Topic Labor and Employment

Workshop Economic and Psychological Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Self-employed

Based on various data sources, the workshop will examine the economic and psychological situation of the self-employed three years after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Next to analyzing the immediate impact of the crisis, the workshop will address the adjustment measures taken by the self-employed and the long-term consequences. Possible research questions include what strategies the self...

Local Unemployment and Postsecondary Education

This study uses administrative data on the universe of students in tertiary education in Germany and shows that university enrollment depends negatively on the local unemployment rate at high school graduation. This finding contradicts common evidence on countercyclical US undergraduate enrollment. Students' financial dependency and loan aversion suggest reduced parental income as dominant...

How have you found your job? Effects of the job search channels on labour market outcomes in Germany

The most popular method to acquire a job is to use one's circle of acquaintances or social networks to find a position. However, in the current research, there is still no clear conclusion if this job search method has positive implications for different job outcomes such as wages. This paper studies the effects of this job search approach in the context of Germany compared to the formal...

Wohnsitzauflage: An opportunity for integration? The Impact of Residential Obligation Policy on Refugee Women’s Labor Market Participation

*************POSTPONED*****************To promote integration, the German government enacted the Residential Obligation Act (Wohnsitzauflage) in 2016, which obliges refugees to maintain their residence in the states to which they have been assigned for a period of three years from the time they are granted asylum or temporary residence. Studies addressing this policy have found controversial...

The Effects of an Increase in the Retirement Age on Health Care Costs: Evidence from Administrative Data

In this paper, we use unique health record data that cover outpatient care and the associated costs to quantify the health care costs of a sizable increase in the retirement age in Germany. For the identification, we exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform which abolished an early retirement program for all women born after 1951. Our results show that health care costs significantly increase ...

Income Growth in the United Kingdom during Late Career and after Retirement: Growing Inequalities after Deindustrialisation, Educational Expansion and Development of the Knowledge-based Economy

This article shows how late-life incomes from work and pensions evolved in the United Kingdom between 1991 and 2007, the year the Great Recession began. Our main contribution comes from focusing on changes across cohorts in different educational groups while also considering the gender divide. Our statistical analyses based on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) suggest that deindustrialisation, ...

Gender Parity on Top Boards Is Still a Far-off Goal, and It Is Time for Companies to Take Action: Editorial

Number of Women on Boards of Large Companies Keeps Growing: Momentum from Inclusion Requirement, However, Is Waning

The upward trend in women’s representation on executive and supervisory boards of major companies in Germany continued in 2022, although the overall momentum has slowed yet again. Growth on executive boards in particular has slowed, as the most recent DIW Berlin Women Executives Barometer shows: Following a significant increase at the 200 largest companies from 2020 to 2021, there was only a one-percentage-point ...

Corporate Reporting Provides Insight into Companies’ Commitment to Gender Equality

Many companies in Germany must provide information beyond financial figures in their annual reports. For some years now, legislators have increasingly required information on non-financial aspects, such as the shares of women in leadership positions. Using a quantitative text analysis of annual reports, this second report in the 2023 DIW Berlin Women Executives Barometer shows that the major publicly ...

Can a Federal Minimum Wage Alleviate Poverty and Income Inequality? Ex-post and Simulation Evidence from Germany

Minimum wages are increasingly discussed as an instrument against (in-work) poverty and income inequality in Europe. Just recently the German government opted for a substantial ad-hoc increase of the minimum-wage level to euro12 per hour mentioning poverty prevention as an explicit goal. We use the introduction of the federal minimum wage in Germany in 2015 to study its redistributive impact on disposable ...