IZA Newsroom

IZA – Institute of Labor Economics

Dajan Baischew

Tobacco control strategies that work

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According to the World Health Organization, the “tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing more than 8 million people a year around the world.” Many countries have therefore implemented various tobacco control strategies aimed at preventing tobacco use and encouraging smokers to quit. Three recent IZA discussion papers evaluate the effectiveness of different policies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.

Public smoking bans improve child health

As evidence of the negative effects of second-hand smoking has mounted, an increasingly popular public policy response has been to impose restrictions on smoking through 100% smoke-free bans in workplaces, restaurants and bars. Yet sparse information exists regarding the impact on the health of children and infants. If smokers compensate by shifting their consumption of cigarettes from public venues to smoking at home, then these policies may have a harmful effect on children and infants.

A study by  Kerry Anne McGeary, Dhaval M. Dave, Brandy Lipton and Timothy Roeper suggests that these fears are unfounded. Exploiting state- and county-level changes to smoking ban legislation over time in the U.S., the authors show that smoking bans have improved the health of both infants and children, mainly through the implementation of more comprehensive bans. Rather than leading to a displacement among smokers, the bans actually had a positive spillover effect in terms of reducing smoking inside the home.

Their effect magnitudes imply that expanding comprehensive coverage to all U.S. states could prevent between approximately 1,110 – 1,750 low birthweight births among low-educated mothers, resulting in economic cost savings of about $71 – $111 million annually. Health improvements among older children add to these economic benefits.

Banning tobacco sales to teens is less effective

Another study by Armando N. Meier, Reto Odermatt and Alois Stutzer evaluates one of the most prevalent prohibitory policies: banning the sales of tobacco to teens. Those in favor of sales bans argue that bans reduce teen smoking by making it more difficult for teens to get cigarettes and by signaling the danger of smoking. Those who criticize sales bans counter that smoking may become more appealing – the forbidden fruit e ffect. They also highlight that teens can circumvent the restrictions by getting cigarettes from other sources, such as their peers, instead of from stores.

Exploiting the staggered introduction of sales bans across Switzerland and the European Union from 1990 to 2016, the estimates for Switzerland indicate a less than 1 percentage point reduction in teen smoking because of the bans. The reduction is substantially lower than the 5 percentage point reduction expected by health officials, mainly because teens circumvent the bans through peers. Moreover, teens consider smokers less “cool” but they do not think smoking is more dangerous.

Pictorial warnings should be supported by media campaigns

A third study by Daniel Kühnle, using individual-level panel data from Australia, examines the association between pictorial warnings on cigarette packages and smoking behavior in terms of prevalence, quitting, initiating and relapsing. The results show that the reform reduced smoking rates by around 4% within the first year of the policy. The effect decreases with age, is similar for men and women, and is slightly larger for low-educated compared to high-educated individuals.

The reform permanently lowered smoking rates primarily due to increased quitting in the year of the reform. The author concludes that pictorial warnings, combined with a reference to a smoking cessation helpline and supportive media campaigns, can be an effective strategy to reduce the social costs of smoking.

Incentivizing learning-by-doing

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Pay-for-performance compensation schemes are used across a wide range of industries and occupations. Even contracts that offer a fixed salary may be implicitly tied to performance by promotion and termination incentives.

Firms offer performance-based pay to motivate workers to supply costly effort, but they may accomplish more than simply inducing employees to work harder in applying their existing skill set. Indeed, such contracts may also induce workers to acquire new skills that make them better at their job, a much more desirable outcome from the firm’s perspective.

In a recent IZA discussion paper, Joshua Graff Zivin, Lisa B. Kahn and Matthew Neidell provide the first empirical evidence on the impacts of performance-based compensation schemes, and particularly the use of bonus payments, for on-the-job learning.

Evidence from grape and blueberry farms

The researchers analyzed data from a grape and blueberry farm that utilizes two distinct contracts to compensate workers for their efforts. Fruit picking provides an ideal setting to evaluate the effects of incentive schemes because workers’ individual productivity can be measured precisely.

The contract for grape pickers paid a fixed wage up to a productivity target and a piece rate thereafter. The contract for blueberry pickers paid a fixed wage up to a productivity target, a bonus for reaching the target, and a piece rate thereafter. The focus of the study was on whether the stronger incentives embedded in the second contract, the one for the blueberry pickers, translated into more or faster learning on the job.

