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Archive: IAB-Veranstaltungen

This paper presents estimates of the causal effect of the default marital property regime on female labour supply, fertility, marriage, and marital dissolution rates utilising the regional variation in the default marital property system in Spain and the 2005 divorce reform. Property rights theory predicts that under contractual incompleteness ownership of physical assets affects investments, and that joint ownership provides the strongest incentives to make relationship-specific investments, while non-integration encourages non-specific investments. My findings are consistent with these predictions: separation of property promotes higher female labour supply, having no more than two children, and a lower marriage rate than community property. The divorce rate remains largely unaffected by the property regime type.

Ersetzt der Computer den Menschen? Führt Digitalisierung zu mehr Kontrolle und höherer Belastung? Welche Folgen hat die Pandemie für Unternehmen, Beschäftigte und Politik? Wie leistungsfähig sind virtuelle Teams? Wird sich Home-Office in der New Work etablieren? Diese und weitere spannende Fragen werden auf dem Nürnberger Dialog Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft 2021 gestellt und beantwortet.

Für den Austausch zum diesjährigen Schwerpunktthema Arbeit im Wandel wurden Fachvorträge, Podiumsdiskussionen und eine digitale Messe mit Ständen von Unternehmen und Institutionen organisiert. Der Dialog richtet sich an Fachleute aus Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Politik, an Vordenker und Entscheider sowie an engagierte Nachwuchstalente und Studierende. Während der Veranstaltung, insbesondere auch im Rahmen der digitalen Messe, besteht die Möglichkeit, sich gezielt mit dem Fachpublikum aus Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft zu vernetzen und miteinander ins Gespräch zu kommen. Seien Sie dabei und diskutieren Sie mit über die Perspektiven der modernen Arbeitswelt!

Die Veranstaltung bietet:

  • Vier wissenschaftliche Panels mit je mehreren Kurzvorträgen
  • Zwei Podiumsdiskussionen
  • Eine Keynote
  • Eine digitale Messe mit Ständen von Unternehmen und Institutionen
  • Wissenschaftliche Präsentationen in Form eines "Science-Slam"

Das duale Ausbildungssystem, einst ein Aushängeschild der deutschen Wirtschaft, steckt in der Krise. Schon vor Corona drohte eine schleichende Auszehrung des Systems. Zum einen nimmt die Zahl junger Menschen aus demografischen Gründen bereits seit Jahren deutlich ab, zum anderen entscheiden sich immer mehr Jugendliche für ein Studium oder eine schulische statt für eine betriebliche Ausbildung. Schließlich gelingt es gerade junge Menschen aus sozial benachteiligten Familien häufig nicht, einen Ausbildungsabschluss zu erwerben.

Allerdings nahm angesichts zunehmender Fachkräfteengpässe in den letzten Jahren vor der Corona-Krise das Ausbildungsplatzangebot wieder zu – und damit das Problem unbesetzter Ausbildungsplätze.

Mit der Corona-Krise hat sich die Situation stark verändert. Das betriebliche Ausbildungsplatzangebot ging bis zum Frühjahr 2021 deutlich zurück, insbesondere in kleineren Betrieben. Auch wenn das Ausbildungsplatzangebot inzwischen wieder deutlich angestiegen ist, liegt es noch immer deutlich unter dem Vorkrisenniveau.

Noch dramatischer sind die bewerberseitigen Rückgänge seit Ausbruch der Pandemie. Die Zahl der im August gemeldeten Bewerberinnen und Bewerber ging von 2019 bis 2021 um insgesamt 15 Prozent zurück. Auch kommen Angebot und Nachfrage vielfach nicht zusammen: Im Jahr 2020 ging die Zahl der abgeschlossenen Ausbildungsverträge um 9,4 Prozent gegenüber dem Vorjahr zurück. Gleichzeitig nahm die Zahl der unbesetzten Ausbildungsstellen zu. Besonders betroffen: das Handwerk – dem damit ein sich verschärfender Engpass an Fachkräften und in der Folge erhebliche Qualitätsverluste drohen.

Doch was tun? Konnte die von der Bundesregierung ausgelobte Ausbildungsprämie den coronabedingten Einbruch abfedern? Und wie können Ausbildungsberufe, auch finanziell, wieder attraktiver werden, ohne die betroffenen Betriebe zu überfordern? Braucht es „abgespeckte“ Ausbildungsberufe für leistungsschwächere Jugendliche? Muss die Berufsorientierung ausgebaut werden? Und droht ein Ausbildungsplatzmangel, wenn junge Menschen nach der Coronakrise wieder verstärkt auf den Ausbildungsmarkt drängen?

This paper examines how and why returning to education to attain a high school diploma combats earnings penalties due to negative employment shocks. High school dropout continues to be a problem, particularly as employment is increasingly skilled over time. Following a policy expanding a Norwegian vocational certification scheme, displaced workers certify their skills at significantly higher rates relative to those displaced pre-expansion. Increases in certification post-expansion significantly reduce income losses after job loss. Certifying skills fosters recovery among early career displaced workers through the retention of relevant industry-specific human capital, which increases job stability over 20 years later.

