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.
Statistical Profiling and Machine Learning in the area of Labour Market Policy
I will talk a bit on how we use machine learning in general in the area of labour market policy in DK, and how we relate this to our core business of producing results on employment and education.
As a specific example of our work, I will illustrate our statistical profiling of newly unemployed, both the technical/methodological side as well as the practical implementation and general experiences in this area, and some thoughts on further development.
Finally I will talk a bit on other more recent areas of developing datadriven solutions in the field of labour market policy, drawing perspectives to new possibilities deriving from machine-learning and modern Technology
Digital Tools to Facilitate Job Search
Unemployment insurance systems in modern labor markets are riddled with a multitude of rules and regulations governing job seekers' economic situation and their incentives to search for employment. These include, for instance, detailed regulations specifying individuals' benefit level and potential benefit duration, job search requirements, conditions for avoiding benefit sanctions, possibilities for earning extra income or additional benefit entitlements by working in part-time or short-term jobs, etc. The complexity of UI systems makes it challenging for job seekers to understand the prevailing rules, their built-in incentives, and the resulting consequences for their personal economic situation. This is potentially problematic, as a lack of understanding may distort individuals' job search incentives and employment prospects.
In this paper, we report the results from a randomized controlled trial among the universe of registered Danish job seekers that studies how reducing complexity affects individuals' understanding of UI benefit rules and labor market behavior. Our intervention exploits an online information tool that provides individuals with continuously updated, personalized information on their remaining UI benefit period, their accumulated working time that can be used to prolong the potential benefit duration, as well as information on essential rules regarding job seekers' benefit duration and benefit sanctions. We match the data from our experiment with data from an online survey and rich information from administrative records to evaluate the causal effects of our intervention on individuals' understanding of the prevailing labor market rules, their job search behavior, and resulting labor market outcomes.
Evidence on the Role of Caseworkers and Public Employment Services
This talk will summarize two studies, which respectively study the role of caseworkers and public employment services for the labor market outcomes of unemployment benefit recipients. A first study asks whether and how much caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. It exploits exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss unemployment insurance caseworkers. A second study evaluates a large-scale policy change in which the public employment service of one Swiss canton changed its strategy by removing restrictions on job search and granting increased autonomy to job seekers.
Who Benefits from a STEM-Education? Evidence from Switzerland
We estimate heterogeneous returns to a STEM education in Switzerland based on individual-level data, exploiting the regional distribution of relative distances to technical and cantonal universities as a cost factor driving college major choice.
Overall, individuals strongly gain in terms of earnings by graduating from a STEM major, with equally large effects for men and women. Ascending Marginal Treatment Effect curves suggest heterogeneous returns while inverse selection on gains implies that individuals with a higher resistance for a STEM education gain the most, where the latter emerges stronger for men. Eventually, we utilize the recent formation of the University of Lucerne, changing relative distances, to estimate the policy-relevant treatment effect for a counterfactual scenario that this university had been established as a technical one: people shifted into a STEM education significantly gain in terms of earnings, with stronger effects for men.
Die coronabedingte Krise (nicht nur) der qualitativen Sozialforschung
In dem Vortrag werde ich versuchen zu erläutern, dass die gesamte Sozialwissenschaft durch die Pandemie in eine tiefgreifende und nachhaltige Krise geraten ist. Vor allem, weil die Qualität der Ergebnisse der Sozialforschung leidet und weil die wissenschaftlichen Karrieren auf allen Qualifikationsstufen durch die Pandemie beeinträchtigt werden. Besonders dramatisch ist, dass viele Lebensbereiche nicht mehr untersucht werden können. Gerade dort, wo Forschung besonders notwendig ist, bei Älteren, nicht so Gesunden, nicht so Wohlhabenden, nicht so Gebildeten gibt es auf absehbare Zeit entweder keine Forschung mehr oder nur eine unzureichende.
Research in Partnership with Government in the US – The California Policy Lab
The California Policy Lab (CPL) is part of a growing number of research centers in the United States that do applied economic research in partnership with local or state government agencies. The goals of such long-term research partnerships is to work on problems that are directly policy relevant, help implement relevant findings, and integrate administrative data that otherwise would be difficult to access. The presentation reviews CPL’s approach to government partnerships and reviews examples of joint research projects, including nudge experiments, predictive work on homelessness, COVID-19 related projects, with particular focus on studies of unemployment insurance benefits
Scared Straight? Threat and Assimilation of Refugees in Germany
This paper studies the adoption of local preferences and norms by refugees over time. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the allocation of refugees across German regions between 2013 and 2018, we examine the path of their convergence towards local culture in the short-run. We assemble a novel data set on values, habits, and preferences for 8,000 refugees, and combine it with information on more than 34,000 locals. We find strong evidence that refugees converge to local culture, closing the gap by 5% every year. This effect is stronger for regions whose culture is more distinct from the national one and more internally homogeneous. We also provide evidence that refugees' cultural convergence is faster where support for anti-immigrant parties is stronger, where there are more hate-crimes against refugees, and where locals are less open to diversity - patterns consistent with what we label the ``threat hypothesis''. Despite the positive effect of a threatening environment on the pace of refugees' cultural convergence, we document that the former slows down their economic integration.
Nachhaltigkeit: Von der Motivation zur Strategie
Nachhaltigkeit ist ein gesellschaftliches Ziel, dem sich immer Organisationen explizit verschreiben. Wichtige Treiber sind hierfür gleichermaßen das äußere Umfeld wie auch die Impulse der eigenen Mitarbeitenden. Doch was ist Nachhaltigkeit und wie lässt sich dieses Ziel mit einer organisationsspezifischen Strategie befördern? Der Vortrag greift diese Frage auf und behandelt ausgewählte Aspekte und Instrumente bei der Erarbeitung einer Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie. Neben Fragen der Stakeholder-Identifikation und Einbindung geht es auch um die Analyse wesentlicher Handlungsfelder sowie möglicher Methoden zur Organisation und Kommunikation von Nachhaltigkeit. Der Vortrag lädt bewusst zur Interaktion ein und möchte Impulse für die weitere Diskussion am IAB geben.
Fairness in times of rapid change – policy levers for more solidarity
Employment and Social Developments in Europe (ESDE) 2020: “Leaving no one behind and striving for more: fairness and solidarity in the European social market economy”
The review provides evidence-based analysis on how to achieve greater fairness across the EU in the face of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and of long-term challenges arising from structural change due to demographic ageing, climate change and digitalisation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is having profound health, economic, employment and social effects, hitting society’s most vulnerable disproportionately hard and threatening much of the progress that the EU had achieved previously in labour markets and social outcomes. Against this background, this year’s ESDE analyses the state of play of and challenges to social fairness and inclusivity of growth in the EU. It also explores specific policies and tools that can improve the prospects of greater social fairness and enhanced solidarity in the future. ESDE provides evidence-based groundwork for the reflection on how policy can help achieve recovery and further normalisation while meeting Europeans’ expectations regarding fairness and solidarity.