IZA Newsroom

IZA – Institute of Labor Economics

IZA World Labor Conference 2018

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IZA was created in 1998 with a generous endowment from the Deutsche Post Foundation. Over the 20 years of its existence, IZA has issued nearly 12,000 Discussion Papers, touching on all areas of labor economics and labor issues, but also including studies dealing with appropriate statistical measurement, macroeconomic labor issues and many other areas related to labor. The IZA network of Research Fellows and Affiliates contains over 1,500 members from more than 60 countries. It includes many labor economists, but also specialists in labor issues in sociology and labor policy more generally.

Each year IZA has held or co-sponsored around 30 conferences covering such areas as education, migration, program evaluation, environmental issues and many others. It has also held an annual meeting, its Transatlantic Conference, bringing together one dozen researchers from each side of the Atlantic to exchange ideas and present their research. At the IZA Summer School, each year around 30 advanced European Ph.D. students discuss each other’s research, hear lectures on cutting-edge topics by world-renowned scholars, and, moreover, become acquainted with each other, fostering a cadre of European scholars of the next generation.

It seemed appropriate to commemorate these achievements by holding a large conference open to researchers from around the world. From over 600 submissions, 192 papers were selected and organized into 48 sessions on June 28-29 in Berlin. The World Labor Conference was also the venue for awarding the biennial IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

[View online program]

[Download conference booklet – PDF]

The 2018 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Joseph Altonji

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Joseph G. Altonji (Yale University) will receive the 2018 IZA Prize in Labor Economics for his seminal contributions to the economic analysis of labor supply, family economics and discrimination. Worth 60,000 euros, the IZA Prize is regarded as the most prestigious science award in the field. It will be formally conferred during the World Labor Conference celebrating IZA’s 20th anniversary in Berlin on June 28, 2018.

According to the award statement, “Altonji’s contributions have shaped the understanding of how households decide on their labor supply under fluctuating business cycles and changing labor markets, whether the family is the relevant unit of economic decision making, and what the mechanisms behind labor market discrimination are. An overarching theme of his work is that even the most insightful and fundamental theoretical advances must be supported by rigorous empirical evidence.”

[download the full statement – PDF]

The IZA Prize Committee consists of seven distinguished economists, six of whom are previous Awardees. “Picking Joe Altonji as this year’s IZA Prize winner was an obvious choice. His profound contributions to several important areas of labor economics – his concern about taking economic theory and measurement seriously – made the selection committee’s job very easy,” said IZA Network Director Daniel Hamermesh, who chairs the committee.

[read more about the IZA Prize and previous winners]

About the Laureate

Joseph Altonji is currently the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of IZA (since 2001). In 2018 he will be President of the Society of Labor Economists. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on a number of government advisory panels, and currently is a member of the U.S. Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee and the National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavior and Economic Sciences Advisory Committee. Recognizing the need for supporting the public debate with economic evidence, he became a founding editor of Microeconomic Insights, a platform providing accessible summaries of economic research.

[read more on his homepage]

IZA Fellow Robert LaLonde (1958–2018)

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Robert J. LaLonde

We regret to announce that Professor Robert LaLonde, IZA Research Fellow since 2001, passed away on January 17, 2018, after a long illness. Except for three years on the Michigan State University faculty, Bob spent his entire professional career, since receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1985, at the University of Chicago, his undergraduate alma mater.

He is most well-known for his research on the evaluation of training programs and the measurement of the impact of labor market shocks, including worker displacement and immigration, and for the affection and respect that he inspired among his students and colleagues.

The far-reaching influence of his work has been chronicled over the years by academic journals, and most recently, in a series of essays published in his honor by the Journal of Labor Economics.

[more on the homepage of the Harris School, University of Chicago]

IZA appoints Thomas Dohmen as Research Director

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Thomas Dohmen

We warmly welcome Thomas J. Dohmen, who will become Research Director at IZA as of September 1, 2017. Professor Dohmen will retain his chair at the University of Bonn while taking leave to strategically advise IZA and devote more time to his own research. Holger Bonin will continue, also in the function of a Research Director, to coordinate the policy research and advisory activities at IZA, which is headed by Hilmar Schneider.

