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Further publications: René Böheim (27 hits)

In a randomised controlled trial in Austria, lowering caseloads for caseworkers in a Public Employment Office led to more meetings with unemployed clients, more job offers, more programme assignments, and more sanctions for noncompliance with job search requirements. It shortened unemployment spells through faster job entry, but also through more exits from the labour force in the 2 years following treatment. The duration of unemployment was reduced for a number of subgroups of the unemployed, but not all benefitted from increased employment. For women and foreigners, lower caseloads led to more time out of the labour force. The quality of jobs after unemployment, measured by wages, did not change. A cost–benefit analysis suggests that lower caseloads not only shorten unemployment but also save public costs.
Using a highly stylized dynamic microsimulation model, we project the labor force of the United States up to the year 2060 and contrast these projections with projections for Germany to assess differential effects on outcomes. The projections are consistent with the US Census Bureau's and Eurostat's demographic projections. Our modeling approach allows to show and quantify how policy changes the future size of the labor force, which we assess with a series of what-if scenarios. Both the USA and Germany are expected to undergo demographic aging, but their demographic fundamentals differ starkly. This has strong implications for their labor force developments. According to our microsimulation, the US labor force will, despite population aging, increase by 16.2 percent in the age groups 15 to 74 (corresponding to 25.2 million workers) between 2020 and 2060, while Germany will experience a decline by 10.7 percent (4.4 million workers). In these baseline projections, improvements in the education structure will add about two million persons to the US labor force and about half a million persons to the German labor force by 2060. In the what-if scenarios, we examine the implications of improvements in the educational structure of the population and of policies which address the health impediments for labor force participation. Of the educational scenarios that we evaluate, increasing the number of persons who achieve more than lower education has the strongest positive impact on labor force participation, relative to the number of additional years of schooling implied by the various scenarios. Shifting people from intermediate to higher education levels also increases labor force participation in higher age groups, however, this is partially offset by lock in effects at younger ages. Our projections highlight that improvements in the labor market integration of people with health limitations provide a particularly promising avenue to increase labor force participation rates and thus help to address the challenges posed by demographic aging. If the health gap in participation rates in the United States were similar to that currently observed in Sweden, the labor force in 2060 would be larger by about 14.9 million persons.
Thomas Leoni, René Böheim
in: IZA COVID-19 Crisis Response Monitoring. Short-Run Labor Market Impacts of COVID-19, Initial Policy Measures and Beyond
IZA Research Reports, 2020, (98), 13 pages, http://ftp.iza.org/report_pdfs/iza_report_98.pdf
We examine the gender wage gap in Austria from 2005 to 2017 using data from EU-SILC. The raw wage gap declined from 18.6 log points in 2005 to 14.9 log points in 2017. We use standard decomposition techniques that correct for differences in the distributions of human capital, and other variables, between men and women. All calculated decompositions indicate that the unexplained part of the gender wage gap decreased substantially over the last ten years. The decrease of the unexplained gender wage gap between the largest gap in this period (2006) and the most recent gap (2017) ranges from 3.7 log points to 8.5 log points depending on the decomposition approach. Using the approach developed by Neumark (1988), the corrected wage gap shrank from 8.7 (8.8) log points in 2005 (2006) to 5.1 log points in 2017. The main reason for the decline in wage differences is the relative improvement of women's observed and unobserved characteristics.
Social Science Research, 2019, 82, pp.18-32
Many countries have reduced the generosity of sickness and disability programs while making them more activating – yet few studies have examined how employment rates have subsequently changed. We present estimates of how employment rates of older workers with poor health in 13 high-income countries changed 2004-7 to 2012-15 using HRS/SHARE/ELSA data. We find that those in poor health in the USA have experienced a unique deterioration: they have not only seen a widening gap to the employment rates of those with good health, but their employment rates fell per se. We find only for Sweden (and possibly England) signs that the health employment gap shrank, with rising employment but stable gaps elsewhere. We then examine possible explanations for the development in the USA: we find no evidence it links to labour market trends, but possible links to the USA's lack of disability benefit reform and wider economic trends.
We analysed sickness and disability policies for the working-age population in a number of OECD countries, between the years 1990 and 2014. Existing evidence suggests that there has been a broad shift in focus from passive income maintenance to employment incentives and reintegration policies. We have updated detailed policy scores provided by the OECD to estimate model-based country clusters. Our results indicate that countries have pursued different types of reforms consisting of a combination of integration and compensation measures. The reforms of recent decades have led to the emergence of a distinct cluster of Northern and Continental European countries characterised by a combination of strong employment-oriented policies and comparatively high social protection levels. An analysis of recent reforms shows a continued expansion of measures that foster employment as well as instances of retrenchment in the compensation dimension. Diversity of policy settings across country groups, however, remains substantial.
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