Special Lecture Series (en) Archive - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Interlinked Transitions: Partnership Formation and Labour Market Entry among Young Male Refugees in Germany

This talk examines the interplay between partnership formation and labour market integration among Syrian and Afghan male refugees.

While research on refugees’ labour market integration is flourishing, research on partnership formation among forcibly displaced individuals in receiving countries remains fragmented. Yet for young refugees, partnership formation and labour market entry are key transitions to adulthood that often unfold under heightened uncertainty, including precarious legal status, limited transferability of skills, and restricted pools of co-ethnic partners. Understanding how these transitions interrelate is therefore central to research on refugee integration.

This talk examines the interplay between partnership formation and labour market integration among Syrian and Afghan male refugees who arrived in Germany during the 2015/16 refugee migration. Recent research by Bauer and Kogan (2006) shows that these refugees are more likely to be married than most other resident minority groups in Germany. Their marital partners are predominantly co-national, whereas German partners are relatively more common in non-marital unions. We ask how partnership trajectories are related to labour market trajectories and, in particular, whether earlier labour market integration predicts subsequent partnership outcomes and vice versa.

We use two waves of the PARFORM (Partnership Formation in the Context of Recent Refugee Migration) panel study, covering male Syrian and Afghan refugees aged 21–35 in 2022–2024 who arrived in Germany during the 2015/16 influx. Labour market integration is measured by employment status and occupational status (professional, managerial, or technical versus other occupations). Partnership outcomes capture whether respondents have a partner and, among partnered respondents, whether their female partner is German without a migration background or co-national. We examine reciprocal prospective associations between labour market and partnership outcomes using two-wave cross-lagged structural equation models.

Preliminary results indicate that employment at Wave 1 is associated with a higher likelihood of being partnered at Wave 2. Lower occupational status at Wave 1 is also associated with a slightly lower likelihood of having a German-origin partner at Wave 2. In the reverse direction, being partnered at Wave 1 is not associated with subsequent employment but is positively associated with higher occupational status at Wave 2. These findings point to an asymmetric relationship between the two transitions: labour market integration appears to precede partnership formation, whereas partnership formation is related to subsequent occupational advancement rather than employment itself.

Joint workwith Jana Kuhlemann.

The (Missing) Third Pillar – Why climate policy needs to get serious about planetary waste management

This study examines why large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is essential for meeting climate targets.

Professor Ottmar Edenhofer examines why large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is essential for meeting climate targets and establishing a third pillar of climate policy alongside abatement and adaptation.

Even with rapid innovation, projected levels of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) remain far below what is required to stay within internationally agreed temperature limits. The main barriers to technology development and deployment are institutional, economic, and political – reflected in governance gaps that undermine incentives to invest in and deploy CDR at scale. He presents market and governance solutions, including innovative “clean-up certificates” and a European Carbon Central Bank to manage net-negative emissions within carbon market frameworks. By “cleaning up” the atmosphere, CDR can also help reduce free-riding incentives in international climate co-operation.

Professor Edenhofer identifies planetary carbon management as the central challenge of 21st-century climate policy, a necessary third pillar of climate policy, alongside emissions reduction and adaptation, and as a critical enabler of net-zero and net-negative pathways.

The evolution of gender in the labour market: Inequality, (in)efficiency and stereotypes

The study is about gender inequality. Are women held back in the labour market because they are less willing to engage in competitive careers?

Gender inequality is rife. Women make systematically different education choices from men, are under-represented in high-earning careers, and bear the bulk of the earning penalty from parenthood. Moreover, the disproportionate role women play in unpaid work in the home more than offsets the gap in paid work in the labor market, resulting in less leisure time and possibly lower life satisfaction.

Are women held back in the labour market because they are less willing to engage in competitive careers and/or they especially value caring for their children? In fact, research has shown that men and women are on average similar in their preferences and attitudes but face different career-family trade-offs. Besides valid arguments of social justice, differential entry barriers into certain professions raise obvious questions about the efficient allocation of women’s talent. While it would be tempting to conclude that family-friendly workplaces could provide a solution to women’s quest for the desired work life balance, there is a risk that this solution may further entrench gender segregation across firms and professions.

Conversely, research has established that, if women’s involvement in the labour market is shaped by prevailing gender norms (actual or perceived) around their primary role in raising children, progress towards gender equality requires redressing gender stereotypes via policy, education, and information interventions.

Prosociality and Layoffs

This study is about layoffs by U.S. public firms using NLP techniques, which allows to establish several facts that are jointly hard to reconcile with existing models.

Many managers describe layoffs as the hardest and most painful decisions of their careers; yet,
standard economic models treat human and physical capital adjustments alike. We collect novel
data on layoffs by U.S. public firms using NLP techniques, which allows us to establish several
facts that are jointly hard to reconcile with existing models. First, firing decisions have large
adverse healthof effects on CEOs, with distress-induced layoffs estimated to reduce CEO lifespan
by 1.85 years. Second, CEOs become more reluctant to make layoffs over their tenure as they
form more connections inside the firm. After plausibly-exogenous CEO changes, instead, new
CEOs make more and shareholder value-increasing layoff decisions. Third, CEOs’ increasing
reluctance to lay off employees intensifies when layoffs are more painful for employees, such as
during recessions or the holiday season, or more painful for managers to witness, such as when
they affect socially or geographically close employees. Fourth, the documented layoff reluctance is
substantially more pronounced among CEOs with higher empathy-related traits. We also show
that long-tenured CEOs are more likely to cut R&D spending during recessions, offsetting forgone
savings from layoffs. Our results imply the need to adjust models of managerial decision-making
for a “human” component of layoff avoidance. Prosocial, or empathy-related, motives provide a
unifying explanation.

Does automation replace experts or augment expertise? The answer is yes.

Yes, automation replaces experts or augment expertise.

Patterns and Paradoxes of Migrant and Ethnic Inequalities in the UK

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.

Measuring and Predicting New Work in the US: the role of local factors and global trends

"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.

Navigating Vulnerabilities: Exploring Trust Dynamics in Citizens-State Interactions for Access to Public Services

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.