Info

The IAB Special Lecture Series 2023 / 2024

hosted by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB)


CONTENT

The IAB Special Lecture Series invites outstanding international researchers across the Social Sciences to present their current work. Guest lecturers are selected on exellent academic merit and typically have made significant contributions to their respective fields and continue to actively shape internationale research agendas. The IAB Special Lecture Series aims to provide a unique opportunity to the IAB researchers as well as researchers from other research entities to discurss the work and share their expertise with the speaker during the presentation, and to receive feedback on their own research projects during individual talks with the speaker.


CONFERENCE FORMAT

The IAB Special Lecture Series will be held at the IAB, Regensburger Str. 100, 90478 Nuremberg.


ABSTRACTS OF THE SPECIAL LECTURE SERIES 2024


 » 05 February 2024, 10.30 am - 12.00 pm - Gabriela Spanghero Lotta

Gabriela Spanghero Lotta is a Professor of Public Administration and Government at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Sao Paulo, Brasil.
Lecture: "Navigating Vulnerabilities: Exploring Trust Dynamics in Citizens-State Interactions for Access to Public Services"
This lecture delves into the multifaceted dynamics of the state-citizen relationship within the realm of service delivery in vulnerable contexts, with a specific focus on the crucial roles played by health workers, teachers, and social workers. Examining these interactions against the backdrop of high vulnerabilities, characterized by factors such as limited trust, resource constraints, perceived lack of state legitimacy, and pervasive inequalities, our discussion aims to uncover the nuanced impact of contextual challenges on encounters between citizens and frontline service providers. Drawing on various research studies concerning frontline workers in Brazil, we will explore the underlying mechanisms that either reduce or reproduce existing inequalities when implementing policies in contexts of high vulnerabilities.



 » 20 June 2024, 10.30 am - 12.00 pm - Giovanni Peri

Lecture: Measuring and Predicting New Work in the US: the role of local factors and global trends.

"New work”, namely the introduction of types of jobs that did not exist earlier, is an essential part of innovation and employment growth for advanced economies. Using text analysis, we develop an algorithm that identifies new job-titles in the US economy based on their vector distance from the closest existing job title in the previous census. We use this method to generate a measure of ``new work” from 1980 to 2010 in each of 354 occupations and we construct its distribution across 766 commuting zones. We first show how this measure of ``new work" is associated to task and skill characteristics of workers in the occupations and to employment growth, skill bias and innovation in the commuting zones. Then we analyze whether local population density, human capital and manufacturing intensity in the 1980, and/or local exposure  to structural ``shocks" in the 1980-2010, relating to trade competition, technological change, immigration and age changes predict the creation of new work. Our main findings are that the share of college educated and the density of population in 1980 are the strongest predictors of New Work creation in the 1980-2010 period. The aging of population and exposure to computer adoption were also associated to New Work creation, while robot adoption was negatively associated to it. The exposure to immigration and trade had a more nuanced and differentiated correlation to new work.


» tba 2024 - David Autor

David Autor is Ford Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, codirector of the NBER Labor Studies Program and the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, the Society for Progress Medal in 2021—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship. In 2020, Autor received the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.” In a 2019 article, the Economist magazine labeled him as “The academic voice of the American worker.” Later that same year, and with equal justification, he was christened “Twerpy MIT Economist” by John Oliver of Last Week Tonight in a segment on automation and employment. 



LOCAL ORGANIZERS

  • Claudia Globisch (IAB, University of Erlangen), 
  • Simon Janssen (IAB), 
  • Yuliya Kosyakova (IAB, University of Bamberg) 
  • Adrian Lerche (IAB)


PREVIOUS SPEAKERS AT THE SPECIAL LECTURE SERIES


FURTHER INFORMATION:

For any questions refer to IAB.Special-Lecture@iab.de


Registration »