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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Sam Hoey (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Thomas Peeters (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Stefan Szymanski (University of Michigan) |
| Abstract: | We study racial disparities in advancement to top management using the careers of 4, 770 former frontline workers from a prominent industry in England. Black workers are substantially less likely than non-Black workers to reach top managerial positions (11 versus 20 percent). We identify three sources of this gap: lower entry into management, lower promotion rates within management, and shorter tenure in senior managerial roles. Counterfactual simulations show that barriers to entering management explain most of the racial gap early in workers’ careers, while differences in promotion rates become the dominant driver later on. |
| Keywords: | racial discrimination, career progression, systemic discrimination, football managers |
| JEL: | J24 M50 M54 |
| Date: | 2026–08–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20260053 |
| By: | Lorenzo Cappellari; Tommaso Colussi; Marco Ovidi |
| Abstract: | We study how committee dynamics affect the recognition of academic excellence and its consequences in the labour market. Using administrative records from a major Italian university and exploiting exogenous variation in the gender composition of graduation committees, we show that equally prepared female graduates are significantly less likely to receive laude honors when evaluated by male-majority committees, while males are unaffected. The effect is concentrated among students advised by female or early-career faculty and disappears when a woman chairs the committee, pointing to the role of authority and influence in deliberations. We show pre-defense gender gaps in adivsors' official laude requests in male-majority committees, consistent with nominations responding to expected committee support. Gaps in academic distinction translate into meaningful entry-wage penalties, contributing to gender gaps at labor-market entry. |
| Keywords: | Gender bias, academic evaluation, labor market outcomes |
| JEL: | J16 I23 J24 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26194 |
| By: | Aboulhosn, Aya (American University); Aksoy, Cevat Giray (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development); Ozcan, Berkay (LSE) |
| Abstract: | Research and policy debates on population aging typically assume that immigration matters only through immigrants’ own fertility and its impact on total population size, ignoring effects on natives’ fertility. We study this margin in the context of the large inflow of Syrian refugees into Türkiye after 2011. Using an instrumental-variables strategy, we provide evidence that greater local exposure to refugees increases native fertility. Drawing on complete birth histories from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we find that the response operates primarily through earlier entry into motherhood and is concentrated among younger women. The result holds across three independent datasets, including administrative birth registers, and is mirrored in women’s stated ideal number of children. Examining potential mechanisms, we find the evidence most consistent with improved household economic security and find no support for channels operating through housing costs or the use of paid childcare. |
| Keywords: | forced migration, fertility, refugees, social interactions |
| JEL: | J13 R23 F22 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18858 |
| By: | Lorenzo Cappellari; Bernardo Fanfani |
| Abstract: | We study how updates in pay floors set by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) shape the wage structure in Italy. We estimate stacked event-panel difference-in-differences models around changes of contractual minima and trace distributional impacts. Pay-floor hikes of 2.2% on average raise mean log FTE daily wages by 2.2%, but effects are near zero at the 10th percentile and stronger at the 90th, implying inequality enhancing wage-rate responses. This asymmetry reflects both within-agreement heterogeneity, as lower-paid workers within CBAs respond less, and between-agreement heterogeneity, as low-wage CBAs exhibit weaker pass-through. Non-compliance with pay floors is higher in low-wage CBAs, thus it is a potential driver of asymmetries even if its level is not affected by wage updates. Pay-floor hikes reduce employment and days worked only among low-wage workers and only among full-time jobs, which may further contribute to the muted wage response in the lower tail through selection mechanisms. |
| Keywords: | collective bargaining, contractual minimum wages, wage structure |
| JEL: | J31 J38 J51 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26197 |
| By: | Thomas Peeters (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Jan C. van Ours (Erasmus University Rotterdam) |
