Labour Economics最新文献

We explore the contribution of stereotyping to attainment gaps between pupils from different ethnic groups when grades are assigned by teachers. We exploit a change in assessment methods in England to compare grades based on teacher predictions to grades received through blindly marked examinations. When grades are assigned by teachers, ethnic minority pupils receive higher grades in maths and lower grades in English relative to White British pupils and compared to when grades are assigned through exams marked by external assessors. We use an extension of the Gelbach decomposition (Gelbach, 2016) to investigate whether the effects can be accounted for by differences in the levels of, or returns to, observed characteristics between years. Accounting for these differences partially reduces the grade gap changes in maths but roughly doubles the magnitude of the grade gap changes in English. Grade gap changes are also not driven by time trends or ceiling effects. We conclude that group-specific stereotyping is a convincing explanation of the results.

Using a novel firm survey matched to administrative employee records, we demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic was a push factor for the diffusion of digital technologies in Germany. Two out of three firms invested in digital technologies. Three quarters of those investing firms invested because of the pandemic, particularly in hardware and software to enable decentralized communication, management, and coordination. These investments also fostered additional firm-sponsored training, underscoring the complementarity between investments in digital technologies and training. We then show that the investments helped firms insure their workers against the economic downturn. Firms with additional digital investments retained more of their employees on regular working hours and relied less on short-time work. Low- and medium-skilled, as well as young workers, benefited the most from the insurance effect of digital investments.

We study the effect of a substantial increase (36%) in parental allowance, a universal basic income-type benefit, on the labor supply of parents of young children in the Czech Republic. Parental allowance does not preclude labor market activity, which allows us to estimate the income effect. We find that the reform resulted in a 4.8 percentage point (11%) decrease in labor market participation of mothers of young children. Mothers with only one child (7.8 p.p., 20%) and university-educated mothers (17 p.p., 32%) reacted particularly strongly. The percentage reduction in hours worked was virtually identical to that in labor force participation. We argue that the sizeable labor supply reduction was driven by the option to extend the parental allowance period, which enabled mothers to postpone their return to work. We find no effect on the labor supply of fathers of young children.

In most disability insurance programs beneficiaries lose some or all of their benefits if they earn above an earnings threshold. While intended to screen out applicants with high remaining working capacity, earnings limits can also distort the labor supply of beneficiaries. We use a reduction in the earnings limit in Hungary to evaluate this trade-off and examine screening and labor supply responses. We find that the policy changed selection into the program modestly but reduced labor supply on the intensive margin significantly. These findings suggest that the earnings threshold should be higher.

Several countries have changed between conscription and volunteer militaries, yet very little is known about the outcomes of conscripts compared with volunteers. Denmark is one of the few countries that recruits conscripts and volunteers for military service and assigns conscripts through a draft lottery—a uniquely informative combination. While deployment to the missions we study was voluntary, we use the initial assignment mechanism to estimate the relationships between recruitment methods and a variety of military and post-military deployment outcomes. We find that conscription improves the deployed intelligence pool compared to a volunteer force. However, the intelligence of deployed conscripts varies more over the business cycle than that of volunteers. Denmark’s mixed recruitment method is able to recruit effective soldiers as we find no other significant associations between recruitment method and outcomes while deployed.

Using a regression discontinuity design, I evaluate an internationally unique policy in Sweden that rewarded equal division of parental leave with a cash bonus. The policy caused a small but significant reduction in the difference in days of leave between the parents. But since parent couples responded in different directions depending on the gender of the person with the lower uptake, the average effect on the mother-father difference in uptake was insignificant. Expectedly, given this result, the bonus did not affect average gender differences in earnings or indicators of later childcare responsibility. However, mothers who lowered their uptake of parental leave in response to the bonus displayed positive point estimates with regard to earnings while mothers who increased their uptake displayed negative estimates. This indicates that we cannot rule out a potential link between the length of parental leave and later allocation of time between home and market production. While the bonus did not affect average gender differences in parental leave and earnings, a key finding is that parents’ division of parental leave can be affected by economic incentives, suggesting that better calibrated bonus programs have potential to be useful policy tools.

This paper estimates the heterogeneous impact of three types of vocational training- preparation, qualifying, and combined – on jobseekers’ return to employment using the Modified Causal Forest method. Analysing data from 33,699 individuals over 24 months, it reveals a short-term negative lock-in effect for all programmes, persisting in the medium term for combined training. Only qualifying training shows a positive medium-term effect. Seniors, low-skilled, foreign-born, and those with poor job histories benefit most, while youth and higher education levels benefit less. Targeting foreign-born individuals could significantly enhance programme effectiveness, as indicated by the clustering analysis and optimal policy trees.

The quality of an employment match is a central concept in labor economics. It is relevant for evaluating the welfare impact of labor market policies, and for our understanding of labor market dynamics. This paper reviews the challenges associated with measuring match quality. We first review measures commonly used in the literature, their advantages, and drawbacks. We then present novel evidence from a survey sample of US employees where alternative measures were collected simultaneously. We show that while some of these measures correlate well, others do not. Finally, we present additional partial evidence on the correlations between measures based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), a substantially larger and nationally representative survey. The takeaway message is a word of caution regarding the interpretation of some of these measures and specific concerns regarding using wages and tenure as indicators of match quality.

Administrative data on bachelor students for 2014/15 to 2022/23 academic years are used to analyze their performance before, during, and – what is new in the literature – after the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis reveals that both low- and high-ability students of all affected cohorts received better grades during the semesters when teaching and examinations were delivered online, with the effect on low-ability students continuing through the first after-COVID academic year. However, improved grades contrast with lower graduation rates, especially among high-ability students. Detailed analysis of graduation patterns coupled with ECTS credits take-up analysis suggests that high-ability students were often discouraged from studying during the pandemic. For low-ability students, the negative influence of COVID-19 was compensated by the lenient grading policy that allowed them to pass the compulsory exams and continue studying.

This paper assesses the effect of teachers on the gender gap in student test scores. It combines different empirical strategies from the value-added and labor economics literature to estimate teacher value-added and its contribution to the math and reading gender gaps. We use rich administrative data from Chile that allow us to follow teachers through different classes in different years. Our main findings indicate that teachers explain up to 18% of student test score variance and help reduce the gender gap in math by 16.9%. The reduction in the math gender gap is greater in voucher schools (16.1%), among students with more educated mothers (24%) and among those with female math teachers (32.2%). We provide evidence supporting a within-class effect, instead of sorting (between-class) effect. We conduct several tests and robustness checks to assess the reliability of our findings.