Bonus payment led to faster learning

Consistent with the literatures on salespeople and executive compensation, the authors find that the contract that included a bonus led to “strategic heaping” around the threshold: workers raise their productivity just enough to qualify for the bonus. Importantly, heaping becomes more likely as workers gain more experience and are better able to reach the threshold (see Figure 1).

For workers under the commission-only contract (the grape pickers), such heaping or changes in heaping were not observed (see Figure 2). While blueberry pickers increased their likelihood of hitting the piece rate threshold by 15 percentage points (80%) over their first 10 days on the farm, grape pickers saw very little improvement.

Figure 1: Blueberry productivity by tenure: Histograms of daily output for the indicated number of days tenure. The vertical lines show the threshold at which workers cross from the minimum wage to the piece rate regime.
Figure 2: Grape productivity by tenure.

Costly bonus contracts pay off for the employer

In essence, the contracts with bonuses tied to productivity targets generate faster learning-by-doing than those induced by a simple commission scheme. Moreover, these productivity improvements were not simply limited to those close to the bonus threshold. Instead, learning occurred throughout the productivity distribution.

Overall gains in productivity from those well below the bonus threshold more than offset the costly bonus payments: A simple back of the envelope calculation based on empirical estimates of learning-by-doing under the blueberry contract suggests that the learning induced from day 3 to day 10 of tenure generates an additional $60 in net revenue per worker, or approximately $8.50 per day.

Compensation schemes designed to incentivize effort thus also play an important role in learning and skill acquisition by workers. According to the authors, this suggests such incentives may be an important tool to improve firm productivity also in different settings.

Talk about performance – or pay for it?

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Economists have traditionally stressed the importance of performance pay to align employees’ behavior with the objectives of employers. However, organizations also adopt non-monetary practices to guide the behavior of employees. In particular, in recent years many larger companies have revised their practices to manage employee performance – often reducing the role of individual rewards and focusing more on establishing regular conversations about performance between supervisors and subordinates.

In a recent IZA discussion paper, Kathrin Manthei, Dirk Sliwka and Timo Vogelsang study whether introducing regular conversations about a specific outcome variable can indeed raise performance, and how the effect of these conversations compares to and interacts with effects of performance pay tied to the same outcome variable. The research team analyzed the supervision between district managers and their store managers of a nationwide retailer, operating discount supermarkets in Germany.

The key result is that performance reviews indeed increased profits by approximately 7-8 percent. Yet, this positive effect of the performance reviews vanished when it was accompanied by performance pay, which alone had no significant effect on profits. Thus, in contrast to the researchers’ expectations, performance pay did not only reduce the marginal effect of introducing performance reviews – it even reduced the absolute effect of this practice.

Performance pay undermines reputational incentives

The authors explain that the use of monetary rewards can reduce the power of the “reputational incentive” mechanism, especially when reputational incentives are strong. Performance reviews generate more transparency about the managers’ activities to raise profits, facilitating the signaling of motivation which leads to higher powered incentives. Performance pay, on the other hand, may undermine the reputational incentives triggered through the review meetings and, in turn, can affect the quality of the interaction between supervisor and subordinate.

On a broader level, these results show that different organizational practices may interact in non-trivial ways. The performance effect of introducing a specific management practice may be contingent on the use of other practices. Whether and how specific practices interact depends on the interplay of different economic motives and behavioral mechanisms.

The Newest Revolution? Happiness!

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The emergence and evolution of modern science since the 17th century has led to major breakthroughs in the human condition. The first, the Industrial Revolution, started in the late 18th century and is based chiefly on developments associated with the rise of the natural sciences and brought a marked advance in material living conditions. The second, the Demographic Revolution, began in the latter half of the 19th century, and is largely the result of progress in the life sciences. It is the shift from high to low levels of mortality and fertility. 

IZA Prize laureate Richard Easterlin, pioneering researcher on the relationship between demographic developments, economic outcomes and subjective well-being, develops in a recent IZA discussion paper the rationale for a third revolution, the Happiness Revolution. He also notes the implications of this perspective for the interpretation of international cross-section studies.

Objective circumstances vs. self-reported feelings

Whereas the two prior revolutions are embodied in markers of people’s objective circumstances, real GDP per capita and life expectancy, the principal measure of the Happiness Revolution is people’s self-reported feelings about their lives as a whole, captured in survey questions about their overall happiness and satisfaction with life in general.