Student dropout from higher education constitutes a serious challenge: In recent years, almost 30 percent of students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programmes in Germany have left university without a degree. Moreover, dropout entails substantial costs. These include the costs of students’ (unsuccessful) stay in the higher education system as well as indirect costs due to the loss of tax and contribution payments these students would have made had they entered the labour market immediately after school. On an individual level, dropout entails a lower lifetime income as well as psychological costs, as dropouts have to cope with their academic “failure” and also need to realign the plans for their professional future. Therefore, understanding – and potentially avoiding – student dropout is a topic of high relevance, not only for researchers but also for policy makers and students themselves.

The conference aims to provide insights and different perspectives on the link between higher education and the labour market. It offers sessions with general contributions on the topic – as, for example, on returns to tertiary education, graduates’ placement on the labour market, or regional mobility of graduates – as well as sessions on this year’s focus topic, dropout from higher education.

In this framework, we are particularly interested in contributions on topics such as:

  • (Labour-market) perspectives of university dropouts.
  • Selectivity of dropout with respect to students’ social background.
  • Reasons for student dropout, with papers on the current Covid-19 pandemic’s impacts on dropout being particularly welcome.
  • Returns to alternative educational tracks (e.g., vocational education) vs. immediate entry into the labour market after dropout.
  • Potential measures to reduce dropout rates.

People who say that they are better off socioeconomically are healthier than those who say that they are worse off, even when only comparing people whose objective socioeconomic status is the same. This association between perceived socioeconomic status and health has intrigued social scientists for various reasons. Some suggest that the finding shows that it is feelings of inferiority by which social conditions "come under the skin." Others suggest that it shows how our objective measures of  socioeconomic status fail to capture stratification in contemporary societies. In our study, we take a step back to re-examine the perceived socioeconomic status-health association in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). Using hybrid, within-between panel regression models and allostatic load as biomarker health outcome, we show that perceived socioeconomic status is only associated with health in comparisons across individuals, in within-specifications where participants serve as their own controls, no association can be found. In a further step, we show how the between-participant association is driven by personality traits and childhood experiences. We discuss the implications of our findings. This is joint work with Lindsay Richards, University of Oxford, and Asri Maharani, University of Manchester.

The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the Labor and Socio-Economic Research Center (LASER) of the University of Erlangen Nuremberg are pleased to announce a workshop on field experiments in policy evaluation. Randomized experiments are the golden standard of causal analysis and have become an important tool in policy evaluations. However, conducting field experiments poses several methodical challenges like external validity, spillover effects, or dynamic selection. The two-day workshop seeks to bring together researchers focusing on policy evaluations using a field experimental design. Studies addressing one of the following fields are particularly welcome:

  • Labor economics
  • Economics of education
  • Health economics

Different Paths – Different Outcomes? Changes in the Acquisition of the Higher Education Entrance Qualification and Educational Pathways of Graduates

Today, the majority of the 18-19 year olds acquires a higher education entrance qualification. While most of them do so by obtaining a general secondary school certificate (e.g., Abitur, Matura, Baccalauréat, A-Levels), alternative paths to acquiring a higher education entrance qualification might apply. Moreover, cooperative education programmes integrating vocational and tertiary education (“Duales Studium”), which provide an alternative path to university studies and vocational training, have become increasingly popular.

How these changes shape education and career paths of students/degree holders is the focus topic of this year’s 2nd Forum „Higher Education and the Labour Market“. Of particular interest are papers focusing on the education and career paths of the new (non-traditional) student groups or analysing (and ideally comparing) students following the different educational tracks (university studies, vocational training, cooperative education programmes). Contributions might, for example, cover topics like:

  • Who chooses (traditional) higher education programmes, who chooses vocational education, and who opts for cooperative education programmes? Are there systematic differences in students’ choices between these options, for example due to gender, academic or migration background, the type of entrance qualification, and/or individual competences?
  • What determines the choice of subjects in higher education or vocational training?
  • Does the type of higher education entrance qualification influence the success in vocational and higher education?
  • Are training and/or study decisions revised later on? And if so, when will this be the case, who will be most likely to revise her or his decision, are some decisions more likely to be revised than others, and which alternative paths are taken?
  • It is often argued that vocational and tertiary education convey different types of competencies (more specific vs. more general). How do these differences in competence endowments affect degree holders’ labour market chances?

In addition to the focus topic we are also interested in contributions that deal with the link between higher education and the labour market in general. Examples are papers focusing on topics like returns to education, overeducation among holders of tertiary degrees, labour market transitions of university drop-outs, graduates’ placement on the labour market – especially with regard to graduates with different types of degrees (e.g., B.A./M.A), or differences over time resulting from the increase in take-up of university studies.