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Veranstaltungsreihe: Special Lecture Series (en)

The IAB Special Lecture Series invites outstanding international researchers across the Social Sciences to present their current work. Guest lecturers are selected on excellent academic merit and typically have made significant contributions to their respective fields and continue to actively shape international research agendas.

This lecture examines the patterns and paradoxes in observed educational and labour market attainment of migrants and minorities.

The inequalities faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities are topics of substantial salience across Europe, reflected in an every-growing body of research. Despite the insights shed by this burgeoning literature there remain a number of outstanding debates and puzzles about what leads to better or worse outcomes and the underlying mechanisms.

The UK is an interesting case for illuminating some of these debates and puzzles, due to: the diversity of its immigrant and ethnic minority population, the richness of research base, and certain counter-intuitive findings that are at odds with theoretical expectations as well as evidence from other European countries. It thus has the potential to shed further light on what drives more or less unequal outcomes in different contexts.

Drawing on a range of research from across the last 20-years, in this lecture I examine the patterns and paradoxes in observed educational and labour market attainment of migrants and minorities, with reference to the role of class background, educational aspirations, neighbourhoods and social networks, cohort change and return migration, discrimination and policy to. I explore the gendered differences in such outcomes, and what that implies for our understanding of wider national ‘gender orders’. I reflect on what this body of work can tell us about the factors that shape economic outcomes in different settings, the need for greater attention to both migrant success as well as migrant disadvantage; and I assess the key outstanding questions and implications for future research.

"New work" - we develop an algorithm that identifies new job-titles in the US economy based on their vector distance from the closest existing job title in the previous census.

"New work", namely the introduction of types of jobs that did not exist earlier, is an essential part of innovation and employment growth for advanced economies. Using text analysis, we develop an algorithm that identifies new job-titles in the US economy based on their vector distance from the closest existing job title in the previous census. We use this method to generate a measure of "new work" from 1980 to 2010 in each of 354 occupations and we construct its distribution across 766 commuting zones. We first show how this measure of "new work" is associated to task and skill characteristics of workers in the occupations and to employment growth, skill bias and innovation in the commuting zones. Then we analyze whether local population density, human capital and manufacturing intensity in the 1980, and/or local exposure to structural "shocks" in the 1980-2010, relating to trade competition, technological change, immigration and age changes predict the creation of new work.

Our main findings are that the share of college educated and the density of population in 1980 are the strongest predictors of New Work creation in the 1980-2010 period. The aging of population and exposure to computer adoption were also associated to New Work creation, while robot adoption was negatively associated to it. The exposure to immigration and trade had a more nuanced and differentiated correlation to new work.

This lecture delves into the multifaceted dynamics of the state-citizen relationship within the realm of service delivery in vulnerable contexts.

This lecture delves into the multifaceted dynamics of the state-citizen relationship within the realm of service delivery in vulnerable contexts, with a specific focus on the crucial roles played by health workers, teachers, and social workers. Examining these interactions against the backdrop of high vulnerabilities, characterized by factors such as limited trust, resource constraints, perceived lack of state legitimacy, and pervasive inequalities, our discussion aims to uncover the nuanced impact of contextual challenges on encounters between citizens and frontline service providers. Drawing on various research studies concerning frontline workers in Brazil, we will explore the underlying mechanisms that either reduce or reproduce existing inequalities when implementing policies in contexts of high vulnerabilities.

The literature on alternative methods for accounting for sample-independent variability is reviewed, a typology of sources of sample-independent variation is developed, and an empirical investigation is conducted estimating the relative and absolute importance of the different types of sample-independent variation.

Empirical economics papers report standard errors to take into account uncertainty associated with sampling variation but rarely consider non-sampling variation from researcher choices about measurement of key variables, functional form choice, identification strategy, and data set. In this paper, we review the literature on alternative methods for taking account of non-sampling variability, develop a typology of sources of non-sampling variation, and conduct an empirical exercise in which we estimate the relative and absolute importance of different types of non-sampling variation. The empirical exercise proceeds in the context of the literature that seeks to estimate the causal effect of college quality on educational and labor market outcomes.

