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Veranstaltungsreihe: IAB-Colloquium

Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler die Ergebnisse ihrer Forschungsarbeit vor und diskutieren diese mit Expertinnen und Experten aus dem IAB. Auch Interessierte aus Arbeitsverwaltung, Politik und Praxis sind willkommen.

Often asked questions concerning business surveys are:

  • What will be the increase in response rates if we apply such-and-such measure(s)?
  • What would be perfect timing for these measures? And,
  • What will be the costs?

Basically these questions ask for an efficient strategy to get response, aiming for a cost-efficient survey design both for the survey organisation (like a National Statistical Institute) and businesses alike, not burdening and chasing businesses too much. The effects of measures to get response for business surveys have not been studied systematically as much as for social surveys. Obvious reasons for this may be the fact that business surveys are mandatory by law, and the costs involved in getting response are not as
high as for social surveys using CAPI or CATI. Nowadays however, with ever decreasing budgets, and the pressure to reduce response burden even more efficient business surveys designs are required. An overview of various measures has been presented by Snijkers et al. (2013), but quantitative information to answer the above mentioned questions was to a large extend still lacking. In a study conducted at Statistics Netherlands (Snijkers et al., 2018) the effects of various measures to get response have been analysed for a number of business surveys, without doing an experiment. These measures include the obvious measures, like sending advance letters to
businesses introducing the survey and soliciting survey response, sending pre-due data reminders, and after the due date sending one or more reminder letters. For one survey (the Survey on International Trade in Goods) we modelled the effects of these measures using survival analysis, to find out what would have happened without any of these measures. At the
lecture the results will be presented.

We study the long-run effects of soft commitments and reminders on academic performance. In
a randomized field experiment, our first treatment consisted of sending students in a
7-semester bachelor's degree program reminders about the recommended study structure
each semester. The second treatment group received the same reminders but in the first
semester were on top offered the opportunity to commit to the recommended study structure
with a non-binding agreement. After 5 years, we find that the reminders did not generate any
effects on academic performance. The soft commitment device treatment on the other hand is
highly effective: after 5 years, students in the commitment treatment are 14 percentage points
more likely to have graduated, 9 percentage points less likely to have dropped out, and their
time to graduation is 0.35 semesters shorter than that of the controls – while maintaining the
same GPA as the controls.

Almost eight million forced migrants arrived in West Germany after WWII. We study empirically how regional conditions affected their economic, social and political integration. We first document large cross-regional differences in integration outcomes. We then show that high inflows of migrants and a large agrarian base hampered integration. Religious differences between migrants and natives had no effect on economic integration. Yet, they decreased intermarriage rates and strengthened anti-migrant parties. Based on our estimates, we simulate the regional distribution of migrants that maximizes their labor force participation. Inner-German migration in the 1950s brought the actual distribution closer to its optimum.

While R&D tax credits appear to increase R&D expenditures, how they change search strategies and impact private and public value creation remains less clear. We develop a simple model that predicts a stronger focus on exploitation, due to increased opportunity costs and the need to generate profit in order to take the credit. We empirically validate greater exploitation for firms in states that offered credits, and illustrate further implications including increased defensive patenting, decreased new market entry, an increase in valuation, and increased markups and profit margins. Technologically close industry peers exhibit a decrease in valuation. We provide evidence that the subsequent introduction of R&D tax credits in other states had qualitatively similar, although quantitatively smaller, effects. Our results indicate that although R&D tax credits create value, they also have unintended consequences.

In light of the debate over inclusive education, this paper evaluates the impact of exposure to special needs (SN) peers. More classroom peers with SN lower performance, the probability of entering postcompulsory education, and earnings at ages 17-25. SN students and students at the lower end of the achievement distribution suffer most from higher inclusion. We analyze reallocation policies and government interventions to alleviate negative externalities. We demonstrate that inclusion is preferable to segregation in terms of maximizing average test scores and that teacher quality is key to alleviating negative classroom externalities, while financial resources are not.

