This study uses published job advertisements to examine organizations’ stated demand for digital skills in Canada. We apply a structured and replicable text-mining methodology to 14,010 Indeed Canada postings, combining web scraping, standardized text preprocessing, bigram tokenization, dictionary-based detection, manual validation, and mapping to the DigComp 2.0 framework. Although advanced digital skills appear in the corpus, employer-declared demand is concentrated in Microsoft Office tools, data entry, basic data management, social media, information systems, computer systems, databases, and data analysis. These findings suggest that Canadian employers are not only recruiting for specialized digital transformation expertise, but also for the foundational digital competence required to perform ordinary service, administrative, and retail work in increasingly digitized environments.
This study investigates how members of the labour force in Germany assess wages in various nursing professions, which wage levels they consider appropriate, and how these assessments vary by working conditions. Using a vignette experiment embedded in an online survey, we identify causal effects of worker and job characteristics on respondents’ wage evaluations. We describe hypothetical care workers and characteristics of their jobs and ask respondents both the wages they presume are currently paid and those they consider appropriate for specific combinations of worker and job characteristics. A substantial share of the respondents considers notable increases in wages to be appropriate, especially in geriatric care and for less skilled nursing assistants. Wage assessments also reflect job characteristics such as performance as well as mental and physical stress. Overall, our findings suggest that the public favours slightly higher wages, specifically for outpatient and inpatient geriatric care, and may favour wage models that more strongly account for performance and stress factors. Unique nursing vignette experiment that can identify causal effects on wages. Respondents often underestimate wages for nurses. Performance parameters and stress are taken into account in respondents’ wage assessments. Results inform professional organisations, managing directors and policymakers about public perceptions with regard to nursing wages.
This article examines the relationship between different types of ICT use, flexibility and wages using Austrian survey data from 2011/2012, employing quantile regression to analyze gender differences across the wage distribution. Distinguishing between “techy” and “operational” computer tasks and using a multidimensional flexibility indicator, the analysis reveals that women receive premiums for both techy and operational computer use across most wage levels whereas men generally do not. However, greater flexibility is associated with a reduced operational computer wage premium for low-wage women, while higher-earning operational men benefit. The findings suggest that mechanisms beyond productivity, such as social evaluation processes and different concepts of flexibility, may influence how computer use is associated with wages.
This paper analyses the impact of offshoring in the EU – both in total and differentiated by destination region (advanced Europe, developing Europe, developed non-Europe, developing non-Europe) – on six different non-wage working conditions: physical environment, work intensity, worktime quality, social environment, skills and discretion, and prospects. Results from instrumental variable (IV) estimations show that offshoring has substantial causal effects, improving the physical environment and career prospects, but also worsening the social environment, particularly in old EU member states. Moreover, the effects vary by destination: offshoring to advanced Europe improves skills and discretion but can increase work intensity, whereas offshoring to developing Europe enhances the physical environment and career prospects. Effects for non-European destinations are more heterogeneous and sometimes opposite to those observed in Europe.
Public works are usually considered a less important and less effective type of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) as has been emphasized by various empirical studies, mainly based on micro-level data. However, very few studies have looked at local-level labour market effects in the case of large-scale public works intervention. In this study, we perform a municipality-level counterfactual evaluation of a large-scale intervention targeting unemployed women without tertiary education in Croatia to work as assistants for elderly people. The municipality-level effects are examined in Croatia by applying difference-in-differences (DID) estimation and following the approach for staggered rollout by Callaway and Sant’Anna (Callaway and Sant’Anna 2021a). Empirical findings suggest that intervention has resulted in significant reductions in long-term unemployment over the longer term, albeit partly caused by the implementation dynamics, in particular the return of participants to the unemployment register after completion. More genuine and lasting impact on long-term unemployment was noted only two years after the municipality’s exposure to the intervention. Despite the significant financial resources invested in the intervention, we find no evidence of displacement effects. We found no effects on women’s employment in other jobs or on their activity rate. Besides the empirical findings, research also involves methodological insights regarding the application of aggregate-level counterfactual studies in the evaluation of labour market interventions, providing lessons on evaluation setup, evaluation timeliness, research questions and data availability.
Previous research on over-education primarily focuses on new graduates, and documents age as a linear corrector of over-education. However, labor markets are aging in developing and developed countries. This research revisits the relationship between age and over-education across the total span of a career in 33 country-years and for 31,608 individuals with tertiary education, using two cycles of the PIAAC dataset. The findings show that, (1) Although over-education decreases in the first half of a career parallel to the existing literature, from the age of 45 onwards it starts increasing, contrary to what earlier research would suggest. (2) This effect is documented only for senior workers with tenures shorter than 5 years, suggesting that over-education is a potential scarring effect of job change or job loss in the tail-end of a career. (3) The effect of the skill level of a senior worker is negligible on their risk of over-education. Statistical tests show that the quadratic specification of age is a better fit than linear and cubic specifications. The results are robust across three different measures of over-education, across country-years, and alternative model specifications.
