. Complementary survey findings suggest that increased contact may be driving this null effect: the presence of a nearby refugee shelter increases casual encounters between natives and refugees, which may reduce prior fears over refugees’ negative impact on the local community.

Recent evidence on the gender pay gap has shown that while it is narrowing for the least educated, it has remained stagnant for those with a university degree and is largest for those at the top of the earnings distribution. Attempts to explain the gap using non-cognitive traits have been limited despite a literature highlighting the fact that some of the gap may be attributable to women not “leaning in” while men are more overconfident in their abilities. We probe this hypothesis using longitudinal data from childhood into mid-career and construct a measure of overconfidence using multiple measures of objective cognitive ability and subjective estimated ability. Our measure confirms previous findings that men are more overconfident than women. We then use linear regression and decomposition techniques to account for the gender pay gap including our measure of overconfidence. Our results show that overconfidence captured in adolescence explains a significant portion of the gender wage gap at age 25, which decreases in importance by age 34 and age 42. This highlights the importance of overconfidence in helping individuals to get on a trajectory of higher earnings early in career.

We examine the properties of a recommender system we developed at the Public Employment Service (PES) in France, prior to its implementation in the field. The algorithm uses past matches and a very large set of covariates to produce, for each job seeker, a ranking of the available offers and score each pair jobseeker-offer. Using a calibration step that takes advantage of the observation of application sequences, it gives a predicted "matching probability" for each pair.  After a theoretical discussion about the possible strategies to design a recommender system, we compare this new machine learning (ML) algorithm with another matching tool, mimicking the one currently used at the PES, based on a score measuring the "closeness" between the jobseeker's search criteria or preferences and the characteristics of the offer. We quantify the trade-off between the matching probability and the later "preference score" when switching from one system to the other. Next, we examine the issue of congestion.  We show that, on the one hand the ML algorithm based on past matches tends to increase congestion and on the other hand that this strongly reduces its performance. Finally, we show that the use of optimal transport to derive recommendations from the matching probability matrix significantly alleviates this problem. The main lesson at this stage is that an algorithm ignoring preferences and competition in the labor market would have very limited performances but that tweaking the algorithm to fit these dimensions substantially improves its properties, at least "in the lab".

Social science research demonstrates that dispersal policies and restrictions on the freedom of residence have inhibited refugees’ socio-economic integration, presumably because such policies prevent refugees from moving to places where they can employ their skills most fruitfully. However, studies of refugees’ actual residential choices provide little evidence that good economic prospects attract refugees, and some even suggest that refugees often move to deprived cities with frail labor markets. The combination of negative effects of residence restrictions and emerging evidence of disadvantaging secondary migration forms what we call the ‘refugee mobility puzzle’. In this study, we aim at unpacking this puzzle by analyzing the inner-German migration patterns of recent refugees. Specifically, we ask: What attracts refugees to deprived areas, and can their seemingly unfortunate residential choices be understood as moves to opportunity and increased prospects of labor market integration after all? Empirically, we draw on the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees and track the location of more than 2,000 refugee respondents who were exogenously allocated a place of residence and subsequently became free to move. Based on linear-probability discrete choice models across all German counties and postcodes, we confirm that refugees tend to move to areas with high unemployment. We show that major attractors like housing availability, co-ethnic networks, and service-oriented labor markets are clustered in areas with high unemployment. Taken together, our results complicate recent critiques of dispersal policies and restrictions. On the one hand, our findings show that seemingly disadvantaging relocations into high unemployment areas can conceal potentially improved economic perspectives in relevant labor markets. On the other hand, refugees’ search for affordable housing may turn into an unintended lock-in factor in the mid- and long-run.

This paper studies the interplay between how much workers value workplace flexibility, whether they have such amenities, and how the presence of amenities affects their wages. To overcome the challenge of eliciting quantitative measures of willingness to pay (WTP) at the individual level, we propose the use of dynamic choice experiments, a method which we call the Bayesian Adaptive Choice Experiment (BACE). We implement this method to collect data on the joint distribution of wages, work arrangements, and WTP for different forms of flexibility. We then introduce and estimate a model in which workers may face different prices for job amenities depending on their productivity, extending the Rosen (1986) model of compensating differentials. The model captures key patterns in the data, including (i) the relationship between wages and having amenities, (ii) inequality in workplace amenities across the earnings distribution even when workers value these amenities similarly, and (iii) the tradeoffs across different forms of flexibility. We use the estimates to explore the welfare consequences of workers facing different amenity prices.