IZA - What's New at IZA

On January 24, 2012, Francis Vella, Professor, Chair of the Economics Department & Villani Chair in Economics, and Gerald Mara, Dean of the Graduate School & Associate Provost, Research, of Georgetown University, signed a collaboration contract with IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann on the premises of Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Vella is also a long-term Research Fellow of IZA and Co-Director of the newly founded Georgetown Center for Economics Research (GCER) together with Professor Roger Lagunoff, who was also present at the ceremony.

The memorandum of understanding documents the intense collaborations between both institutions over the last years in a series of activities and outlines how they have decided to continue and extend this collaboration into a number of new areas. An important purpose is to strengthen the exchange of faculty and graduate students and to foster participation in workshops and conferences. The partners will engage in research and teaching issues and collaborate on themes of policy relevance using the Georgetown Center for Economic Research (GCER).

Klaus F. Zimmermann | Nigel Newton

IZA and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc are delighted to announce the development of IZA World of Labor. This innovative online portal will provide a comprehensive, reliable and up-to-date information resource aimed at labor economists, decision makers, and other professionals in labor economics around the world.

Building on IZA's international expertise, this resource will be developed for IZA by Bloomsbury and will involve hundreds of scholars worldwide. It will develop into a unique repository of data, best practice and thought leadership presented in a clear and accessible way. The online platform will be available free of charge and there will be an accompanying range of books in both in print and electronic formats. IZA World of Labor will adhere to the highest scholarly standards of peer-review process.

IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann: "I am delighted that this unique project will make evidence based scholarly information available to a global audience, which is central to IZA's mission. The complex interdependencies of an increasingly globalized world require a new form of analysis and explanation which this portal will provide."

Bloomsbury's Chief Executive Nigel Newton: "We are very proud to partner with this outstanding research institute in Germany. We are looking forward to joining our experience in digital reference publishing with IZA's in-depth expertise in labor economics in order to provide decision makers around the world with a wealth of freely accessible and reliable labor market information."

Altmann | Zimmermann | Wibral

At the traditional IZA reception during the Annual Meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA), which took place in Chicago this year, IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann presented the 2011 IZA Young Labor Economist Award to the authors of the article "Gift Exchange and Workers' Fairness Concerns: When Equality Is Unfair" (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2010). Representing the team of authors, which also included Johannes Abeler and Sebastian Kube, Steffen Altmann and Matthias Wibral attended the award ceremony in Chicago.

Polachek | Whitfield | Tatsiramos

During the same event, IZA Fellows Solomon Polachek (Binghamton University) and Konstantinos Tatsiramos (University of Leicester) received the Leading Book Series Editors in the Emerald Literati Network 2011 Awards for Excellence in recognition of the outstanding work they have put into the Research in Labor Economics series. The prize was presented by Emma Whitfield, Commissioning Editor at Emerald.

Read more about:
- IZA Young Labor Economist Award
- Research in Labor Economics

IZA Program Director Hartmut Lehmann has been voted President-elect of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (ACES) for the year 2012. He will be President of ACES in 2013, when he will organize the eight sessions of the association at the ASSA meetings in Philadelphia (January 3-5, 2014). ACES is the leading scholarly organization for the support of comparative economic studies. Its world-wide membership includes academics, economists and political scientists employed by international agencies, governments and banks as well as policy makers.

IZA Fellow Gary Fields (Cornell University) recently published the book "Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey". Based on decades of experience studying labor markets in developing nations, Gary takes a long, measured look at the world's three billion who live on less than 2.50 dollars per day, and shows how employment and self-employment prospects can be improved. Acknowledging the surfeit of literature on ending poverty, this book goes beyond foreign aid and government intervention to look at the labor force itself and how it can be helped to earn its own way out of poverty.

Nobel laureate George Akerlof: "Working Hard, Working Poor addresses the world's greatest economic problem.... There is not enough wage employment for those who want to work. Gary Fields, with great sensitivity, puts us in their shoes (insofar as they have them) and shows how we can increase and improve employment to alleviate their suffering. We all have a moral responsibility to read and to understand his message."

[more information at Oxford University Press]

The first wave of the Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) is now available at IZA. RUMiC consists of three large scale surveys: the Urban Household Survey, the Rural Household Survey and the Migrant Household Survey.

RUMiC provides unique data to the scientific community to explore topical issues in the Chinese labor market. The rural, urban and migrant samples contain peculiar information at both the individual and household level which allow the study of a wide range of research topics: migration and return migration, employment, entrepreneurship, social networks, health and subjective well-being, and children's education.

Details about the survey and information on data application can be found on the IZA International Data Service Center (IDSC) homepage: idsc.iza.org

K. F. Zimmermann | A. Banerji

On December 2, 2011, Arup Banerji, Director for Social Protection and Labor within the World Bank's Human Development Network, signed a collaboration contract with IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann on the premises of the World Bank in Washington, DC. The memorandum of understanding documents how both institutions have been collaborating intensively over the last years in a series of activities and have decided to continue and extend this collaboration into a number of new areas.

Important knowledge gaps and weak capacity have limited the identification and implementation of effective labor market policy reforms in developing and transition countries. Against this background, the World Bank and IZA had launched a joint research area on Employment and Development in 2006. At the heart of this partnership is the development of operationally-oriented research and policy advice on labor market issues. The World Bank and IZA share a common mission in promoting rigorous research and evidence-based policy analysis to support countries with the design and implementation of labor policies to create and provide access to jobs.

