Agenda du séminaire
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 16/05/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-21
Job seekers face uncertainty about their abilities, and whether these match with job requirements. Such uncertainty may result in sub-optimal job search outcomes and job matches. We conduct a field experiment among job seekers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Participants underwent a skill assessment and were asked about their willingness to pay (WTP) for information about their relative performance on a test of general intelligence. WTP is positive for about 80 percent of the population, and is associated with gender and personality. Feedback provision leads individuals to update their beliefs which only persists for individuals with low WTP. We provide evidence that suggests imperfect recall as potential mechanism for the lack of persistence. Feedback increases job search intensity but relatively less for initially overconfident individuals and those with negative or zero WTP. This results in lower realized wages for these groups. The heterogeneity in belief updating, recall and job search behavior is consistent with some overconfident job seekers being unable to forget information and, thus, to maintain motivated beliefs, but being sophisticated about this inability to forget.
ISPHORDING Ingo (IZA) Feedback, Overconfidence and Job Search Behavior
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 23/05/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-13
A large literature argues that technological change since the 1980s altered the demand for workers’ skills, increasing wage inequality and polarization. By estimating a model of occupational choice using panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), I find that changes in the supply of workers’ skills were also major driving factors in increasing inequality and polarization. Specifically, I find that (1) as tasks in high-skill jobs have become increasingly complex, the distribution of workers’ ability to perform those tasks has become more dispersed, (2) workers’ ability to perform low-skill work tasks has become more homogenous, and (3) workers have increasingly sorted into occupations by skill level, even if this does not maximize their income. These results suggest that skill formation has been a key channel through which long run changes in the nature of work have affected wage inequality. Finally, to obtain my estimates I prove a new identification result in a multi-dimensional potential outcome model and show how to robustly estimate it semiparametrically adapting results from mixture models.
DIEGERT Paul (Duke University) The Role of Skills and Sorting in Explaining Wage Inequality
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 30/05/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
CARLANA Michela (Harvard) *
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 06/06/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-21
Economic theory predicts that a common language and culture facilitate social
interaction. The value of assimilation is larger for an individual from a small minority than for one
from a large minority. We test the theory and confirm it by exploiting a natural experiment in
Denmark between 2004 and 2015, when refugee immigrants were assigned to neighborhoods
quasi-randomly and language training was a condition for receiving social assistance. The assigned
share of co-language neighbors reduces the probability of having completed a language course four
years since arrival, irrespective of gender and skills. While the share of neighbors who speak their
native tongue has little impact on the economic success of men, it increases women’s fertility and
reduces their employment probability, earnings, and likelihood of working in communication-
intensive jobs. Moreover, while favorable local labor market conditions improve individual labor
market outcomes, they slow down the language course progression of men. Our results support the
economic theory and have important implications for immigration and integration policies.
PIIL DAMM Anna (Aarhus University) Co-Ethnic Neighbors and Assimilation
écrit avec Ahmad Hassani,Trine Skriver Høholt Jensen and Marie Louise Schultz-Nielsen
Texte intégral
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 13/06/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-15
TIAN Lin (INSEAD) *
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 20/06/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-15
Professional advancement often comes through personal connections. This study analyzes how gender persistently shapes the career benefits workers enjoy from positive shocks to their network of connections. We follow mid-career academic scientists in China who compete to serve temporarily on a major scientific funding body. This role brings substantial opportunities to expand their personal networks, partly through increased interactions with senior scientists who are gatekeepers of research funding. Specifically, we estimate how service affects career advancement differentially by gender over time. For males, service is linked to a 56 percent increase in high-stakes, high-value grants awarded, a doubling of the likelihood of promotion, and a significant increase in the likelihood of becoming a gatekeeper with whom subsequent scholars choose to network. In contrast, females experience no gains. This disparity appears to flow primarily through an expansion to the professional networks of male but not female scientists. Notably, the benefits of service are more comparable when female scientists have more opportunities to network with senior female scientists. These findings help explain the persistence of gender inequality in senior roles in science and other historically male-dominated fields.
EBLE Alex (Columbia University) How Gender Shapes the Career Impacts of Network Shocks: Evidence from Academic Science
Travail et économie publique externe
Le 11/07/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
DUCHINI Emma (University of Essex) *