Weekly Visiting Scholar Seminars

Unconditional cash transfers in the form of a universal basic income, a universal basic pension or a universal child benefit are increasingly being discussed in many countries. In this article, I investigate the labor supply effects of the introduction of a large unconditional cash benefit. I exploit the unique design of the child benefit program in Poland to identify the pure income effect of the monthly transfer. I find very small labor supply effects on both the intensive and extensive margin. Additional evidence shows that instead of extending their free time, households receiving the benefit substantially increased their consumption and savings.

Public employment services provide training to jobseekers aimed at increasing skills and improving matching. However, many jobseekers are reluctant to participate. In this field experiment, we investigate the non-take up of free training programs. We designed multiple different treatment arms to separate out direct effects of raising awareness, strengthening reciprocity and autonomy, and reducing asymmetric information. Treatment is randomly assigned and consists solely of the variation in information provided to jobseekers. We run the intervention on 11’000 jobseekers in one Austrian state. Initial results show significant increases in training and a shift towards more qualification-oriented and less activation-oriented training programs. The program’s success has resulted in a state-wide implementation of the program.

This paper studies the worker-level effects of a labor supply shock and determines the role of firms in these effects. To do so, I exploit Venezuelans’ uneven and massive arrival within Colombia (as of 2019, nearly 2 million Venezuelans lived in Colombia) and use administrative employer-employee data covering the universe of formal workers to follow natives’ labor market outcomes over time. Overall, I find a reduction in worker-level employment that is concentrated at the bottom of the wage distribution (among self-employed and minimum wage earners). Besides, I find a negative wage effect that is driven by workers from the upper part of the wage distribution who work in relatively small firms. To identify the subgroups most affected by immigration, I implement a machine learning method that shows that firm-specific pay premiums are more important in explaining the negative effect on employment and wages than other worker characteristics. These results support the influential role that firms play in determining the impact of immigration on workers’ outcomes.