Therefore, the core of the collaboration in the near future will be the joint development of the World Bank Jobs Knowledge Platform and the IZA World of Labor project. At the same time, IZA and the World Bank will continue its many successful joint conferences and workshops and its research activities dealing with the pressing issues of developing, emerging and transition countries. The next joint IZA/World Bank "Employment and Development" conference is scheduled to take place in Delhi, India, in November 2012. IZA research teams also support the forthcoming World Development Report on Jobs.

IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann supports the initiative by Germany's Economics Minister Philipp Rösler to recruit high-skilled workers from southern European countries that are facing high rates of unemployment. "Both Europe and Germany could benefit from this plan," Zimmermann told the German business daily Handelsblatt. Since the introduction of the euro took away the instrument of exchange rate flexibility, it was clear that labor mobility would be needed as a channel of adjustment for regional disparities. "The eurozone states not only failed to meet the deficit targets, they also failed to stimulate mobility between the national labor markets," said Zimmermann. He had already argued previously that Germany neglected a great opportunity by closing its borders to labor migration from eastern European countries during the first years after EU enlargement.

Zimmermann added: "Mobility is traditionally low in Europe. It should not take government intervention to get jobless skilled workers from southern Europe to come to Germany at least temporarily. The common market and existing ethnic networks should do the trick. But the reluctance even among high-skilled workers to move within the EU shows that much remains to be done in terms of European integration."

Read the article in Handelsblatt Online (in German).

David Lam

David Lam (University of Michigan) has been appointed as Program Director for the new research program on Growth and Labor Markets in Low Income Countries (GLM | LIC), a collaboration between the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and IZA. The objective of this program is to improve knowledge on labor market issues in low-income countries through the funding of scientific research and capacity building activities. A major goal is to provide evidence that will improve labor market policies. The program will allocate over 10 million euros to fund peer-reviewed research projects based in institutions around the globe. The first call for proposals was sent out in early December (see the program website for details).

As IZA Program Director, David Lam will provide the intellectual leadership of the program. This includes the identification of research gaps and specification of research areas for the calls for proposals. He will also lead the monitoring and evaluation of funded research projects, and the synthesizing of results of the program. "This program is an ambitious investment in improving our understanding of how labor markets work in the world’s poorest countries. The program will engage top economists in the world to study labor market imperfections, obstacles to productive employment, and gender gaps in employment opportunities. The results will lead to better policies that will improve the prospects for economic growth and poverty alleviation in these countries," said Lam.

[read full story]

Pictured from left to right: Luiz Carlos Robortella (Mackenzie Presbyterian University), Werner Eichhorst (IZA), José Pastore (University of Sao Paulo), Sérgio Nobre (Head of Metalworkers' Union), Senator Armando Monteiro

In November 2011, IZA Deputy Director of Labor Policy Werner Eichhorst, together with José Pastore, professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Sao Paulo, presented a joint study (co-authored with IZA Research Associate Paul Marx) at seminars organized by the Chamber of Commerce of the State of Sao Paulo (Fecomércio) and the National Confederation of Brazilian Industry (CNI) in Brasilia as well as before the Labor Committee of the Lower House of Brazilian Parliament.

The study, supported by Bradesco, a major bank in Brazil, compares labor market institutions and dynamics in Germany and Brazil with particular emphasis on the role of dismissal protection, flexible contracts, unemployment benefit systems and collective bargaining. Brazilian discussants, among them leading members of the business community, trade union leaders and representatives of both chambers of the Brazilian Congress, were particularly interested in learning more about the beneficial role of internal flexibility regarding working time and wages at the plant level which helped stabilize employment during the 2008-09 crisis in the German manufacturing sector.

The English version of the study is downloadable as IZA Discussion Paper No. 6137.
The paper is also available in Portuguese.

According to a comprehensive study of 19 European countries over a period from 1993 to 2008, national differences in unemployment benefits have no impact on migration flows within the European Union. Contrary to widespread prejudice, benefit generosity overall does not influence the individual decision to migrate. For non-EU immigrants only a small, statistically insignificant effect was found. "It is a popular myth that scores of immigrants come to take advantage of the welfare state," said IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann. "While such cases exist, they are rather due to ill-designed immigration policies than to generous public benefits."

Read the complete study: IZA DP No. 6075

The most recent volume of Research in Labor Economics (RLE) contains ten original innovative chapters on worker well-being. The articles cover such topics as time allocated to work and human capital acquisition, aspects of risk in the earnings process, migration, and the impact of public policies and institutions on employment and earnings.

The RLE series, which is co-edited by IZA, now benefits from a newly established Editorial Advisory Board including Orley C. Ashenfelter, Francine D. Blau, Richard Blundell, David Card, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Richard B. Freeman, Daniel S. Hamermesh, James J. Heckman, Alan B. Krueger, Edward P. Lazear, Christopher A. Pissarides, and Klaus F. Zimmermann.

As another milestone in the success story of RLE, the series has now been included in the newly launched Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index, which will enable a wider dissemination of each article and a better analysis of citations.

For more information, please see the latest RLE newsletter.