The basis of the Happiness Revolution is the development of the social sciences, Easterlin argues. The first and foremost achievement of the social sciences has been to establish widespread public recognition that circumstances like unemployment, poor health, and poverty are the result chiefly of forces beyond an individual’s control, and that collective action is required to help those suffering from such circumstances. Prior to the 20th century, the common belief was that these problems were the result of an individual’s character flaws – laziness, failure to save, dirtiness, drunkenness, gambling, and the like.

Social science and the creation of the welfare state

Economics initially supported such beliefs through its advocacy of laissez-faire, that government should be small and that to intervene in people’s lives would only promote dependency. After severe financial crises and major depressions, however, as the problems of the free market economy became clearer, social sciences put forward policies aimed at stabilizing the economy. At the same time, social policy took shape, eventuating in policies comprising what is now called the “social safety net“. This consists of programs encompassing such things as income support (unemployment insurance, social security, social assistance, and disability benefits), health care, infant and childcare, education including preschool programs, maternity and paternity leave, elderly care, and old-age pensions. 

These economic and social policy initiatives, which are still evolving, are most fully realized in today’s welfare state. The cradle-to-grave safety net of the welfare state addresses the concerns most important, according to national surveys, for personal happiness over the life course—employment and income security, a fulfilling family life, and good health. The extent of a nation’s success in addressing these concerns is captured in measures of happiness—hence the “Happiness Revolution.” 

Happiness as guidance for public policy decisions 

Happiness has begun to nudge aside GDP per capita as a measure of social progress. Easterlin further argues that happiness, unlike GDP, can capture in more comprehensive fashion the varied contributions the social sciences are making to advancing personal well-being. 

The positive cross section relationship between happiness and GDP per capita is sometimes cited as demonstrating that economic growth causes greater happiness. It is hard to reconcile this assertion with the fact that Costa Ricans, whose government introduced safety net policies as early as the 1950s, are as happy as Americans despite a GDP per capita only one-fourth as great. It is also hard to square this view with the nil time series relationship between trends in happiness and GDP per capita. In the United States happiness today is no greater than 70 years ago when real GDP per capita was one-third of its current level; in China life satisfaction in 2015 was about the same as in 1990 despite a roughly fivefold multiplication of real GDP per capita.

The World Happiness Report

The annual World Happiness Report, produced under the auspices of the United Nations, presents happiness estimates for over 150 countries worldwide. The geographic differences in happiness are much like those observed for the Industrial and Demographic Revolutions. On a scale from zero to ten, Western European countries and their offshoots are highest with values reaching as high as 7.5 or more and Sub-Saharan African nations lowest, in the range of 3.0 to 4.0. 

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Easterlin’s IZA Prize Volume on “Happiness, Growth, and the Life Cycle” presents his key papers in happiness economics.

Read also an interview in Brain World Magazine:

Working conditions in online labor markets

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Among the trends which characterize the changing nature of work, the growth of the online platform economy has been steady and fast in recent years. Technological progress and digitalization are at the basis of its current development. Due to the overall exponential growth of internet facilities, an increasing number of workers are participating in what is described as the gig, on-demand, or platform-based economy.

These workers are usually called crowdworkers, where crowdwork is defined as an “employment form that uses an online platform to enable organizations or individuals to access an indefinite and unknown group of other organisations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific services or products in exchange for payment.”

Poor working conditions?

A number of studies have shown how these workers suffer from the erosion of fundamental labor rights, the loss of social protection and difficulties in exercising collective action. These issues are especially acute for platform workers involved in the so-called micro-tasks (a series of small tasks which together comprise a large unified project and can be performed independently over the Internet in a short period of time), which are more exposed to risks concerning low pay, precariousness and poor working conditions.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that platform work has a causal effect on working conditions solely based on the evidence of these descriptive studies, as it could be argued that the characteristics of crowdwork are intrinsically different from traditional salaried professions.

In light of these crucial issues, a recent IZA discussion paper by Michele Cantarella and Chiara Strozzi analyzes a large fraction of the available evidence on earning and working conditions of crowdworkers involved in micro-tasks, focusing on data both from the United States and Europe.