| Abstract: | We examine worker-to-firm matching in a high-wage international labor market encompassing nine European countries. Employment matches are ranked along two key dimensions: worker productivity, defined by contributions to physical output, and firm productivity, measured by the ability to generate revenue from that physical output. We find a strong and significant positive rank correlation between these two measures, both within and across countries. This evidence of `positive assortative matching' suggests that labor market frictions do not prevent high-productivity workers from matching with high-productivity firms across Europe. Both workers' initial job placements and their subsequent mobility within countries and across countries reinforce this pattern. |
| JEL: | J24 J63 Z22 |
| Date: | 2026–08–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20260054 |
| By: | Bellou, Andriana (University of Montreal); Cardia, Emanuela (University of Montreal) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the short- and long-run effects of the Great Depression on college attainment by gender in the United States for cohorts born 1906–1920. Using state-level variation in Depression severity, we find that harsher conditions in the early 1930s are associated with small increases in educational attainment by 1940, with similar responses for men and women. Following these cohorts to 1960, more severe Depression exposure is linked to modest increases in men’s college attainment at the one- and two-year margins, with little effect on four-year completion. Women’s responses are more heterogeneous and generally imprecisely estimated. We further show that these patterns are stronger in areas with greater WWII mobilization: male attainment rises more strongly in highly mobilized states, while women’s responses remain limited and mixed. Overall, the results suggest that early-life exposure to the Depression, combined with wartime opportunities, may have contributed to modest gender differences in college attainment in the mid-twentieth century. |
| Keywords: | Great Depression, college gender gap, WWII mobilisation, GI Bill |
| JEL: | J1 N3 I0 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18846 |
| By: | Bruno Cr\'epon; Aur\'elien Frot; Christophe Gaillac |
| Abstract: | Most digital job-search assistance encourages unemployed workers to broaden their search toward related occupations, targeting one important source of search inefficiency: insufficient occupational diversification. Our analysis suggests that the relevant margin of adjustment depends on the underlying search problem. Building on a detailed analysis of job seekers' beliefs and search behavior, we identify a large group of pessimistic workers for whom the main constraints are low search effort and low aspirations, rather than insufficient occupational diversification. This diagnosis points to an unexpected intervention: rather than encouraging these workers to search in new occupations, we encourage them to search more intensively and apply for better-paying jobs within the occupations they already consider. We evaluate this diagnosis-based intervention, alongside a standard occupational recommendation, in a large-scale randomized experiment conducted with the French Public Employment Service. The motivational intervention increases search effort, raises reservation wages, and improves reemployment outcomes along the predicted margins. Occupational recommendations, by contrast, primarily benefit workers whose search problem lies in the allocation of attention across occupations and operate by activating existing perceptions rather than correcting beliefs. More broadly, our findings show how digital platforms can combine subjective expectations, behavioral data, targeted interventions, and randomized experimentation to diagnose job seekers' needs and iteratively improve intervention design. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.16849 |
| By: | Bruno Cr\'epon; Aur\'elien Frot; Christophe Gaillac |
| Abstract: | Job seekers' expectations about reemployment are increasingly used to study job search, but what their biases reveal about underlying beliefs and preferences is ambiguous. We combine new survey data, structural modeling, and machine learning to uncover the informational content of these expectations and show how they can be used to improve the targeting of employment support. Using a new panel of French job seekers' subjective expectations linked to administrative records, we show that reemployment expectation biases are strongly associated with, and summarize, biases in beliefs about the two fundamentals of search, job offer arrival rates and the wage distribution. These underlying biases are heterogeneous but strongly positively correlated, so their effects on search compound. We then estimate a structural job search model with multiple sources of biased beliefs and show that correcting them helps pessimistic job seekers but can demotivate and hurt optimistic ones, providing a rationale for targeting. Finally, we develop a machine-learning stratification that recovers policy-relevant groups, with distinct patterns of biased beliefs and behaviors, from easily elicited reemployment expectations alone. This gives employment services a simple tool to target informational interventions. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.16827 |
| By: | Baez, Javier E.; Garriga, Santiago; Perova, Elizaveta; Tyurkileri, Meliz |