We present evidence on the employment outcomes among refugees who obtained legal access to the Austrian labour market between 2001 and 2017. The analyses are based on comprehensive administrative data sets from Austrian social security registers matched to process-based data from the Public Employment Service. We focus on prime-working age refugees from 31 origin countries. Our presentation will elaborate on three factors related to differential employment outcomes: The role of the education attained in the source country, the role of source country characteristics, and the length of the asylum proceedings. We find that higher levels of education are not associated with better employment outcomes. Instead, we find higher educated male refugees to be less successful on the Austrian labour market compared to their counterparts with compulsory education. This pattern of findings holds across different source countries. Moreover, there is some evidence that female refugees from countries with a low rate of female labour force participation (proxy for gender culture) are less likely to enter the host labour market. We also find that the length of the asylum proceedings is positively related to employment outcomes following legal labour market access. Related employment gaps, which are robust to various specifications and outcome measures, are larger among men than among women.

Replicability is at the core of the scientific enterprise. In the past 30 years, recurring concerns about the extent of replicability (or lack thereof) of the research in various disciplines have surfaced, including in economics.

In this talk, I describe the context in which the current discussion in the social science is occurring: what are the definitions of replicability and reproducibility, what is failing, and to what extent. In particular, I discuss the concerns in economics: to what extent is this a problem in economics, what are the approaches that are being considered, and what are the possible broader implications of those approaches. Finally, I discuss the concrete measures that are being implemented under my guidance at the American Economic Association, and that are being discussed in the broader economics community.

The solutions to these problems will change the way research will be taught and conducted, in economics in particular, and in the social sciences more broadly. The implications affect undergraduate and graduate teaching, research infrastructure, and habits.

About 1.4 million refugees and irregular migrants arrived in Europe in 2015 and 2016. We model how refugees and irregular migrants are self-selected. Using unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls, we provide the first large-scale evidence on reasons to emigrate, and the self-selection and sorting of refugees and irregular migrants for multiple origin and destination countries. Refugees and female irregular migrants are positively self-selected with respect to education, while male irregular migrants are not. We also find that both male and female migrants from major conflict countries are positively self-selected in terms of their predicted income. For countries with minor or no conflict, migrant and non-migrant men do not differ in terms of their income distribution. We also analyze how border controls affect destination country choice.

In recent years, research on education in developing countries has shifted its focus from increasing school inputs and improving infrastructure to enhancing the quality of interactions within the classroom, both between teachers and students and between the students themselves. Focusing on the latter, we design and implement a randomized experiment within Indian schools at post-primary levels to detect the effects of collaborative learning practices on student academic and non-academic outcomes. Of particular focus is whether collaborative learning benefits both high-achieving and low-achieving students alike, and whether they aid the learning process of first-generation learners and children drawn from disadvantaged populations.

Migrant selectivity refers to the notion that immigrants differ in certain characteristics from individuals who stay behind. This talk considers patterns and consequences of selectivity. The first part depicts the selectivity profiles of recently arrived immigrants in Germany and thus provides an illustration of the sociodemographic composition of current migration streams. The second part is dedicated to the consequences of educational selectivity for new immigrants’ language acquisition in different European destinations. We start by describing the selectivity profiles of recent migrants to Germany with respect to educational attainment, age and sex. We illustrate how refugees differ from labor migrants, and we compare the profiles of Syrian refugees who overcame the distance to Europe to Syrian refugees who settled in the neighboring countries Lebanon or Jordan. We rely on destination-country data from the IB-BMF-GSOEP Survey of Refugees, the Arab Barometer, and the German Microcensus as well as on a broad range of origin-country data sources. Regarding sex selectivity, males dominate among refugees in Germany, while, among economic migrants, sex distributions are more balanced. Relative to the societies of origin, labor migrants are younger than refugees. At the same time, both types of migrants are drawn from the younger segments of their origin populations. In terms of educational attainment, many refugees perform rather poorly relative to German standards, but compare positively to their origin populations. The educational profiles for labor migrants are mixed. Finally, Syrians who settle in Germany are younger, more often male and relatively better educated than Syrians migrating to Jordan or Lebanon.