Alberta Centre for Labour Market Research
Our team of experts are focused on accelerating public, private, and non-profit collaboration in the production of labour market research and outcomes
Publications
330
Researchers
27
Times Cited
7086
Web of Science Times Cited
THE EFFECT OF MIGRATION POLICY ON GROWTH, STRUCTURAL CHANGE, AND REGIONAL INEQUALITY IN CHINA
Research
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New Economics Papers (from NEP)
The following works presented are external working papers published to the NEP-LMA and NEP-LAB RSS feeds. This content is provided to show a wider view of research being conducted across the areas of Labor Markets - Supply, Demand, and Wages, as well as Labour Economics. Works listed may have no relation to ACLMR or the ACLMR team and are published out of academic interest only.
Labour Markets
2025
Assessing the Value of Incomplete University Degrees: Experimental Evidence from HR Recruiters
A university degree is a risky investment because of the non-negligible risk of having to drop out of university without graduating. However, the costs of this risk are controversial, as it is often argued…
2025
The Impact of Higher Education on Employer Perceptions
Do employers seek to attract individuals with more education because it enhances human capital or because it signals higher levels of pre-existing traits? We experimentally vary master’s degree completion…
2025
Unequal Impacts of AI on Colombia's Labor Market: An Analysis of AI Exposure, Wages, and Job Dynamics
The rapid advancements in the domain of artificial intelligence (AI) have exerted a considerable influence on the labor market, thereby engendering alterations in the demand for specific skills and the…
2025-04
The German labor market after the long boom: What’s next?
Germany has long been portrayed as the best real-world example of an export-oriented economic model associated with a dualized labor market and welfare state. The success of this export-centered model…
2025
Rebalancing Power Asymmetries Within Firms: Evidence from Illegal Resignations
We document the extent of employer abuse of power and characterise the employers most likely to engage in abusive relationships with their employees. We leverage an Italian reform that changed the process…
2025-02
Winners and Losers of Technology Grants: Evidence on Jobs and Skills
Industrial policies are widespread, but evidence on their workforce effects remains limited. We present novel evidence on the impact of EU technology subsidies on employment and skill demand in Finnish…
2025
Preferences for Gender Diversity in High-Profile Jobs
This paper examines preferences for gender diversity among co-workers. Using stated-choice experiments with 5, 400 PhD students and university students in Germany, we uncover a substantial willingness…
2025-04
The Gender Gap in Career Trajectories: Do Firms Matter?
The gender wage gap rises with experience. To what extent do firm policies mediate this rise? We use administrative data from Italy to identify workers' first jobs and compute wage growth over the next…
2025
Earnings Expectations of “First-in Family” University Students and Their Role for Major Choice
How do students’ earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative…
2025
Value Dissonance at Work
Large organizations often require employees to collaborate with others who may see the world differently. Yet, little is known about whether misalignment in personal values with managers or colleagues…
2025
Transitory Earnings Opportunities and Educational Scarring of Men
I study how transitory increases in the opportunity cost of schooling affect dropout rates and long-run outcomes. Exploiting a tax-free year in Iceland and comparing teenagers around compulsory schooling…
2025-04-14
The commercialization of labour markets: evidence from wage inequality in the Middle Ages
Much of our understanding of the dynamics of historical economies has been shaped by insights drawn from long-run wage series. Behind much scholarship concerning pre-industrial wages lies the quest for…
2025
Breaking Barriers or Reinforcing Gaps? Gender Wage Disparities Across Skill Levels in a Developing Economy
Many factors are behind the persistent gender wage gap in a developing economy, such as occupational segregation, social norms, and gender attitudes. To narrow the gender wage gap, it is mandatory to…
2025-03
Property Rights, Sick Pay and Effort Supply
Direct evidence on variations in work incentives across different property rights systems remains scarce. This paper examines absenteeism among individuals employed in worker cooperatives—firms that…
2025-03
What Do We Know About Income and Earnings Volatility?
We first review research about income and earnings volatility and second provide new UK evidence about the latter using high quality administrative record data. The USA stands out as a high volatility…
2025-04-25
Cooperation in the Workplace
Organizations rely on peer-to-peer knowledge exchange among employees, yet incentivizing cooperative behaviors is a challenge. This study evaluates an intervention designed to encourage peer support in…
2025-04-29
The short- and long-run effect of affirmative action: evidence from Imperial China
We study the short- and long-term effects of affirmative action policies in the context of China. During imperial China, official positions were awarded to the most academically talented individuals through…
2025-04
Exposure to Regulation and Income Inequality in Local Labor Markets: Evidence from the U.S. over the Past Half-Century
Existing evidence points to a positive correlation between specific regulations and income inequality at a country or regional level, but little is known about how overall regulatory burden affects inequality…
2025-04
Informal Labor Exchange Teams and Participation in the Labor Market: Evidence from Rural Tanzania
We investigate labor exchange teams in rural communities, which are prevalent in many developing countries. We show theoretically that these teams are beneficial to employers, who can outsource the monitoring…
2025-03-16
Flexible Partial Pension – a Bridge to Full-time Retirement, a Way out of Employment, or an Income Supplement?
