Research

"Firm Response to Raising Women's Retirement Age: Spillovers on Coworkers and External Hiring" [updated draft coming soon]

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

Presented at: IAB DiskAB (planned); 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

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 careers of older women affects younger co-workers' promotion as well as external hiring chances. These crowd-out effects are particularly pronounced among middle-aged female coworkers and external hires. The average effects hide substantial heterogeneity by the availability of internal and external substitutes, highlighting the importance of labor market frictions. 

"Coordinated Retirement Decisions with Firms:  The Role of Worker Substitutability"  [please reach out for a paper if needed]

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. Coping strategies, such as those used to mitigate turnover costs due to retirement, can be identified through understanding worker substitutability. In this context, by combining the literature on worker substitutability with that on labor supply effects of retirement reform, I show that older workers with specific skills who are difficult to substitute for, either in the internal labor market (by coworkers) or the external labor market (by new hires), are more likely to continue working when faced with a higher retirement age. The findings, based on a regression discontinuity design corresponding to a shift in the early retirement age, suggest that worker labor supply decisions are coordinated with firms based on their substitutability, thereby mitigating turnover costs. 

"Disclosure Discrimination: An Experiment Focusing on Communication in the Hiring Process"  (with D.Korlyakova & R.Rehák) [SSNR link,  AEA RCT Registry]

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. 

Work in progress

"The Effect of Parental Job Loss on Intergenerational Mobility and Children's Job Search Outcomes" (with C. Biesenbeek and M. Mastrogiacomo) [in coding stage]

"Coworker Peer Effects in Retirement Decisions" [in coding stage]