Thomas Dohmen is an internationally renowned scholar in behavioral and organizational economics. From 2003 to 2007, he was a Senior Research Associate at IZA before serving as Director of the Research Center for Education and Labor Market (ROA) at the University of Maastricht. Since January 2013, he has been a Professor of Applied Microeconomics at the University of Bonn.

“Thomas has been closely affiliated with IZA for many years. Given his in-depth knowledge of the institute and his extensive leadership experience at Maastricht, he is ideally suited to meet the unique challenges of a research institute that aims at reconciling academic excellence with practical relevance,” says Schneider. “He will also play a key role in mentoring our junior researchers, whose career development is immensely important to us.”

Dohmen’s new role will also strengthen IZA’s ties with the University of Bonn and create additional opportunities for joint research activities. “Both sides have a lot to offer. Our closer collaboration will clearly be mutually beneficial,” believes Professor Jürgen von Hagen, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and Economics and spokesperson of the economists at the University of Bonn.

IZA continues GLM|LIC program with DFID – new website now online

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Since 2011, IZA has been coordinating the “Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries” program on behalf of the British Department for International Development (DFID). The objective is to fund research projects that deliver a significant new body of evidence to help shape future policies in low-income countries.

So far, 31 projects within five topic areas have been supported, generating more than 150 publications. Many of these publications have been featured in in top academic journals and major international conferences. A number of important policy recommendations have come out of the projects, described in the Policy Brief series.

To facilitate access to these findings, the relaunched GLM|LIC website has a number of new features. In addition to information about the supported projects, including working papers, policy briefs, and published articles from the projects, an Evidence Finder makes it easy to locate GLM-LIC research results by topic and country.

Meanwhile, the cooperation between DFID and IZA has been renewed until 2020. The “Call for Proposals” for innovative new research to be funded in the next phase will be posted on August 1.

Magne Mogstad receives 2017 IZA Young Labor Economist Award

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Magne Mogstad, the Gary S. Becker Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, has been selected as the recipient of the 2017 IZA Young Labor Economist Award. IZA

Magne Mogstad

bestows this honor once every two years to an aspiring labor market researcher below age 45 to support and stimulate top research. The selection was made by a committee consisting of the IZA Network Coordinator and five distinguished economists: Francine Blau, Richard Blundell, George Borjas, David Card and Shelly Lundberg.

According to Daniel S. Hamermesh, Professor at Royal Holloway University of London and Editor-in-Chief of IZA World of Labor, the award is a “modest recognition of the remarkable amount that Mogstad has already achieved.” He has contributed major studies in such diverse areas as the economics of the family, human capital, econometrics of labor issues, and others. The breadth of the topics analyzed is matched by the depth of the contribution in each area.

Mogstad’s research is characterized by a strong empirical focus on large-scale administrative population data to answer a variety of public policy questions. In his most recent papers, for example, he addressed the effect of assortative mating on overall income inequality, the welfare implications of disability insurance, and the causal mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

The Award, which carries a stipend of 6,000 euros, will be conferred formally during the IZA reception at the ASSA annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA, on January 5, 2018.

See also the complete list of IZA Young Labor Economist Award winners.

IZA Journal Series merged into three high-quality journals

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In 2012, IZA launched a series of five open-access online journals in cooperation with SpringerOpen to provide a high-quality, peer-reviewed outlet characterized by a fast decision-making and publication process. By now, the IZA Journals have become well-established in the scientific community. All five journals are listed in the Scopus series. The Australian ABDC index ranks the IZA Journal of Labor Economics as an A journal. Two journals are being evaluated for inclusion in the Thompson Reuters index.

