Documents Berlingieri, Francesco 7 results

"Working from home (WfH) has become much more common since the early 2000s. We exploit the German Socio-Economic Panel between 1997 and 2014 to investigate how such a work arrangement affects labour market outcomes and life satisfaction. We find that childless employees work an extra hour per week of unpaid overtime and report higher satisfaction after taking up WfH. Among parents, WfH reduces the gender gap in working hours and monthly earnings, as contractual hours increase more among mothers. Hourly wages, however, increase with WfH take-up among fathers, but not among mothers unless they change employer. This points to poorer bargaining outcomes for women compared to men when staying with the same employer. Controlling for selection into paid employment due to changes in unobserved characteristics or preferences does not affect the magnitude of the effects."

"As the COVID-19 pandemic causes a record number of people to work from home, this disruptive event will likely have a long-lasting impact on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of working from home may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the COVID-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. We discuss the likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in the labour market and at home in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples. We construct a novel teleworkability index that differentiates between fully teleworkable, partly teleworkable and on-site jobs and find that in about a third of households the COVID-19 shock is likely to induce shifts in the intra-household allocation of tasks from mothers to fathers."

"Employment responses to the COVID-19 crisis differed widely across German local labour markets at the beginning of the pandemic, with differences in short-time work rates of up to 20 percentage points. We show that digital capital, and to a lesser extent working-from-home, were essential for the resilience of local labour markets. Using an empirical strategy that combines a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score weighting, we find that local exposure to digital capital reduced short-time work usage by up to 4 percentage points and the effect lasted for about 8 months. Working-from-home potential lowered short-time work rates, but only in local labour markets exposed to digital capital, and in the first four months of the pandemic when a strict lockdown was in place. Differences in unemployment rates across local labour markets were at most 2 percentage points and did not depend on digital capital or working-from-home potential."

"Graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are usually found to have higher wages and a lower risk of overqualification. However, it is unclear whether we can interpret the effect of STEM subjects on overqualification and wages in a causal way, since individuals choosing these subjects might differ systematically in unobserved characteristics, such as ability. Using data on German male graduates we show that unobserved heterogeneity indeed matters for differences in the risk of overqualification and wages when STEM graduates are compared to the Business & Law group, while it plays only a minor role for the difference between STEM graduates and the Social Sciences & Humanities group."

"This paper investigates the effect of the size of the local labor market on skill mismatch. Using survey data for Germany, I find that workers in large cities are both less likely to be overqualified for their job and to work in a different field than the one they are trained for. Different empirical strategies are employed to account for the potential sorting of talented workers into more urbanized areas. Results on individuals never moving from the place of childhood and fixed-effects estimates obtaining identification through regional migrants suggest that sorting does not fully explain the existing differences in qualification mismatch across areas. This provides evidence of the existence of agglomeration economies through better matches. However, lower qualification mismatch in larger cities is found to explain only a small part of the urban wage premium."

"As the Covid-19 pandemic causes an all-time high share of people to work from home, this disruptive event is likely to have a long-lasting effect on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home (WfH) on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of WfH may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the Covid-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. This expert brief discusses the likely effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on gender gaps in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples."

"Working from home (WfH) has been widely adopted since the Covid-19 pandemic. Pre-pandemic evidence on how hybrid work arrangements relate to labour market outcomes is a scarce and valuable benchmark. We exploit the German Socio-Economic Panel between 1997 and 2014 to investigate how such a work arrangement relates to working hours, wages and job satisfaction for different demographic groups. We find that childless employees work an extra hour of unpaid overtime per week and report higher job satisfaction after taking up WfH. Among parents, gender differences in working hours and monthly earnings are lower after WfH take-up. However, hourly wage increases with WfH take-up are limited to fathers, unless mothers change employers. We discuss the role of career changes, commuting and working-time flexibility in explaining these findings."