Austrian Labour Economics Workshop

The ten presentations covered research ranging from family formation and working time to wage setting and artificial intelligence. Short summaries are provided below, alongside information on workshop materials. Some authors considered their results too preliminary for wider publication; the organisers nevertheless expressed confidence that all presenters would make interesting contributions.

Research presented

When Love Is Scarce: Early Marriage Market Competition and Labor Market Outcomes

9:30 | Dora Walter, WU Wien
Joint work with Wolfgang Frimmel and Martin Halla.

Walter examined how early marriage-market competition affected family formation and long-term labour-market outcomes. Early-career wage growth depended heavily on job mobility and occupational sorting, especially during the first decade, when marriage and childbearing decisions also often occurred. Using population-wide Austrian administrative data, the authors measured local marriage-market tightness through spatially overlapping sets of potential partners and competitors. Tighter markets delayed marriage and fertility, increased educational attainment and geographic mobility, and led to higher long-term earnings, particularly for women. The findings highlighted how early family formation could permanently reshape careers by restricting job search during its highest-return phase.

Forced Melting Pot: Temporary Migration and the Formation of Economic and Social Ties

10:05 | Carola Stapper, JKU Linz
Joint work with Ann-Kristin Becker.

Stapper investigated whether temporary migration generated lasting ties, even under the adverse conditions of forced labour in Germany during World War II. The authors used the quasi-random assignment of foreign forced migrants across German counties and linked archival location and nationality data to subsequent social connectivity, foreign direct investment and joint patenting with migrants’ origin countries. A gravity model showed that greater exposure produced stronger bilateral social and economic ties after migrants returned home, persisting up to the time of the study. Personal connections drove the effects, which were somewhat stronger where wartime conditions were less severe and cultural similarity was greater.

A Century of Weekly Working Time Reductions: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis

10:40 | Ludwig List, WU Wien, INEQ
Joint work with Quirin Dammerer.

List presented a review of the economic effects of weekly working time reductions over the past century, drawing on 214 empirical studies from 30 countries. Employment was the focus, although the literature also examined other outcomes. A meta-regression of 1,223 estimates from 39 studies found no statistically significant aggregate employment effect across countries and periods, and no evidence of publication bias. A small positive effect emerged for individual employment probabilities, particularly when accounting for missing controls. Methodological choices and study design substantially influenced results. The authors interpreted the findings as suggesting that shorter working weeks did not lead to job losses, while stressing that employment had historically been only one goal alongside health, well-being and work–life balance. Reform design, including distributional, educational and gender dimensions, mattered for broader outcomes.

Work from Home and Child Penalties

11:30 | Candan Erdemli, EUBA Bratislava
Joint work with Omar Bamieh, Alice Kügler and Lennart Ziegler.

Erdemli examined whether working from home mitigated child penalties. Austrian payslips had recorded employees’ actual home-working days since 2021, enabling the authors to study remote work itself rather than jobs’ remote-work potential. An instrumented difference-in-differences design exploiting the COVID-induced expansion of remote work found that one additional home-working day per week raised first-time mothers’ employment by 2.8 percentage points. Full-time work and earnings also increased; earnings gains arose entirely through the extensive margin. Separating worker and firm components showed that mothers were more likely to return to their pre-birth employer only when it supported remote work; otherwise, they switched employers. Employment gains were largest where early childcare was more widely available, suggesting complementarity rather than substitution.

Closing the Gender Leadership Gap: Competitive versus Cooperative Institutions

12:05 | Nina Xue, WU Wien
Joint work with Catherine C. Eckel, Lata Gangadharan, Philip J. Grossman and Miranda Lambert.

Xue explored how institutional environments influenced the gender leadership gap, motivated by stereotypes of women as more cooperative and less competitive. An experiment compared competitive, winner-take-all incentives with cooperative, equal-earnings arrangements. Leaders provided non-binding advice on how to play. All leaders improved efficiency similarly, but evaluations revealed a gender gap only under competition, where women received lower ratings for identical advice. This bias disappeared in the cooperative setting, where female leaders were evaluated 50% higher. The findings suggested policy implications from the alignment between institutional environments and gender stereotypes. Men were more willing to lead in both settings.