These successes notwithstanding, it is time to look at potential improvements, both in terms of quality and in terms of costs, which have so far been covered fully by IZA. Based on valuable feedback from the members of the IZA research network, it was decided to merge journals with a similar focus and continue with three instead of five journals. All previously published and forthcoming articles will be accounted for within the newly merged journals, thus ensuring that the authors’ investments are preserved.

As of April 1, 2017, the IZA Journal of Labor Policy and the IZA Journal of European Labor Studies will be merged into the IZA Journal of Labor Policy. The new JoLP is strategically positioning itself more explicitly towards policy relevance. The other merger will affect the IZA Journal of Labor & Development and the IZA Journal of Migration, which will become the IZA Journal of Development and Migration. Its focus will be on labor and migration in the context of economic development and vice versa. The IZA Journal of Labor Economics will remain as is.

[more information]

IZA/IAB Linked Evaluation Dataset: New resource for the analysis of labor market policies

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High-quality data are the key to evaluating the effectiveness of labor market policies. While administrative datasets provide detailed and reliable information on individual job histories, survey data give insights into individual behavior, attitudes and subjective experiences. A joint project by IZA and IAB (Institute of Employment Research) now combines the “best of both worlds” into the newly available IZA/IAB Linked Evaluation Dataset 1993-2010 (LED).

The dataset contains information on over 15,000 entrants into unemployment (between June 2007 and May 2008) who were interviewed for IZA over the subsequent three years and agreed to have their data matched with their individual employment biographies recorded by the IAB. The dataset is anonymized and individuals cannot be identified.

While the IAB administrative data provide detailed individual-level information on employment, benefit receipt and participation in active labor market programs, the IZA survey data cover a number of individual characteristics that affect search behavior and labor market outcomes.

The LED thus offers new opportunities for empirical labor market research – not only for the evaluation of active labor market policy instruments, such as training programs or wage subsidies, but also for many other aspects of the transition process from unemployment to employment.

More information on data access is available on the IAB and IZA websites:

Contact: idsc@iza.org

IZA Prize in Labor Economics conferred to Claudia Goldin at ASSA Meeting in Chicago

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H. Schneider, C. Goldin, D. Hamermesh

The 15th IZA Prize in Labor Economics was formally conferred to Claudia Goldin during the traditional IZA Reception at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations in Chicago on January 6, 2017. After introductions by Hilmar Schneider (CEO of IZA) and Daniel S. Hamermesh (Chief Coordinator of the IZA Network), laudatory remarks were given by Shelly Lundberg (UC Santa Barbara; IZA Prize Committee member), Robert A. Margo (Boston University) and Price V. Fishback (University of Arizona).

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. The 2016 IZA Prize recognizes her career-long work on the economic history of women in education and the labor market. Read more about the laureate, her impressive vita, her “detective work” as an economic historian and labor economist, and her insights on the gender gap:

[more about the IZA Prize]

The Empirics Strike Back Again: Abel Brodeur wins Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for his dedication to open science

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In 2013, IZA Research Affiliate Abel Brodeur (University of Ottawa) and his co-authors published an IZA discussion paper titled “Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back” (see also our IZA Newsroom article). Analyzing 50,000 statistical tests published in top economics journals, the authors concluded that researchers might be tempted to inflate the value of almost-rejected tests by choosing a “significant” specification. The reason is that journals favor rejection of the null hypothesis, which means that positive findings increase the chances of publication.

Abel Brodeur

The IZA paper was published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in January 2016 and received coverage in various media outlets, including The Economist. Abel Brodeur has now been awarded one of ten 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science from the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), a network of researchers and institutions committed to strengthening scientific integrity in economics and related disciplines by identifying and disseminating useful tools and strategies for improving transparency, including the use of study registries, pre-analysis plans, data sharing, and replications.

Brodeur receives the prize, which includes $10,000, for his work on the above-mentioned paper and “for his clear dedication to and advocacy of open science and reproducibility,” according to BITSS. Promoting open science is also among IZA’s core objectives. We have repeatedly stressed the value of replications and launched initiatives such as the open-access IZA Journals and the IDSC data repository.