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Archive: IAB-Veranstaltungen

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.

Der diesjährige Workshop zur Arbeitsmarktpolitik des Leibniz-Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle und des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung Nürnberg widmet sich dem Thema "Strukturwandel auf dem Arbeitsmarkt".

Internationale Arbeitsteilung, Digitalisierung und technologischer Fortschritt stellen Unternehmen vor komplexe, zukunftsentscheidende Fragen, können ganze Wirtschaftszweige bedrohen und viele Arbeitsplätze kosten. So wird zum Beispiel davon ausgegangen, dass Routinearbeiten vermehrt durch Maschinen übernommen werden können und die Nachfrage nach Arbeitskräften in vielen dieser Tätigkeitsfelder langfristig stark sinken wird. Auch politische Entscheidungen und Regulierungen, beispielsweise im Bereich des Umweltschutzes, führen zu Umbrüchen in traditionsreichen Branchen wie der Braunkohleförderung oder der Automobilindustrie. Gleichzeitig ergeben sich durch strukturellen Wandel und die damit einhergehende Verschiebung der Arbeitsnachfrage neue Arbeitsfelder und Berufsbilder in aufstrebenden Wirtschaftszweigen.

Dabei entstehen unter anderem neue Erwerbsbiografien, die oft kaum noch der traditionellen Vorstellung von langfristigen Anstellungsverhältnissen und Aufstiegsmöglichkeiten innerhalb eines Betriebes entsprechen. Vielmehr sind sie geprägt von häufigeren Wechseln des Arbeitgebers und zahlreichen Perioden der Weiterbildung. Auch Personen, die ihren Arbeitsplatz durch eine Betriebsschließung verloren haben, müssen sich der Herausforderung des lebenslangen Lernens stellen, um den Anschluss auf dem Arbeitsmarkt nicht zu verlieren. Vor diesem Hintergrund diskutiert der 16. IWH/IAB-Workshop zur Arbeitsmarktpolitik die Auswirkungen strukturellen Wandels auf Regionen, Branchen, Betriebe und einzelne Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer.

The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) is pleased to invite submissions for a workshop on “Vacancies, Hiring and Matching” in Nuremberg on October 1 and 2, 2019. In 2019, the IAB celebrates the 30th anniversary of the German Job Vacancy Survey, which has been collecting representative data
on vacancies and hiring processes since 1989. Given that the nature of employers’ vacancy posting
and hiring processes is an important, but still under-researched topic, the workshop’s objective is to
discuss recent developments in the following research areas:

  • Empirical research based on employer-level and/or vacancy data (also online vacancy data)
  • Macroeconomic work dealing with vacancies, labor market flows or the matching process
  • Other empirical studies on labor demand and the hiring of workers
  • Methodological work discussing employer-level data collection and/or the measurement of vacancies and labor flows

The 4th Workshop on “Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market” focuses on topics concerning regional labour markets. This year, a special focus is placed on the causes and consequences of agglomeration effects, and on local labour markets. The workshop aims to bring together frontier researchers from the areas of labour economics, regional economics, geography and other related fields. Theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented contributions are welcome.