"Firm Response to Raising Women's Retirement Age" 

Co-workers' careers are interdependent. This study asks whether a reform raising women's retirement age affected the career opportunities of younger workers. Drawing on administrative data from Germany, I find that a reform-induced extension of the careers of older women affects younger co-workers' promotion and external hiring chances. These crowd-out effects are particularly pronounced among middle-aged female coworkers and external hires. The average effects hide substantial heterogeneity related to the availability of internal and external substitutes, highlighting the importance of labor market frictions.

Awards: 1st prize at the Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank) 

Presented at: EWMES (planned); IAB Brown Bag Seminar (planned); IAB DiskAB; EALE; IZA Summer School; ESPE; Dutch National Bank; Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank);  SITES; AIEL; CERGE-EI Brown Bag Seminar; Student Workshop at Harris School of Public Policy at UChicago; BSE Summer School; Armenian Economic Association annual meeting

"Coordinated Retirement Decisions with Firms:  The Role of Worker Substitutability"  

Worker turnover can be costly for firms due to imperfect worker substitutability in the labor market. Therefore, it is important to understand how worker substitutability affects employment behavior at an older age. By combining the literature on worker substitutability with that on labor supply effects of retirement reform, I show that older workers with fewer potential substitutes in the internal labor market (by coworkers) or the external labor market (by new hires) are more likely to continue working when faced with higher retirement age. Based on a regression discontinuity design corresponding to a shift in the early retirement age, the findings suggest that workers internalize and mitigate some of their employer’s costs of finding suitable replacements.

[draft available upon request]

Presented at: AIEL

"Disclosure Discrimination: An Experiment Focusing on Communication in the Hiring Process"  (with D.Korlyakova & R.Rehák) 

We focus on communication among hiring team members and document the existence of discrimination in the disclosure of information about candidates. In particular, we conduct an online experiment with a nationally representative sample of Czech individuals who act as human resource assistants and hiring managers in our online labor market. The main novel feature of our experiment is the monitoring of information flow between human resource assistants and hiring managers. We exogenously manipulate candidates' names to explore the causal effects of their gender and nationality on information that assistants select for managers. Our findings reveal that assistants disclose more information about family and less information about work for female candidates relative to male candidates. An in-depth analysis of the disclosed information suggests that gender stereotypes play an important role in this disclosure discrimination. Furthermore, assistants disclose less information about foreigners overall. This effect appears to be driven by the less attention assistants are willing to devote to the CVs of foreigners, measured by the extra effort to learn more about the candidates. 

[SSNR link; AEA RCT Registry]

Presented at: pregame in the team of John List at UChicago