Labour market and education form the thematic core of our work. The two fields are closely intertwined, because education and success at work depend on each other. Those who receive support early have better chances on the labour market later on. And because job requirements and occupational profiles are changing more and more rapidly, education no longer ends with school or vocational training. Lifelong learning is steadily gaining importance in today’s world of work. We investigate who invests in further training and what it achieves.
On the labour market side, we examine the effects of labour market policy measures: from further training and integration measures, through mobility assistance, to the employment prospects of specific groups. We have accompanied the statutory minimum wage since its introduction in 2015 with a series of studies for the Minimum Wage Commission, examining its effects on employment, unemployment, the wage structure, and household income. For the European Commission, we took stock of the Youth Guarantee across all Member States and examined which implementation models genuinely ease young people’s entry into a changing world of work. For the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, we evaluated vocational German language courses, the central instrument for the linguistic labour market integration of immigrants. Beyond Germany and Europe, we have for fifteen years supported the joint programme of IZA and FCDO, which funds research on labour markets in low-income countries and provides training for early-career researchers and ministry officials.
On the education side, we are responsible, among other things, for the multi-year evaluation of the Startchancen Programme, one of the federal government’s largest education policy initiatives, which provides targeted support to schools in challenging circumstances. For European Schoolnet we advised Assess@Learning until 2022, a European field trial that used randomised assignment in five countries to test whether digital formative assessment improves classroom teaching. Added to this are questions of vocational training and human capital investment, such as the role played by employees’ personality traits or the risk attitudes of managers.
In both areas we combine microeconometric methods with the careful handling of complex individual and register data. The Employment Statistics of the Federal Employment Agency, the German Socio-Economic Panel, the Structure of Earnings Survey and linked datasets form the basis of many of our analyses.
