Education & Labor Economics, Gender Economics, Banking regulation and supervision, Empirical banking
Fuchs, L., Heinz, M., Pinger, P., Thon, M. (2024): How to Attract Talents? Field-Experimental Evidence on Emphasizing Flexibility and Career Opportunities in Job Advertisements
Job advertisements are a key instrument for companies to attract talent. We conduct a field experiment in which we randomize the content of job advertisements for STEM jobs in one of the largest European technology firms. Specifically, we study how highlighting job flexibility and career advancement in job advertisements causally affects the firm’s pool of applicants. We find large treatment effects of entry-, but not for senior-level positions in the firm: highlighting job flexibility increases the total number of female and male applicants, while emphasizing career advancement only raises applications by men. Both effects are entirely driven by applicants residing outside of the federal state in which the firm is located. In a survey experiment among STEM students, we find that the content of job advertisements shapes young professionals’ beliefs about the work environment at the firm. Most importantly, we find that students expect better career benefits, but lower work-life balance when career advancement are highlighted. Our study highlights how job advertisements affect the total number of applications as well as applicants’ quality, diversity, region of residence and beliefs.
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Fuchs, L., Nguyen, H., Nguyen, T., Schaeck, K. (2023): Climate Stress Test, Bank Lending, and the Transition to the Carbon-Neutral Economy
Does banking supervision affect borrowers’ transition to the carbon-neutral economy? We use a unique identification strategy that combines the French bank climate pilot exercise with borrowers’ carbon emissions to present two novel findings. First, climate stress tests actively facilitate borrowers’ transition to a low-carbon economy through a lending channel. Stress-tested banks increase loan volumes but simultaneously charge higher interest rates for brown borrowers. Second, additional lending is associated with some improvements in environmental performance. While borrowers commit more to reduce carbon emissions and are more likely to evaluate environmental effects of their projects, they neither reduce direct carbon emissions, nor terminate relationships with environmentally unfriendly suppliers. Our findings establish a causal link between bank climate stress tests and borrowers’ reductions in transition risk.
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Fuchs, L., Pinger, P., Seegers, P. (2025): Relative Grades and Gender Differences in STEM Enrolment
Based on novel administrative and survey data from Germany, this study investigates the importance of relative STEM performance in high school for the gender gap in STEM enrollment. We first document that males display a higher relative STEM performance than females, which however mainly emerges from females' stronger achievement in non-STEM subjects. Our findings further reveal that a one-standard-deviation increase in grade-based STEM advantage raises the likelihood of pursuing a STEM degree by approximately 19 percentage points for males, but only by half as much for females. A decomposition analysis shows that 26\% of the STEM gender gap could be attributed to differences in grade-based STEM performance if major preferences resembled those of males. However, relative grades are largely unimportant in an environment where preferences mirror those of females. This suggests that STEM performance differences have limited influence on females' decisions to pursue STEM degrees. While STEM advantage significantly impacts observed gender gaps in STEM enrollment, this effect is primarily driven by males.
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