Platform workers vs. traditional workers

Does working on online labor markets have an impact on earnings and working conditions across the US and the EU? Are individuals involved in micro-task crowdsourcing intrinsically different from traditional salaried workers involved in comparable occupations? The paper addresses these questions by comparing outcomes in working quality between online-platform and traditional workers in a quasi-experimental approach, exploiting caregiving as an exogenous source of variation influencing participation in crowdwork rounds across the female population.

The authors’ contribution is based on an empirical analysis of cross-sectional data collected from three different surveys and harmonized in order to obtain the greatest degree of comparability. The aim is to provide an unbiased comparison of earnings and working conditions of platform workers and ‘traditional’ workers across control and treatment groups, where variations in outcomes are analyzed conditionally on a binary ‘treatment’ variable indicating participation into crowdwork.

For both the US and Europe the treatment groups include information on crowdworkers from a number of online platforms – namely, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), Crowdflower, Clickworker, Microworkers and Prolific Academic – coming from two dedicated surveys distributed by the International Labour Organization, while the control groups include information from available extended surveys on American and European workers’ conditions (American Working Conditions Survey, European Working Conditions Survey).

Crowdworkers earn less and would like to work more

Their findings indicate that, overall, crowdworkers earn about 70% less than ‘traditional’ workers with comparable ability, while working only a few hours less per week. For both the US and EU, those differences are not affected by the observed and unobserved ability of individuals. Also, platform workers appear to be uninterested in looking for other forms of occupation, while still expressing the desire to work more than what they currently do.

According to the authors, these results suggest that the labor force in crowdworking arrangements may suffer from high levels of under-utilization, relegating crowdworkers into a new category of idle workers whose human capital is neither fully utilized nor adequately compensated.

Improving jobs outcomes in developing countries

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The global economy faces massive transitions due to automation and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Mobilizing investment to create better jobs and improve access for disadvantaged groups has never been more important – especially in developing countries.

Focused on Improving Jobs Outcomes in Developing Countries, the third edition of the Jobs and Development Conference was at World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC on June 6-7, 2019. It was organized by IZA together with the World Bank and the five partner institutions of the Network on Jobs and Development.

“This conference opened space for policymakers and labor economists to exchange ideas about what works for improving jobs outcomes and how developing countries are shaping up to tackle the future of work agenda,” said co-organizer Gary Fields (Cornell University and IZA).

The conference, attended by more than 100 registrants as well as by delegates from Washington-based institutions, kicked off with a policymakers’ panel, where Prakash Loungani (IMF), Indhira Santos (World Bank), Steven Ayres (DFID), and Kunal Sen (UNU-WIDER) discussed how to improve the design of labor market institutions in developing countries to accelerate the growth of good jobs and promote universal access to social protection; how to improve jobs outcomes for women; and ways to transform agriculture to generate better jobs in Africa.

Keynote speeches from MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann made the case for paradigm shifts in how we think about economic growth, jobs, productivity, wages, and the future of work – both in developed and developing countries.

Automation and the future of work

Acemoglu emphasized how automation is transforming the nature of work. Repetitive tasks previously performed by humans can now be automated. Contrary to what many pessimists have predicted, that isn’t making work redundant. Instead, other new tasks are being created, where humans have a comparative advantage. According to Acemoglu, the real threat to labor does not come from brilliant new technologies, but from “so-so” technologies that are “just good enough to be adopted but not so much more productive than the labor they are replacing” (read more in a recent IZA Newsroom article).

Development Scrabble

Hausmann highlighted how complex combinations of inputs lie at the heart of productivity and income growth. The problem is that “you run out of some inputs before others.” Hausmann laid out an extended metaphor of “Development Scrabble” where letters equate to expertise (normally requiring both people and tools); and words equate to the innovations that result from new combinations of letters. As a country or region assembles more letters, the possible combinations grow exponentially. Seen this way, development is a process of increasing complexity.

Parallel sessions included another sixty-five papers. Fifteen presentations were organized by the partner institutions, while fifty papers were chosen from more than 200 submissions in response to the Call for Papers. The program included researchers from more than twenty countries. Annual Jobs and Development Conferences are planned for the next five years in countries around the world.

New moms are healthier when dads can stay home

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Giving fathers flexibility to take time off work in the months after their children are born improves the postpartum health and mental well-being of mothers. This is the main finding of a new IZA discussion paper by Stanford economists Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater.