This paper examines the evolution of the paid care economy in Egypt, over 2009-21, assessing trends in employment and employment conditions. The analyses demonstrate that, despite goals to grow the paid care economy, paid care employment has shrunk over time in Egypt, driven by the retreat of the public sector. Furthermore, employment conditions in care employment have worsened over time, in part due to the increasing privatization of care employment. The informal share of care employment (without social insurance coverage) has increased over time. While initially there was not a care pay gap, one has formed over time.
Technological change is transforming occupational tasks across modern labour markets, affecting employment security and (re-)employment chances. To maintain their labour market opportunities, affected workers must adapt by acquiring new skills, primarily through further education. This study examines the hiring value of such training in occupations with varying susceptibility to task automation. A factorial survey experiment was conducted with 717 HR managers and recruiters in Germany, generating 5,443 evaluations of fictitious CV-like profiles against job advertisements in 15 occupations. Results show that certificates for further training directly related to advertised tasks increase interview probabilities, but this effect declines with higher occupational automation risk. By contrast, identical signals based on prior work experience remain unaffected by automation risk and the same training devaluation rate is found for training courses not directly related to demanded skills. These findings suggest that the perceived value of further training is shaped not only by skill relevance, but especially that a potential lack of proven application in real-world contexts may function as weaker labor market signals in highly automatable occupations. The study highlights the differential role of skill signals in recruitment and contributes to research on labor market adaptation to technological change.
Administrative data are increasingly used in social science research, including for studying the labour market consequences of motherhood. Yet despite the growing use of such data within countries, cross-national comparative research remains limited because administrative data require substantial harmonisation before meaningful comparisons are possible. In this paper, we harmonise two rich administrative data sets suitable for comparative research on maternal employment: the French DADS-EDP and the German SIAB. France and Germany present a compelling case for such comparisons given their differing norms and policies regarding childcare and maternal employment. We document our harmonisation decisions on data structure, sample selection, employment measurement, and key socio-economic variables, and provide the full Stata code as supplementary material. We illustrate the potential of the harmonised data by examining how maternal employment trajectories evolve over time in France, West Germany, and East Germany. The analysis reveals substantial cross-national and temporal variation in employment trajectories after childbirth, highlighting the value of harmonised administrative data for comparative research on maternal employment.
This study investigated how psychosocial working conditions and work engagement in a previous job influence motivation to work among unemployed older workers. We used a prospective cohort design with data from the Danish SeniorWorkingLife study to analyse prospective associations between job control, quantitative demands, social relations, management support, work-life balance, development opportunities, and work engagement in the previous job, and motivation to obtain employment when unemployed two years later. The sample comprised 693 participants who were 50–63 years and employed at baseline (2018 or 2020) and subsequently unemployed at follow-up (2020 or 2022, respectively). Results showed that work engagement at the previous job was positively associated with motivation to have a job when unemployed. None of the psychosocial working conditions showed statistically significant associations. However, trends indicated a negative association between psychosocial work conditions that are not ‘transferable’ to future jobs (e.g. social relations) and motivation to work when becoming unemployed, while there appears to be a positive association between ‘transferable’ psychosocial work conditions (e.g. job control) at the previous job and motivation to work when becoming unemployed.
Abstract We study the wage effects of an expansion of for-profit preschools in Sweden, which followed after a reform in 2006 removed municipalities’ right to veto private entry. The expansion decreased preschool employers’ monopsony power by increasing the number of alternative employers. We use a differences-in-differences event study design to evaluate the impact on preschool workers’ wages, and find no evidence that wages were affected. In the context that we study, the absence of an upward wage effect may be explained by the entering for-profit firms’ propensity to hire less qualified, lower-paid staff, and workers from other sectors of the economy than the preschool sector. JEL classification H44, I2, J31, J42
This paper investigates how in-demand skills, advertised wages, and occupational exposure to automation co-evolve in Slovakia’s online labor market. Drawing on data covering nearly the full universe of online job vacancies posted in Slovakia in 2022, the analysis extracts skills from unstructured text and maps them into fifteen conceptual categories spanning cognitive, socio-emotional, and manual domains. These categories account for a sizeable share of wage variation, with several linked to notable premia or penalties. Automation risk is gauged through a novel Europe-specific measure of exposure to AI and machine learning, software, and robotics, constructed by matching patent text to task-level occupational descriptions in a shared semantic space. First, the analysis examines whether the conditional number of in-demand skills differs across firms that are more tilted toward adoption of automation technologies, proxied by the occupational structure of their labor demand. The evidence reveals a non-monotonic pattern: vacancies posted by firms more exposed to AI and software list more skills, whereas those concentrated in robotics-exposed roles list fewer; across technologies, skill demand peaks at intermediate adoption levels, forming a clear hump shape. Analysis of skill composition and automation exposure shows that bundles demanding abstract and manual abilities—people and project management, software-specific, financial, hand–foot–eye coordination—are correlationally associated with lower exposure, while clusters featuring routine cognitive, customer-service, and social or character skills align with higher exposure, indicating complementarity. Estimates of average treatment effects confirm a negative association between abstract and manual skills and automation exposure, supporting the view that such capabilities act as a shield against automation. Routine and socio-emotional skills, by contrast, remain concentrated in highly exposed occupations, consistent with their complementary role in tasks that evolve alongside new technologies.
