Public Economics Seminar

Über das Seminar

Winter-Semester 2026/27

Abstracts:

Ben Sprung-Keyser:

We examine the geographic incidence of local labor market growth across locations of childhood residence. We ask: when wages grow in a given US labor market, do the benefits flow to individuals growing up in nearby or distant locations? We begin by constructing new statistics on migration rates across labor markets between childhood and young adulthood. This migration matrix shows 80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% migrate less than 500 miles. Migration distances are shorter for Black and Hispanic individuals and for those from low-income families. These migration patterns provide information on the first order geographic incidence of local wage growth. Next, we explore the responsiveness of location choices to changes in wage offers. We develop an approach to isolate those changes in wage offers from sorting-driven wage changes. We do so using AKM-style estimates to measure changes in location wage premia over time, decomposing wage variation across place. Applying this approach to variation induced by the recovery from the Great Recession, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to increases in local labor market wage growth. We find that higher wages lead to small changes in in- and out-migration and a partial capitalization of wage increases into local prices. The geographically concentrated nature of most migration and the small magnitude of these migration elasticities suggest that the incidence of labor market conditions across childhood residences is highly local. For many individuals, the "radius of economic opportunity'' is quite narrow.

Jonas Jessen:

Discrete choice experiments are widely used to estimate workers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for job amenities under the assumption that varying an attribute does not change workers’ beliefs about other job attributes. We test this assumption by embedding an amenity with a known market price—a popular monthly public transport pass—in a large- scale discrete choice experiment with German workers. Many workers, including public transport users, overvalue the ticket by more than 100%, despite WTP for other attributes aligning with the literature. A complementary belief-elicitation experiment shows that advertising an amenity, such as the pass but also common amenities like work from home, causally shifts beliefs about unlisted attributes of the job. Posted wages similarly signal unlisted attributes so that wage variation, the money metric for WTP calculation, is itself contaminated by belief spillovers—such as higher pay signaling heightened stress. These spillovers imply that discrete choice estimates capture perceived bundles rather than isolated attributes, and distort current estimates of non-wage compensation and monopsony power.

Roman Klimke:

Public insurance programs do more than insure: by subsidizing consumption, they can redirect labor and firms toward publicly financed sectors. Whether such demand-side industrial policy raises welfare depends on the counterfactual allocation of marginal workers. We study Germany’s 1995 introduction of universal long-term care insurance, exploiting regional variation in pre-reform means-tested coverage and administrative labor-market biographies. The reform expanded nursing-home employment and establishment entry without increasing wages. Marginal workers came disproportionately from unemployment and nonparticipation, and exposed local labor markets experienced lower unemployment, higher labor-force participation, and a larger wage bill. These responses transform the welfare accounting. A patient-only marginal value of public funds calculation reproduces the standard moral-hazard benchmark, but including worker surplus and fiscal externalities yields higher returns. A general-equilibrium model shows this conclusion is not universal: insurance-induced sectoral expansion raises welfare when labor-market frictions leave productive employment relationships unrealized but can reduce welfare in tighter labor markets.

Rafael Lalive:

This paper studies how mandating job postings impacts firms' recruiting practices, employment, and wages, exploiting the Swiss Job Vacancy Notice Obligation (JVNO) policy, which requires firms hiring in high-unemployment occupations to post vacancies on a public online platform. We leverage administrative data and estimate two empirical models: a regression discontinuity design comparing occupations around the unemployment rate threshold and a firm-level shift-share approach capturing differential exposure to treated occupations. We find that the policy leads to a significant increase in both job postings and posting firms in treated occupations, with effects driven primarily by smaller firms. Firm-level evidence shows that these changes reflect a genuine expansion in employment rather than a simple reallocation of hiring activity, and are accompanied by increases in wages. We further document higher exit rates from unemployment to treated occupations with no corresponding increase in job search activity. Taken together, the results indicate that mandatory job postings can improve labor market outcomes by increasing vacancy creation and facilitating matches between job seekers and firms.

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