Work in progress


Working papers

The Micro and Macro Effects of Changes in the Potential Benefit Duration   cite
with Robin Jessen,  Ewa Gałecka-Burdziak,  Marek Góra and Jochen Kluve.
Covered by Handelsblatt

We quantify micro and macro effects of changes in the potential benefit duration (PBD) in unemployment insurance. In Poland, the PBD is 12 months for newly unemployed if the previous year’s county unemployment rate is more than 150% of the national average, and 6 months otherwise. We exploit this discontinuity using RD estimates on registry data containing the universe of unemployed from 2004 to 2020. For workers whose PBD is directly affected by the policy rule (benefit recipients younger than 50), a PBD increase from 6 to 12 months leads to 13 percent higher unemployment. The aggregate effect on unemployment is entirely explained by this increase. Thus, the micro effect equals the macro effect. We find no evidence of spill-overs on two distinct groups of unemployed whose PBD is unchanged and no effect on measures of labour market tightness. A decomposition analysis reveals that 12 months after an increase in the PBD, changes in exits from and entries into unemployment each contribute to about one half of the overall increase in unemployment.

Parental Leave, Worker Substitutability, and Firms' Employment  cite
Reject & resubmit The Economic Journal (revision resubmitted)
with Mathias Huebener, Daniel Kuehnle and Michael Oberfichtner. 
Summary of our findings at the IZA Newsroom in English and German.
Awarded with the BeNA Innovative Research Award 2019

Motherhood and parental leave are frequent causes of worker absences and employment interruptions, yet we know little about their effects on firms. Based on linked employer-employee data from Germany, we examine how more generous leave benefits affect firm-level employment and hiring decisions. Focusing on small- and medium-sized firms, we show that more generous benefits reduce firm-level employment in the short term, which is driven by firms with few internal substitutes for the absent mother. However, firms do not respond to longer expected absences by hiring fewer young women, even when few internal substitutes are available. To rationalise the findings, we show that replacement hiring occurs largely before the expected absence and that firms hire more external replacements when fewer internal substitutes are available. These findings indicate that extended leave does not harm firms when these can plan for the longer worker absences. 
In this paper we analyse the association between maternal well-being and child development at different ages. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) which captures maternal life satisfaction and numerous cognitive and non-cognitive child development outcomes. We identify a strong positive association between mothers’ life satisfaction and their children’s development when these are toddlers (2-3 years, VAB scores), of primary school age (5-10 years, SEB scores and Big 5) and in adolescence (11-14 years, life satisfaction, school grades and self-reported Big 5). This relationship holds when we control for a wide range of potentially confounding factors, including maternal education, employment, household income and maternal personality traits. We confirm our main findings with an IV estimation where we instrument contemporaneous maternal life satisfaction with that measured pre-birth and with a value-added model as some child outcomes are observed twice at different ages. Our findings suggest that mothers’ life satisfaction is beneficial for their children’s development at all ages and that it is fruitful for policy makers to identify measures through which maternal well-being can be raised.

Drafts coming (hopefully) soon

Moral Hazard among the Employed: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity
with Ewa Gałecka-Burdziak, Robin Jessen and Andrew C. Johnston

Policymakers face trade-offs between the benefits of social insurance and the unintended consequences of moral hazard. We use discontinuities to measure the employment effects of benefit generosity and benefit duration. The discontinuities reveal that more generous benefits not only reduce exit from unemployment, but also substantially increase worker entry into unemployment. Our welfare analysis shows that a $1-increase in benefit [generosity/duration] incurs a more significant welfare loss than a $1-increase in benefit [duration/generosity], and that the distortion on UI [entry] is larger than the well-known distortion on UI [exit]. The welfare distortion become more pronounced when the externalities of employment are incorporated into our model. 

Separate Housework Spheres
with Sebastian Schweighofer-Kodritsch, Felix Weinhardt and Jan Berkes

Key patterns of the gender division of household time-allocation are incompatible with canonical non-cooperative household models; men do not increase their housework contributions in response to women's increase in labour supply. Using novel time-use data from the socialist GDR and reunified Germany we document that despite different gender norms regarding women's employment household time-allocation patterns look similar when conditioning on household types. We then extend Fernández et al.'s (2004) household model by introducing a second household good. Comparative advantage by gender across those two goods creates separate housework spheres. The model generates testable propositions which we take back to the data. We find ample support for separate housework spheres in Germany and more generally using data for 16 countries over four decades. Separate housework spheres exist independent of female labour force participation or gender norms towards female employment. We discuss implications for the nature of norms, effects of labour market policy and shocks such as COVID-19.

A Star Was Born: How Workers Respond To Politically-charged Job Postings
with Pawel Adrjan, Mária Balgová, Simon Jäger and Jason Sockin

While nouns in the German language are gendered toward males, the introduction of the ``gender star'' or ``gender colon'' have allowed for nouns to be interpreted as not assigning gender, or non-binary. Their usage however has become highly politically polarizing. Using over 40 million online job postings from 2016 to 2023, we document the rising prevalence of the gender star and colon in the German labor market, particularly in German counties with greater support for the Green party. We then study how jobseekers respond when the advertised job title includes such non-binary punctuation. Inclusive job ads receive more clicks and lead to more application starts. The positive effect is larger for the colon and holds when exploiting within firm and job title variation and looking at large companies with rapid increase over time. Finally, using a survey experiment, we investigate how such politically-charged signals in job ads affect sorting and labor market polarization. 

Aggregating evidence on capital and training programs for micro-enterprises in developing countries
with Nathan Fiala and Tim Kaiser

We aggregate 622 treatment effects reported in 53 field experiments in 27 developing countries to study the relative effectiveness of capital and training programs for small- and micro-enterprises on business- and household outcomes. The average effect of interventions on all outcomes is 0.1 sigma and treatment effects are highly generalizable across contexts with no evidence of fade-out. We find that statistical effect sizes of capital (credit and grants) and training interventions (business training and consulting) are similar with no evidence for complementarities of interventions. We find no strong evidence of heterogeneous effects by outcome, gender of the beneficiary or business types.

Child Penalties in Labour Market Skills
with Michele Battisti and Lavinia Kinne

Pronounced child penalties in labour market outcomes are widely documented. In this paper, we adapt the pseudo-panel approach by Kleven et al. (2023) to estimate child penalties in a single cross-sectional data set on cognitive skills of adults (PIAAC) covering 26 countries. We show that labour market skills drop in early parenthood for both parents, but especially for mothers. The long-run child penalty in numeracy skills is 0.15 standard deviations. Using estimates on the returns to skills in the labour market, these lower numeracy skills would translate into 3% lower wages for mothers.

The Effects of Reducing Flexibility in the Labour Market: Evidence from Spain
with Pawel Adrjan and Miguel Ángel Malo

Sexual Harassment at the Workplace
with Valentina Götz and Ingo E. Isphording

Longer unemployment benefit for more experienced workers - a privilege or a curse? An RD and DD analysis
with Ewa Gałecka-Burdziak, Robin Jessen and Anna Ruzik-Sierdzińska