Surveys are an important tool to learn about population characteristics in the social sciences. To make them reliable, survey institutes and methodologist put a lot of effort into ensuring their representativity. Still, every survey has its limits. Nonetheless, applied researchers often leave the safe waters of pre-defined sampling and weighting schemes to study very specific subpopulations or to analyze the data at a level of detail that was not intended by the creators of the survey. In this paper, I use the IAB Establishment Panel, a prominent and widely used German establishment survey, to show the consequences of pushing a survey beyond its limits. Despite not being representative at fine regional or sectoral scales, the survey is often used like that in applied research. I show that the approximation error from using aggregated survey responses can be massive and that using such aggregates can lead to very different conclusions than the ‘true’ population data in plausible empirical applications. C43,C80
We examine how welfare benefit receipt influences the transition from school into all forms of professional training, including vocational training and higher education. We use a unique data set that combines panel survey data with detailed administrative records of adolescents in Germany and develop a dynamic multiple imputation method to account for missing data. We find that adolescents in welfare dependent households show more fragmented transition patterns than others after leaving school. They are significantly less likely to enter professional training even after controlling for a rich set of individual and household related factors, including school type and grades. A key driver of this training gap is the school type, while school grades play no role. Our results imply a long-lasting impact of early socioeconomic conditions on later labor market transitions.
Based on a novel dataset, we examine the gender gaps in the career opportunities of university graduates in accountancy, administration and economics in Uruguay. We find no significant gender differences in graduation marks, time to degree or the likelihood of attaining upper-level job positions shortly after graduation. However, the gaps emerge 7 years after graduation. We show that women are 10
This article describes newly available data on the German short-time work scheme Kurzarbeit. In the course of administering short-time work, the Federal Employment Agency has begun to collect data on its usage. From this process, two distinct data sets emerge: one at the establishment level and one at the individual level. The article explains how both data sets are generated from the administration of Kurzarbeit, details the information they contain and provides illustrative applications. It also discusses the respective potentials and limitations of these data sets for research. E24, H25, J08, J65, J68
This paper conducts a meta-regression analysis of 319 estimates from 76 empirical studies that quantify the unexplained component of hukou-based relative wage gaps in China. On average, the reported unexplained relative hukou wage gap across studies is 10.6
An influential thesis predicted in the 1990s that large cities would become polarised as both high-wage professional and low-wage service jobs expanded at the expense of middle-wage workers. We revisit this thesis by analysing change in the occupational class structure of the ten largest cities in Germany and the UK, 1991–2021. Using UK census and German social security data (SIAB), we find for all cities strong job growth at the top – among professionals and managers –, moderate growth at the bottom – among service and sales workers – and a sharp decline in the middle – among office clerks and production workers. The result is occupational class upgrading with a polarised twist. Polarised upgrading was particularly strong in London, but also evident in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle. German cities experienced similar levels of occupational upgrading, but less polarisation. Notably in Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart, job growth was heavily concentrated among professionals and managers. While second-tier cities such as Dortmund, Essen or Leipzig also created many professional jobs, they experienced almost as much growth in low-end jobs. We find no evidence that job polarisation is specific to the largest cities or that strong job growth among professionals is limited to a few winner-take-all cities such as London and Berlin.
The adoption of AI technology by industry could significantly disrupt our current understanding of “typical” economic activity. As AI comes to pervade more sectors and occupations over time, it is likely that this technology will give rise to challenges and risks but also opportunities and benefits. There is, however, a significant degree of uncertainty regarding how future waves of technological change will impact the economy, including the labour market. Recent research has found that 40
An important question regarding the future of working conditions revolves around employees’ choice of whether to work from home or at their regular workplace. While many employees have become accustomed to working from home during the Covid19 pandemic and want to continue doing so, many employers want them to return to work on-site more intensively. In this study, we conduct a choice experiment with employees in Berlin and Brandenburg in Germany to investigate this rebalancing process. We examine how employers can influence employees’ decision to either work from home or on-site and how the allocation of workdays between home and the regular workplace reacts to a set of work arrangements for different occupational groups. These work arrangements include flexible working hours, fixed desks, canteens, the presence of colleagues on-site, and an employer allowance for days worked from home. The results show that the most important incentive to work from home is produced by the employer allowance for working from home. The most important pull factors for working at the regular workplace are the provision of both a fixed, own desk and flexible working hours granted during days worked on-site. Overall, however, the impact of work arrangements on the choice to work from home or on-site is rather small. J81; J22
