Injecting nonpartisan evidence
Jan 2019
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Injecting nonpartisan evidence
The newly established policy brief series conveys main research insights to politicians, policy makers, and the broader public. The policy briefs are nontechnical summaries of research findings that address today’s key challenges, and they come with policy suggestions derived from the research results.
by Michael Stiefel
The first three policy briefs deal with the labor market in the wider sense: the changing gender composition in high-paying jobs, the question on how automation can cause social unrest, and the importance of culture as a determinant for unemployment duration. In the first issue of the new series “The end of men”, Nir Jaimovich analyzes how the rising demand for highly skilled workers in the US has unequally affected both genders over the last forty years. The employment outcomes of highly skilled women in the high-paying jobs have improved, while the outcomes for highly skilled men have deteriorated. Jaimovich explains this change by a rising need for social skills in the workplace, such as empathy and communication. Changes in job definitions and job ads show that high-paying jobs increasingly require those skills. Evidence from psychology indicates an advantage for women in this domain. Jaimovich finds that women’s outcomes improved precisely in those occupations where there was also a shift towards social skills. As opportunities for action, this policy brief stresses the importance of social skills and calls for education systems, which equally foster them.
In the second issue “Rage against the machines”, Bruno Caprettini and Joachim Voth analyze historical data from the Swing Riots in England, shedding new light on how the adoption of labor-saving technology can cause social unrest. In 1830, protests by rural laborers who destroyed threshing machines spread through England. Caprettini and Voth analyze historical newspaper ads to build a data set of threshing machines at this time. Using variation in geographic characteristics, they show that in areas predestined for this technology, the adoption of threshing machines indeed caused labor unrest. This study puts emphasis on the necessity for compensating the losers from new technology, by either providing a safety net or alternative employment for them.
In the third policy brief “Culture and Work Attitudes”, Josef Zweimüller offers insights on how culture affects economic outcomes such as unemployment duration, using data from the Swiss unemployment register. In Switzerland, language borders also separate cultural groups, as both surveys and voting results show. Institutions and local labor markets, however, are similar across the borders, offering the possibility to isolate the effect of culture. Zweimüller documents that Swiss residents in French and Italian regions stay unemployed for seven weeks longer on average than residents in German language regions – an economically large difference that can be explained by different work attitudes rather than by language proficiency or religion. This policy brief highlights how culture can cause heterogeneous economic effects within the same institutional setting.
The newly established policy brief series conveys main research insights to politicians, policy makers, and the broader public. The policy briefs are nontechnical summaries of research findings that address today’s key challenges, and they come with policy suggestions derived from the research results.
by Michael Stiefel
The first three policy briefs deal with the labor market in the wider sense: the changing gender composition in high-paying jobs, the question on how automation can cause social unrest, and the importance of culture as a determinant for unemployment duration. In the first issue of the new series “The end of men”, Nir Jaimovich analyzes how the rising demand for highly skilled workers in the US has unequally affected both genders over the last forty years. The employment outcomes of highly skilled women in the high-paying jobs have improved, while the outcomes for highly skilled men have deteriorated. Jaimovich explains this change by a rising need for social skills in the workplace, such as empathy and communication. Changes in job definitions and job ads show that high-paying jobs increasingly require those skills. Evidence from psychology indicates an advantage for women in this domain. Jaimovich finds that women’s outcomes improved precisely in those occupations where there was also a shift towards social skills. As opportunities for action, this policy brief stresses the importance of social skills and calls for education systems, which equally foster them.
Contact
Bruno Caprettini is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich. He works on economic history and development economics. In August 2017, he received an SNF Ambizione grant for the project “Structural change- lessons from the present and from the past.” Structural change is the movement of labor out of agriculture. In his research, he studies episodes of structural change that happened in the past or in recent years.
