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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.

Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, because managers are evaluated on team performance, they have an incentive to hoard talented workers, thus jeopardizing the efficient allocation of talent within firms. This study documents talent hoarding using the universe of application and hiring decisions at a large manufacturing firm. When managers rotate to a new position and temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers' applications for promotions increase by 128%. Marginal applicants, who would not have applied in the absence of manager rotations, are three times as likely average applicants to land a promotion, and perform well in higher-level positions. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent within the firm. Female workers react more to managerial talent hoarding than their male counterparts, meaning that talent hoarding perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm.

Im Rahmen der Kernprozesse in der öffentlichen Verwaltung steht dokumentenbasierte Sachbearbeitung weiterhin im Vordergrund. Die Transformation in Richtung einer informationsbasierten Sachbearbeitung sieht IBM als obligatorisch an mit Blick auf IT- und Prozesskosten sowie Datenschutz. Neben der am Markt etablierten Textextraktion und -klassifikation ist insbesondere im Bereich der Dokumentenvalidierung das Thema Bilderkennung zentral. IBM hat in Projekten eine offene Dokumentenverarbeitungsplattform entwickelt, die es erlaubt, auch diese Bildverarbeitung vorzunehmen. Der exemplarisch vorgestellte Usecase betrachtet die Dokumentenechtheitsprüfung am Beispiel der Stempelerkennung mittels Open Source basierten Algorithmen und mit Fokus auf Erklärbarkeit der KI.

Motivated by a reduced-form evaluation of the impacts of the German nationally uniform minimum wage on labour, goods and housing markets, we develop a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model with monopsonistic competition and monopsonistic labour markets. The model predicts that the employment effect of a minimum wage is a bell-shaped function of the minimum wage level. Consistent with the model prediction, we find the largest positive employment effects in regions where the minimum wage correspond to 46\% of the pre-policy median wage and negative employment effects in regions where the minimum exceeds 80\% of the pre-policy median wage. After estimating the structural parameters and inverting the structural fundamentals, we use the quantified model to derive minimum wage schedules that maximize employment or welfare.

We use a quasi-experimental design and national administrative data to analyze the intergenerational effects of introducing non-search activity requirements for long-term unemployment benefit recipients aged 18-34. The young adults we study were in early adolescence in 1999 when the requirements were introduced. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we find that young adults whose fathers were subject to the requirements have a lower incidence of unemployment benefit receipt compared to those whose fathers were not. More detailed investigation suggests that completion of the mandated activities, role modeling, changes in attitudes, improved health, and greater support and stability are potential channels.