Annual Conference 2024

Organisatoren

Local Organisation: Dirk Engelmann (HU Berlin), Radosveta Ivanova-Stenzel (TU Berlin)
Core Conference: Bernd Fitzenberger (IAB, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Open Meeting: Almut Balleer (RWI Essen, TU Dortmund)

Call for Papers 2024 is closed now

The VfS Annual Conference consists of a core conference part with keynotes and a core conference panel on the current topic and an open conference part on all economic topics. Manuscripts for the Open Meeting could be submitted from all fields of economics, as individual papers or as organised sessions by March1.

The submissions will be evaluated by anonymous reviewers and then selected by the programme committee. Information on the acceptance of the contribution for the programme will be provided by the end of May.

Core Conference 2024: Upcoming Labor Market Challenges

Demographic change and aging workforces, continuing rapid technological transformations, and the ever-more visible consequences of the climate crisis confront our economies and labor markets, which are already suffering from a shortage of labor. Women have made great progress in the labor market, but they still do not make full use of their labor market potential. Geopolitical conflicts and international divisions impact upon trade possibly reducing the international division of labor and inciting migration, and populism and political polarization obstruct efficient decision-making. These developments impose exceptional challenges for our economies and, in particular, our labor markets.

The keynotes at this conference address these issues, focusing on three core subjects: Regional inequalities, the role of women in the labor market, and immigration. Held by leading scholars in the field, the speakers will discuss the latest research and assess different policy approaches.

Jessica Pan (NUS Singapore) starts from the observation of persistent gender gaps in the labor market, which are all the more puzzling as women are now increasingly more educated than men and better prepared for the labor market than ever before. She focuses on how children affect women’s careers, and provides new evidence on how continuing disadvantage through childbirth impacts on aggregate gender inequality. David Card (UC Berkeley, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics) takes a tour through pay differences within and between cities based on ongoing work using novel administrative data. He discusses the causes and consequences of these wage differences, which have not been considered comprehensively to date. Christian Dustmann (University College London and RF Berlin) discusses the effects immigration has on the economy, the challenges of measurement, and how immigration impacts on the policy discourse.

These and other issues will also be taken up by a policy panel that includes policy makers and academic policy advisors, with a focus on labor market challenges in the German-speaking countries. Moreover, various more specific labor market themes will be addressed by several more policy-oriented panels.