Project Details
Projekt
Labour Scarcity and the Role of Firms in the Labour Market
Subject Area
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518302089
The project focuses on the role of firms in the labor market, with a dual purpose. Firstly, it analyses how labor market tightness affects the allocation of workers across employers. Secondly, it investigates how employers can use internal labor markets to mitigate challenges from tight labor markets. When examining worker allocation between employers in the first part of the project, we will investigate whether the increased competition for workers leads to the reallocation of jobs from low-wage to higher-wage employers. The analysis will, for example, differentiate low-wage services (Food, Cleaning, Security, and Logistics) occupations and high-wage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) occupations, thereby shedding light on the evolution of wage inequality. The project will also provide detailed descriptive evidence on the evolution of labor market tightness across different occupations and regions since the 1980s, thereby offering the essential descriptive context for the other proposals encompassed within this Research Unit. In the second part, this project takes a within-employer perspective and analyses how internal labor markets can help employers to mitigate labor scarcity. We examine how the organizational structure of firms relates to hiring difficulties and assess whether firms can attract and retain workers by offering careers rather than single jobs.
DFG Programme
Research Units
