The European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) Annual Conference
October 3 2023
The Conference took place in Prague on 21-23 September 2023. Piotr Lewandowski and Marta Palczyńska represented IBS.
The contribution of IBS
Marta Palczyńska presented the paper “The employment effects of a wage subsidy for the young during an economic recovery”. Astrid Kunze (NHH) and Iga Magda (IBS) are the co-authors of the research. The study assesses the employment effects of a large wage refund program for young unemployed people in Poland, which was introduced in 2016. That new programme was effective for low- and middle-skilled eligible young women but not for men. The research was conducted within the frame of the Youth Employment PartnerShip project.
Piotr Lewandowski presented a joint paper with Karol Madoń (IBS) and Deborah Winkler (World Bank) titled “The role of Global Value Chains for worker tasks and wage inequality”. It shows that higher GVC participation is associated with more routine tasks among workers in offshorable occupations. This indirectly widens within-country wage inequality. However, GVC participation directly lowers wage inequality, except in the richest countries. Overall, GVC participation is negatively associated with wage inequality in most low- and middle-income countries that receive offshored jobs. Yet it is positively associated in high-income countries that offshore jobs.
The EALE Conference
The program of the EALE Conference was rich, and the level of presented research was high. Michèle Belot (Cornell University) gave a presidential speech summarizing (her and others’) research on matching jobs and workers online. The conference also included two keynote lectures. Uta Schönberg (University College London) discussed research on knowledge spillovers and individual careers. Gordon Dahl (University of California, San Diego) presented a fascinating study of diversity and discrimination in the classroom. He showed that in-group bias peaks in polarized classrooms where native and migrant groups are equally represented.
The EALE Conference also gave ELMI the opportunity to make its official debut. It was the first in-person event of ELMI – the Network of European Labour Market Research Institutes, which includes IBS.
It included four papers by researchers from CERGE-EI, IAB, IFAU, and LISER. All presentations were accepted to the conference from the regular call for papers.