Can weather events predict migration choices of 140,000+ individuals?

Existing work presents mixed findings on the impact of weather events on international mobility. Relying on fine-grained data over 1980-2018 in the Mexico-U.S. setting, we turn to machine learning (ML) tools to first determine if weather events can predict migration choices of 140,000+ individuals. We use random-forest models which allow us to include a comprehensive list of weather indicators measured at various lags and to consider complex interactions among the inputs. These models rely on data-driven model selection, optimize predictive performance, but often produce ‘black-box’ results. In our case, the results show that weather indicators offer at best a modest improvement in migration predictions. We then attempt to open the black box and model the linkages between select weather indicators and migration choices. We find the combination of precipitation and temperature extremes and their sequencing to be crucial to predicting weather-driven migration responses out of Mexico. We also show heterogeneity in these responses by household wealth status. Specifically, we find that wealthier households in rural communities migrate in the immediate aftermath of a negative weather shock (relative to the ‘normal’ weather in their community), while poorer households need to experience consecutive and worsening shocks to migrate to the United States. This pattern suggests that migration as an adaptation strategy might be available to select households in the developing world.

This lecture investigates the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets and focus on the mechanisms that produce positive outcomes.

Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment.  But what actually happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves job quality, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market. Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, this lecture investigates the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets and focus on the mechanisms that produce positive outcomes: matching processes that include the dispossessed, job ladders that grow within the low wage sector, and increasing human capital that can be parlayed into internal and external upward mobility.  Dr. Newman will also consider the downside of overheated economies, which can fuel surging rents and ignite outmigration. She will conclude with a discussion of policies and practices that can sustain the benefits of tight labor markets when unemployment begins to rise.

Maternity protection policies have the objective of supporting mothers' access to equal opportunity and equal treatment in the workplace. We provide two examples showing that beside this direct goal, short-run policy incentives can also affect decisions involving long-term commitment. First, we examine how dismissal protection of pregnant women affects fertility decisions and show that women at the risk of job loss use pregnancy as  precautionary strategy. Second, we show that earnings dependent parental leave benefits available to the mother affect the father’s decision to acknowledge paternity.

We draw on research on status processes and cultural change to develop predictions about gender status beliefs in the United States. We expect that

  • while explicitly men and women may not distinguish competency and worth by gender, they do so implicitly,
  • that younger respondents, especially women, hold less consensual gender status beliefs, and
  • men are less likely to alter their gender status beliefs due to loss aversion.

We conduct two studies to assess these arguments. The first uses novel nationally-representative data to describe the distributions of status beliefs in the US population; the second demonstrates the importance of these beliefs for allocating rewards by gender. Combined, the studies demonstrate the distribution of gender status beliefs by age and gender, and the implications for gender inequality, thereby illustrating the role of cultural status beliefs for maintaining gender stratification and the potential role of cohort change for changing such beliefs. Finally, we discuss promising approaches to reduce the impact of gender status beliefs in labor market processes.

We study how Americans respond to idiosyncratic and exogenous changes in household wealth and unearned income. Our analyses combine administrative data on U.S. lottery winners with an event-study design that exploits variation in the timing of lottery wins. Our first contribution is to estimate the earnings responses to these windfall gains, finding significant and sizable wealth and income effects. On average, an extra dollar of unearned income in a given period reduces pre-tax labor earnings by about 50 cents, decreases total labor taxes by 10 cents, and increases consumption by 60 cents. These effects are heterogeneous across the income distribution, with households in higher quartiles of the income distribution reducing their earnings by a larger amount.

Our second contribution is to develop and apply a rich life-cycle model in which heterogeneous households face non-linear taxes and make earnings choices along both intensive and extensive margins. By mapping this model to our estimated earnings responses, we obtain informative bounds on the impacts of two policy reforms: an introduction of UBI and an increase in top marginal tax rates. Our last contribution is to study how additional wealth and unearned income affect a wide range of behavior, including geographic mobility and neighborhood choice, retirement decisions and labor market exit, family formation and dissolution, entry into entrepreneurship, and job-to-job mobility.