The researchers examined the effects of a reform in Sweden that introduced more flexibility into the parental leave system. The 2012 law removed a prior restriction preventing a child’s mother and father from taking paid leave at the same time. And it allowed fathers to use up to 30 days of paid leave on an intermittent basis within a year of their child’s birth while the mothers were still on leave.

The policy change resulted in some clear benefits for the mother’s health, including reductions in childbirth-related complications and postpartum anxiety, according to the empirical analysis. “A lot of the discussion around how to support mothers is about mothers being able to take leave, but we often don’t think about the other part of the equation—fathers,” Rossin-Slater said.

Giving families flexibility

The study underscores that the father’s presence in the household shortly after childbirth can have important consequences for the new mother’s physical and mental health: Following the reform, mothers are 14 percent less likely to need a specialist or be admitted to a hospital for childbirth-related complications—such as mastitis or other infections—within the first six months of childbirth. And they are 11 percent less likely to get an antibiotic prescription within that first half-year of their baby’s life.

There is also an overall 26 percent drop in the likelihood of any anti-anxiety prescriptions during that six-month postpartum period—with reductions in prescriptions being most pronounced during the first three months after childbirth.

Moreover, the study found that the average new father used paid leave for only a few days following the reform—far less than the maximum 30 days allowed—indicating how strong a difference a couple of days of extra support for the mother could make.

“The key here is that families are granted the flexibility to decide, on a day-to-day basis, exactly when to have the dad stay home,” Persson said. “If, for example, the mom gets early symptoms of mastitis while breastfeeding, the dad can take one or two days off from work so that the mom can rest, which may avoid complications from the infection or the need for antibiotics.”

Exposure to “high-achieving” boys in high school may harm girls in the long run

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The gender composition of a class, a group of competitors, or a team has been shown to affect both individual and group outcomes. These findings point to potentially important consequences for issues ranging from effective teaching and the optimal structuring of teams to the design of evaluations in a variety of environments.

In a recent IZA Discussion Paper, Angela Cools, Raquel Fernández and Eleonora Patacchini attempt to move beyond the question of gender per se and instead focus on investigating a particular characteristic: “high-achievers” of a given gender. Does greater exposure to “high-achievers” of the same or different gender matter? To whom does it matter? And why?

The study investigates these questions in the context of high-school education using data from Add Health, a nationally representative sample of U.S. students in grades 7-12. To identify “high achievers” in terms of predetermined abilities rather than grades, which may be affected by interaction with fellow students at school (thus reversing cause and effect), the researchers look at parents’ educational attainment as a strong predictor of children’s academic achievement.

The analysis shows that greater exposure to “high-achieving” boys decreases the likelihood that girls go on to complete a bachelor’s degree. It also negatively affects their math and science grades and, in the long term, decreases labor force participation and increases fertility.

Exploring possible mechanisms, the researchers find that greater exposure leads to lower self-confidence and aspirations and to more risky behavior, including having a child before age 18. The girls most strongly affected are those in the bottom half of the ability distribution and those attending a school in the upper half of the socioeconomic distribution.

Greater exposure to “high-achieving” girls, on the other hand, has a positive effect of essentially the same absolute magnitude, increasing bachelor’s degree attainment for lower-ability girls, those without a college educated parent, and those attending “better” schools.

Boys, in contrast, are unaffected by “high-achievers” of either gender.

It remains unclear whether “high-achieving” boys have a direct negative effect on fellow female students, or a more indirect effect that may arise from how teachers react to these students or even from how the parents of these boys affect teachers or the allocation of resources.

Nonetheless, the findings suggest that policies should aim at increasing girl’s ambition and self-confidence, and at “counterbalancing” the negative effects of high-achieving through exposure to more high-achieving girls.

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Visit the IZA World of Labor to learn more about gender differences in…

Breaking the cycle of poverty through education

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Children that grow up surrounded by poverty often remain in poverty even into adulthood. To try to break this cycle, governments and nonprofit institutions have developed a broad range of policies and interventions. One such program is the Pathway to Education program that offers disadvantaged youth in Grades 9 through 12 free public transportation and postsecondary financial aid in exchange for commitments to regularly meet with an advisor, access tutoring assistance, and attend character-building group events.