Flexible partial retirement schemes are intended to give individuals the opportunity to reduce working hours before moving into full retirement, the expectation being that the reduced workload will contribute…
2025-03
Success stories and continuing challenges: A longitudinal analysis of gender-ethnic wage gaps in the UK
This paper investigates the evolution of ethnic wage gaps among men and women in the UK over the period 1993–2023. The results show reductions in wage gaps among all South Asian groups, which are…
2025-01
The Evolution of the Earnings Distribution in a Sustained Growth Economy: Evidence from Australia
We study the evolution of the earnings distributions in Australia from 1991 to 2020, a prolonged period of sustained economic growth without recession. Using a 10% sample of Australian taxpayer records,…
2025
Rural Employment Evolutions
A quarter of the population in high-income countries lives in rural areas. However, existing empirical evidence on these areas in OECD countries is scarce. Over the past several decades, many rural areas…
2025
Political Bias in the Media – Evidence from the Universe of French Broadcasts, 2002-2020
How does the media bias the news? And in particular, how much does it cost owners to ensure that journalists comply with their stance? We compile a unique dataset of journalists and guests appearing on…
2025
Migration, Child Education, Human Capital Accumulation, and a Brain Dilution Tax
I study the effect of educational policy in the host economy on human capital accumulation and growth. The analysis is performed in a two-country growth model with endogenous fertility. I show that providing…
2025
Tariff, Wages and Compensation: A General Oligopolistic Equilibrium Analysis
A major section of the existing literature on strategic trade policy, following a partial equilibrium framework, observed that imposition of tariff by the domestic country leads to a rise in their wage…
2025-04
The Daughter Penalty
Looking at the earnings profiles of men and women after their first child is born, a number of studies establish that women suffer a larger penalty in earnings than men—a child penalty. Leveraging randomness…
Labour Economics
2025
Gender-Specific Application Behaviour, Matching, and the Residual Gender Earnings Gap
This paper examines how gender-specific application behaviour, firms' hiring practices, and flexibility demands relate to the gender earnings gap, using linked data from the German Job Vacancy Survey…
2025-04
Balancing Work and Care: How Workplace Factors Can Mitigate the Gendered Impacts of Caregiving
Parental caregiving responsibilities can disrupt paid work, contributing to persistent gender inequalities in employment and earnings. Using Australian employer-employee linked data and a dynamic difference-in-differences…
2025-04
The Power to Discriminate
This paper examines the relationship between labor market power and employer discrimination, providing new causal evidence on when and where discriminatory outcomes arise. We leverage mass layoffs and…
2025-04
How Do Firms Respond to Parental Leave Absences?
How do firms adjust their labor demand when a female employee takes temporary leave after childbirth? Using Austrian administrative data, we compare firms with and without a birth event and exploit policy…
2025-03
Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in 15 Destination Countries
We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation.…
2025-02
Closing the Mismatch: Encouraging Jobseekers to Reskill for Shortage Occupations
We partner with a Public Employment Service to examine whether jobseekers can be encouraged to reskill for shortage occupations. In a large-scale field experiment involving 100, 000 recently unemployed…
2025-04
Gender Norms, Stereotypical Beliefs, and Competitiveness
Using an online experiment with 5, 762 US participants, we investigate whether individuals who seek competition face inaccurate perceptions of their behaviors and personality and whether women are held…
2025-04
Jewish Occupational Attainment in the Antebellum United States: Filling a Gap in the Literature
This paper is concerned with analyzing the occupational attainment of American Jewish men compared to other free men in the mid-19th century to help fill a gap in the literature on Jewish achievement.…
2025
Do Financial Incentives for Training and Caseworker Meetings Enhance Re-employment?
