This symposium brought together young European and American labor economists (five each from a set of 80 people who had submitted articles) to present their work and discuss each other’s papers under the guidance of two senior labor economists, Simon Burgess and Daniel S. Hamermesh. In line with IZA’s mission, each paper not only advanced scholarship but also provided implications for policy.
Resumes and the truth
For their paper “Employer Learning, Labor Market Signaling and the Value of College: Evidence from Resumes and the Truth,” Daniel Kreisman and his co-authors linked resumés from applicants at a job website to national U.S. data on people’s college attendance and graduation. The article shows that many job applicants omit their experiences at colleges and universities where they did not obtain a degree. These omissions suggest that the widely disseminated estimates of the returns to additional education are error-ridden, since the underlying measures of education are themselves error-ridden.
Longer working horizon
Francesca Carta presented her co-authored work on “The Effect of a Longer Working Horizon on Individual and Family Labour Supply.” The study examines how a sudden and substantial increase in the pensionable age in Italy altered older Italians’ attachment to the work force. The results confirm that raising the retirement age induces a big increase in the number of older people still working/not retiring, with the largest increase among those who previously would have been able to retire.
Download all the presented papers below (presenting authors mentioned first).