Programs like Pathway appear effective at improving education attainment, but cost thousands of dollars per student. To justify these costs, it is necessary to consider long-term benefits. What policy makers are ultimately concerned with is return on investment in improving lifetime outcomes, such as earnings, in order to break the cycle of poverty. With the possibility that short-run impacts on academic outcomes may not easily translate to significant long-term impacts, the ability for comprehensive programs to improve long-run outcomes is an open question.

A recent IZA Discussion Paper by Adam M. Lavecchia, Philip Oreopoulos and Robert S. Brown delivers encouraging evidence that comprehensive student support programs can indeed lead to meaningful, long-run labor market benefits, including higher employment rates and earnings and a reduced reliance on social assistance.

Student support program in one of Toronto’s poorest community

The Pathway program started at Regent Park, Canada’s oldest and largest public housing project and one of the poorest communities in Toronto. Eligibility is based solely on the place of residence; for example, at its Regent Park site, only students living in the neighborhood’s public housing units are eligible for the program. Participation in the program, although voluntary, is extremely high, often in excess of 85-90 percent.

The research design compares the outcomes of individuals that were assigned to live in Regent Park during high school with students that were assigned to other Toronto public housing projects. To estimate long-term labor market outcomes, the authors matched high school administrative records to income tax records.

Increases in annual earnings and employment

The researchers find that eligibility for Pathways increases annual earnings at age 28 by approximately $3,100 or 19 percent. Eligibility for Pathways is also found to have a large positive impact on the fraction of disadvantaged youth that are employed as adults, by 15 percent, and postsecondary educational attainment. In addition, the program decreases the likelihood of receiving social assistance by more than a third.

The study is the first to estimate impacts of comprehensive support programs for high school students on earnings. It also adds to a growing body of evidence that interventions like Pathways have the potential to improve labor market outcomes and reduce reliance on social assistance more than a decade after students participate in the program. An important question remains around whether watered-down versions of these programs could generate similar effects for less cost, or whether programs like that work even better when delivered together with college level programs.

Causes, costs and benefits of migration

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For the 16th Annual Migration Meeting, the organizers chose a location with one of the richest histories of migration in the world, namely Ireland. Hosted by the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, the meeting brought together 16 presenters discussing the latest research in the economics of migration in a two-day workshop.

The highlight of this year’s workshop was the keynote by Prof. Sir Paul Collier from the University of Oxford, one of the leading development economists. In a thought-provoking lecture entitled “Sustainable Migration”, he focused on potential welfare costs of migration that cannot be explained by the standard models in labor economics and their implication for migration policy. One example is that immigration may induce firms to train domestic workers less, which leads to an under-investment in tacit knowledge. Another example is the location choice of high-skilled immigrants, who predominantly locate in large cities.

While migrants contribute to the success of cities, they are often the main beneficiaries of agglomeration rents while medium-skilled natives get priced out of large cities. As a consequence, migration may contribute to the growing divide between big cities and the periphery, which affects the social fabric in many countries. Despite some well-documented benefits of migration, it is important that these costs be measured and that they feed into the design of migration policy. Collier advocates a sustainable migration policy that minimizes the economic, political and social costs of migration for the sending and receiving countries.

Investigating refugee flows

A key theme of the meeting was the economic impact of refugee flows. Looking at the recent wave of Syrian refugees to Turkey, work by Onur Altindag shows that refugee inflows led to an increase in local economic activity by enhancing the productivity of existing as well as the creation of new firms.

Panu Poutvaara makes use of novel data on refugee flows to investigate the self-selection of refugees and irregular migrants in 2015 and 2016. He documents a strong positive selection of both groups; it is mainly the most skilled workers who flee to Europe while the less skilled remain behind.

Work by Dany Bahar shows that returning refugees can enhance economic growth in their country of origin. The paper looks at refugees from former Yugoslavia who were living and working in Germany before being repatriated after the end of the Balkan wars. The paper reveals a striking finding: industries that welcomed many returning refugees grew faster after the war and showed stronger export performance. This suggests that returnees brought back knowledge from Germany which had a large benefit for local companies.

Besides refugees, the presentations covered a broad range of topics such as the impact of high-skilled migrants on the labor market, the effect of sanctuary cities on law enforcement in the US, the effect of  migrant rights on the desire to emigrate, the effect of identity on the economic and social integration of second-generation immigrants, and the effect of teachers speaking the same foreign language on the test scores of immigrant children.

See the workshop program for a full list of presentations.