Nir Jaimovich received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2004. He works on macroeconomics questions with special emphasis on business cycles, labor markets, and the macroeconomic implications of micro product level data and was head of the NBER price dynamics group (together with Bob Hall). Within these research areas, he combines new data and quantitative theories to tackle long-standing macroeconomic questions. In the area of labor/macro his work shows how demographic composition and occupation structure of the economy shape the dynamics of the business cycle. In addition, his work examines the empirical and theoretical plausibility of signals and uncertainty about future economic fundamentals functioning as important drivers of business cycles. Finally, his micro-pricing product-level data shows how actual firms’ pricing strategies shapes the insights regarding the extent that monetary policy has an impact on the economy. His work has found large resonance inside and outside academia and was featured within policy circles (such as White House official publications) and media outlets such The New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Forbes, Swiss and German media.
UBS Foundation Professor of Macroeconomics and Financial Markets
Joachim Voth received his PhD from Oxford in 1996. He works on financial crises, long-run growth, as well as on the origins of political extremism. He has examined public debt dynamics and bank lending to the first serial defaulter in history, analysed risk-taking behaviour by lenders as a result of personal shocks, and the investor performance during speculative bubbles. Joachim has also examined the deep historical roots of anti-Semitism, showing that the same cities where pogroms occurred in the Middle Age also persecuted Jews more in the 1930s; he has analyzed the extent to which schooling can create radical racial stereotypes over the long run, and how dense social networks (“social capital”) facilitated the spread of the Nazi party. In his work on long-run growth, he has investigated the effects of fertility restriction, the role of warfare, and the importance of state capacity. Joachim has published more than 80 academic articles and 3 academic books, 5 trade books and more than 50 newspaper columns, op-eds and book reviews. His research has been highlighted in The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, El Pais, Vanguardia, La Repubblica, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, NZZ, der Standard, der Spiegel, CNN, RTN, Swiss and German TV and radio.
Bruno Caprettini is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich. He works on economic history and development economics. In August 2017, he received an SNF Ambizione grant for the project “Structural change- lessons from the present and from the past.” Structural change is the movement of labor out of agriculture. In his research, he studies episodes of structural change that happened in the past or in recent years.
Nir Jaimovich received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2004. He works on macroeconomics questions with special emphasis on business cycles, labor markets, and the macroeconomic implications of micro product level data and was head of the NBER price dynamics group (together with Bob Hall). Within these research areas, he combines new data and quantitative theories to tackle long-standing macroeconomic questions. In the area of labor/macro his work shows how demographic composition and occupation structure of the economy shape the dynamics of the business cycle. In addition, his work examines the empirical and theoretical plausibility of signals and uncertainty about future economic fundamentals functioning as important drivers of business cycles. Finally, his micro-pricing product-level data shows how actual firms’ pricing strategies shapes the insights regarding the extent that monetary policy has an impact on the economy. His work has found large resonance inside and outside academia and was featured within policy circles (such as White House official publications) and media outlets such The New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Forbes, Swiss and German media.
UBS Foundation Professor of Macroeconomics and Financial Markets
Joachim Voth received his PhD from Oxford in 1996. He works on financial crises, long-run growth, as well as on the origins of political extremism. He has examined public debt dynamics and bank lending to the first serial defaulter in history, analysed risk-taking behaviour by lenders as a result of personal shocks, and the investor performance during speculative bubbles. Joachim has also examined the deep historical roots of anti-Semitism, showing that the same cities where pogroms occurred in the Middle Age also persecuted Jews more in the 1930s; he has analyzed the extent to which schooling can create radical racial stereotypes over the long run, and how dense social networks (“social capital”) facilitated the spread of the Nazi party. In his work on long-run growth, he has investigated the effects of fertility restriction, the role of warfare, and the importance of state capacity. Joachim has published more than 80 academic articles and 3 academic books, 5 trade books and more than 50 newspaper columns, op-eds and book reviews. His research has been highlighted in The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, El Pais, Vanguardia, La Repubblica, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, NZZ, der Standard, der Spiegel, CNN, RTN, Swiss and German TV and radio.