Effects of a Large Public-Sector Wage Floor

13:45 | Samuel Stöcher, WU Wien
Joint work with Lukas Lehner.

Stöcher studied a substantial public-sector wage-floor increase in Burgenland that departed from the nationwide agreement used in preceding years. The analysis examined public-sector employment, wages below and above the new minimum, wage inequality, private-sector spillovers and the gender pay gap. Public-sector income effects were clearly positive: employment below the new minimum fell sharply, offset by employment in higher wage groups. Wage spillovers also reached groups above the new minimum, and inequality declined overall. Evidence of private-sector wage spillovers remained suggestive and required further investigation.

High Intergenerational Earnings and Low Educational Mobility: The Role of Vocational Apprenticeships

14:20 | Qin Lin, WU Wien
Joint work with Franziska Disslbacher, Wolfgang Frimmel, Martin Halla, Moritz Hörl, Alice Kügler, Harald Oberhofer and Anna Schwarz.

Lin addressed Austria’s “mobility paradox”: exceptionally low educational mobility alongside remarkably high income mobility. Population-wide administrative data linked this pattern to the vocational and tertiary education system. Substantial differences in returns across educational tracks and fields produced overlapping lifetime earnings distributions. Children from highly educated families disproportionately entered lower-paying tertiary fields, further weakening the education–income link. Widespread, accessible vocational education and training offered routes into stable, well-paid occupations, supporting income mobility among children from less-educated households.

Labor Market Inequality and Rent Sharing at the Top

14:55 | Emanuel List, WU Wien

List examined whose wages responded to changes in firm rents, using Austrian matched employer–employee data for 2009–2020 with uncensored wage-tax earnings. Within ongoing job matches, the instrumented rent-sharing elasticity was 0.045, with little variation by gender, occupation, education or nativity. Differences by earnings rank were pronounced: the elasticity remained flat through the ninth decile, rose to 0.15 in the top percentile and reached 0.40 in the top 0.1%. Group-specific Abowd–Kramarz–Margulies (AKM) premia indicated that sorting across employers, rather than unequal within-firm pay, primarily widened gender and nativity gaps. Earnings rank mattered more than group membership for rent sharing, which was concentrated at the top; bonuses played a significant role above the median. Firm rents contributed to pay dispersion, with surplus allocation increasingly favouring top earners and intensifying upper-end inequality.

Generative AI and Employer Concentration

15:45 | Raphael Gottweis, WU Wien
Joint work with Maria Del Rio-Chanona and Yiming Zhang.

Gottweis presented work in progress on how generative AI affected firms’ advertised labour demand in Austria. The project examined whether effects differed across workers and labour markets with different employer structures.

Exposure to Automation and Augmentation and wage inequality in Europe

16:20 | Katarína Vaľkova, EUBA
Joint work with Tomáš Oleš and Matej Vitáloš.

Vaľkova examined why estimates of technological change’s effects differed in magnitude and, more troublingly, direction. Divergence appeared in both employment and wage-inequality effects, particularly for AI adoption, and seemed to depend on exposure measures. The authors distinguished robots, software and AI, as well as automation, where technology took over tasks, and augmentation, where it created tasks or accelerated their completion. For AI, patent-based and job-task-based measures yielded divergent results. The authors traced this divergence to job-based indicators, which could not, by construction, detect growing inequality within occupations.

Programme at a glance

Registration began at 9:00, followed by the welcome at 9:15. Coffee breaks took place at 11:15 and 15:30, with lunch at 12:40. The workshop ended at 17:00.

Presentations and papers

Presentation materials were made available for the contributions by Carola Stapper, Ludwig List, Nina Xue, Samuel Stöcher and Katarína Vaľkova.