In 2005, displaced workers in Finland with at least three years of work history were given the option to enroll in a Re-employment Program. Participants met with a caseworker at the beginning of their…
2025-03
Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle
We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early…
2025-03
The Relationship Between Intergenerational Mobility and Equality of Opportunity
Among economists, empirical analysis of social mobility and the role of parental background is largely carried out in two separate strands of research. The intergenerational mobility literature estimates…
2025-03
Feedback, Confidence and Job Search Behavior
We conduct a field experiment with job seekers to investigate how feed- back influences job search and labor market outcomes. Job seekers who re- ceive feedback on their ability compared to other job…
2025-04
Deter and Deteriorate: The Effects of Application Processing Times on Welfare Receipt and Employment
This paper investigates the effects of application processing times on welfare applicants’ benefit and employment outcomes. For causal inference, we exploit exogenous variation in application processing…
2025-03
Immigration, Workforce Composition, and Organizational Performance: The Effect of Brexit on NHS Hospital Quality
Restrictive immigration policies may force firms to abruptly change their workforce composition. But how does this impact the performance of these organizations? We study the effects of the 2016 Brexit…
2025-05
Breaking Stereotypes: How Valuing Workers' Preferences Improves Task Allocation and Performance
Firm performance depends critically on the efficient allocation of tasks across employees. Yet, task assignment decisions are often shaped not only by productivity considerations but also by managerial…
2025-04
Educational Ambition, Marital Sorting, and Inequality
This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of “ambition types” that…
2025-03
The Menopause
The motherhood penalty is well-documented, but what happens at the other end of the reproductive spectrum? Menopause—a transition often marked by debilitating physical and psychological symptoms—also…
2025-04
Endogenous Depopulation and Economic Growth
Fertility rates have declined dramatically across almost all high-income countries over the past decades. This has raised concerns about future economic prospects. Indeed, fully– and semi–endogenous…
2025-02
From Conflict to Compromise: Experimental Evidence on Occupational Downgrading in Migration from Myanmar
We examine the relationship between violent conflict and the willingness of potential migrants to accept lower skilled work (occupational downgrading). We develop a theoretical model of migration decisions,…
2025-03
Beyond Hot Flashes: The Career Cost of Menopause
Menopause marks a crucial juncture in women's lives and careers. We provide novel evidence on the effects of menopause onset on labor and health outcomes. Combining Norwegian register with survey data…
2025-03
The Origins and Evolution of Occupational Licensing in the United States
The analysis of occupational licensing has concentrated largely on its labor market and consumer welfare effects. By contrast, relatively little is known about how occupational licensing laws originated…
2025-02
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Examining Efficiency and Equity in Designing Summer Youth Employment Programs
Summer Youth Employment Programs are known to have significant impacts on youth outcomes based on lotteries from oversubscribed programs. But most cities cannot use a lottery design due to heterogeneity…
2025-03
China’s Import Competition, Innovation and the Role of Unions
This paper investigates the relationship between China’s import competition and the innovation strategies of domestic firms. Using firm level data from Italy spanning 2005-2010 and employing IV fixed…
2025-02
High-Skilled Migration from Myanmar: Responses to Signals of Political and Economic Stabilization
In recent years Myanmar has witnessed considerable economic and political instability, leading many young people, particularly the higher-skilled, to consider migrating abroad for improved prospects.…
2025-04
Protection for Whom? The Political Economy of Protective Labor Laws for Women
During the first half of the twentieth century, many US states enacted laws restricting women’s labor market opportunities, including maximum hours restrictions, minimum wage laws, and night-shift bans.…
2025-04
Anticipated Discrimination and Major Choice
We study whether gender differences in university major choices result from anticipated labor market discrimination. First, we document two novel facts using administrative transcript records from a large…
2025-04-15
Explaining the Dynamics of the Gender Gap in Lifetime Earnings
Using a long administrative panel dataset for France, we analyse the dynamics and drivers of the narrowing gender gap in lifetime earnings (LTE) for cohorts born after WWII. We find that the level, trends,…
2025-03
Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? Changes in the Geography of Work in the US, 1980-2021
We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across US commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages,…
2025-03
On the Role of Legislation as a Driver of Incentive Management Practices in Europe
This paper investigates one aspect of the structured management practices literature which has argued that exogenous legislative changes leading to reductions in union power (identified with the passage…
2025-04
The Long Road to Equality: Racial Capital and Generational Convergence
We introduce the concept of racial capital, defined as the collective material and non- material assets of the racial groups to which a child is exposed while growing up, and examine its potential to…
2025-03
The Value of Worker Rights in Collective Bargaining
This paper proposes novel natural language methods to measure worker rights from collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) for use in empirical economic analysis. Applying unsupervised text-as-data algorithms…
2025-03
Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities
The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supply–shaped by factors like geography and regulation–strongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities…
2025-04-30
Mapping the Unpaid Care Work Economy in Asia
Aging populations in Asia are worried that they are facing a “care crisis, ” with many older people in need of care having no one to care for them. However, we do not have a clear picture of current…
2025
Determinants of Converging Gender Productivity: A Cross-Country Analysis
Most countries have experienced a substantial narrowing of the gender employment and wage gaps in recent decades. However, the determinants of the convergence in gender productivity, an important factor…
2025-03
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Measurement of Telework During and Shortly After the Pandemic—an On-the-Ground Perspective
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, the amount of telework sharply increased, allowing people to work while limiting their exposure to others. At that time, there were no regular monthly economic…
2025-04
Managing an aging society: Learning the right lessons from Japan
As the world and especially other Asian and European economies enter the accelerated process of aging that Japan experienced from the mid-1990s onwards, learning the right policy lessons from Japan's…
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