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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

We analyze workers' risk preferences and training investments. Our conceptual framework differentiates between the investment risk and insurance mechanisms underpinning training decisions. Investment risk leads risk-averse workers to train less; they undertake more training if it insures them against future losses. We use the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) to demonstrate that risk-affinity is associated with more training, implying that, on average, investment risks dominate the insurance benefits of training. Crucially, this relationship is evident only for general training; there is no relationship between risk attitudes and specific training. Thus, as expected, risk preferences matter more when skills are transferable - and workers have a vested interest in training outcomes - than when they are not. Finally, we provide evidence that the insurance benefits of training are concentrated among workers with uncertain employment relationships or limited access to public insurance schemes.

The wage gap between newly arriving immigrants and comparable natives in the United States has widened substantially over the last few decades while the subsequent speed of convergence has declined. These patterns have led to a pessimistic view regarding wage assimilation prospects of immigrants. This paper unravels an unexplored mechanism that can explain an important part of these regularities: labor market competition. Because immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes in production, increasing immigrant inflows exert stronger labor market competition on previous cohorts of immigrants than on natives, contributing to a widening wage gap. We quantify the importance of this mechanism using a model that accounts for the main features of the literatures on the wage impact of immigration and immigrant wage assimilation. Our results suggest that, if competition and composition effects are netted out, immigrant cohorts are more positively selected in recent decades, with these differences disappearing after 10 years, implying a lower relative wage growth for recent cohorts.

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