| Abstract: | This study estimates the child penalty in Türkiye, defined as the negative impact of having a child on mothers' labor market outcomes. Utilizing the Survey of Income and Living Conditions data from 2006 to 2023, the analysis reveals a significant child penalty, which varies across regions within the country. Panel-based estimates show that women’s labor force participation drops by 44 percent in the year following child’s birth, while their employment rates decline by 40% percent. Additionally, for mothers who remained employed, their working hours decrease by approximately 7%, while the likelihood of informal employment increases by 69% three years after childbirth. The results highlight the persistence of the child penalty—lasting for at least 10 years after the birth of the first child—and stand in stark contrast to men’s labor market outcomes, which remain largely unchanged. The study identifies key factors that mitigate the penalty, including higher education, older age at birth, presence of grandmothers, availability of childcare services, and more progressive gender norms. The findings underscore the need for policy interventions that enhance gender equality in the labor market for mothers, such as expanding childcare services, promoting flexible work arrangements, and addressing gender norms. |
| Date: | 2026–05–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11397 |
| By: | Bahal, Girish (University of Western Australia); Feld, Jan (Victoria University of Wellington); Shrivastava, Anand (Azim Premji University) |
| Abstract: | Preferences and discrimination are often treated as competing explanations for occupational segregation. This framing misses an important feedback. Preference-based sorting changes the sex composition of occupations; composition changes expected discrimination; and expected discrimination changes sorting. We formalize this mechanism through a general model, where occupations differ in flexibility and workers face more discrimination when their sex is underrepresented. We show two results. First, discrimination amplifies segregation caused by preferences. Second, preferences and discrimination are negatively correlated across occupations. We use the model to study anti-discrimination policies, preference-equalizing policies, and policies that make high-wage occupations more flexible. |
| Keywords: | labor market segregation, preferences, discrimination, sex, gender |
| JEL: | J16 J24 J71 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18843 |
| By: | Razavi, Goya (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | Large earnings gaps by socio-economic status (SES) persist among college applicants even where tuition is free. Using the universe of Danish applications linked to administrative earnings, I ask whether these gaps reflect low returns to selective majors, admission rules, or students’ own choices. Leveraging GPA admission cutoffs from a centralized matching algorithm, I apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to examine whether low-SES students benefit from selective college majors. Scoring just above the cutoff for admission to a more selective major raises low-SES students’ income by 9% at age 30, partially closing the class gap in earnings. For high-SES students I find no detectable gain. To disentangle the contribution of major-specific returns from that of students’ choices as sources of inequality, I then estimate a joint model of college major choice and earnings in which returns depend on peer composition, using students’ rank-ordered application lists to correct for selection on unobservables. Low-SES returns exceed high-SES returns, relative to their outside options, across most of the major selectivity distribution. Current GPA-based meritocratic admissions are inefficient in terms of maximizing earnings: implementing need-affirmative admissions, holding capacity fixed, would reduce the class gap by 15% through upward mobility of disadvantaged students. Notably, the class gap in earnings could largely be eliminated if students selected college majors based on returns, though this requires expanding capacity. Thus, disparities persist not because disadvantaged students experience low returns from selective majors, but because of how seats are allocated and which majors students choose. |
| Keywords: | Admission rules; earnings; policy impact; capacity |
| JEL: | J01 J12 |
| Date: | 2026–08–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2026_010 |
| By: | Attila Lindner (University College London; ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies; IFS; IZA); Balázs Reizer (ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies; Corvinus University of Budapest); Andrea Weber (CEU; CEPR; RFBerlin) |
| Abstract: | We investigate how a large-scale outflow of workers affect the reaming workforce. We use Hungarian administrative social security data on the opening of the Austrian labor market to Hungarian workers as a natural experiment. We find that the opening of the Austrian border increased wages by 1 percent and decreased employment by 5 percent in the close neighborhood of the Hungarian side of the border. We also show that the outflow of workers slightly decreased the quality of the remaining workforce in Hungary. Furthermore, we show that Austrian labor demand shocks have a positive impact on Hungarian wages as the increase of vacancies in Austria increases the wages on the Hungarian side of the border. |
| Keywords: | Labor demand, migration |
| JEL: | J23 F22 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:2514 |
| By: | Sheth, Ketki; Weis, Toni Johannes; Getnet, Saba Yifredew |
| Abstract: | Gender gaps in pay and leadership roles are well documented across labor markets. However, the literature on low- and middle-income countries is limited, and it remains unclear whether these gaps reflect sorting into lucrative, high-skill sectors or differential career progression within those sectors. This paper examines gender differences in compensation, advancement, and career-relevant mechanisms within such a high-skill sector, focusing on finance in Ethiopia and using evidence from the country’s largest commercial bank, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, which is estimated to account for roughly one-quarter of employment in the country’s finance sector. Using six years of administrative records covering the universe of nearly 50, 000 employees, combined with large-scale employee and manager surveys, the paper documents substantial gender gaps in compensation and career advancement: women earn approximately 85 percent as much as men, are 80 percent less likely to hold supervisory roles, and are 68 percent less likely to hold managerial roles. These gaps are not explained by differences in education, experience, or internal performance evaluations. The study finds little support for commonly cited mechanisms emphasized in high-income settings, including gender differences in willingness to compete for promotions, negotiate, or access professional netwo rks. Instead, gender differences emerge in access to career-enhancing opportunities and in constraints on work flexibility. Together, these findings suggest that gender gaps in advancement arise not from lower ambition or weaker effort but from differences in exposure to advancement-relevant opportunities and in time allocation and geographic mobility, some of which may be amplified through supervisors’ perceptions. The bank under study performs relatively well on aggregate gender indicators and has explicitly prioritized women’s advancement, suggesting that these estimates are likely lower bounds on gender gaps elsewhere in the financial sector and that substantial disparities can persist even in comparatively favorable institutional settings. |
| Date: | 2026–08–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11436 |
| By: | Ziegler, Lennart (Central European University) |
| Abstract: | How strongly do employer age preferences restrict the hiring of older workers? I study Austrian job postings, in which employers could openly state age limits until the practice was banned in 2004. Age limits were both widespread and strict: more than 30 percent of vacancies stated an upper age limit, and most caps were set between age 40 and 55. To assess the impact of the ban, I link the vacancies to administrative data on applicants and hired workers, predict each job's age requirement from pre-ban postings of the same firm and occupation and compare jobs with stronger and weaker predicted restrictions over time. After the ban, previously restrictive jobs attracted older applicants and hired older workers, with larger effects at the application stage than at the hiring stage. Wages, job duration, sickness absence and vacancy filling duration remained unaffected. In the ad texts, employers replaced direct references to young workers with attributes commonly associated with youth. Taken together, these results suggest that employers hold overly pessimistic beliefs about older workers and partially revise them once a broader pool of applicants emerges. |
| Keywords: | vacancies, age discrimination, screening and hiring |
| JEL: | J63 J14 J23 J24 J68 J71 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18866 |
| By: | Diallo, Yaya; Djolaud, Guy Arnold |
| Keywords: | Labour market concentration, Monopsony power, Immigrant assimilation |
| JEL: | J42 J61 J15 J21 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:clefwp:342474 |
| By: | Zoltán Hermann (HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies; Corvinus University of Budapest); Júlia Varga (HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impact of occupational regulation, a labour market institution affecting many workers, on labour market fluidity in Europe. Using data from 10 European countries, we estimate the effect of occupational regulation on occupational mobility (transition to another occupation) and job loss (transition from employment to unemployment). By leveraging the variation in regulation across countries within an occupation, we identify the regulation effect using a two-way fixed effects approach. We also compare the effects of more and less stringent forms of regulation. The results show that occupational regulation substantially decreases occupational mobility, while its effect on job loss is ambiguous. More stringent regulation (occupational licensing) has a more substantial effect than weaker requirements. |
| Keywords: | occupational regulation, occupation licensing, occupation mobility, labour market fluidity, labour market flexibility |
| JEL: | C01 J08 J44 J62 |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:2418 |