I am an applied microeconomist and am mainly interested in the intersection of social safety net programs with labor markets.
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at CERGE-EI. During my PhD years, I made research visits to the University of Chicago (invited by D. Black) and the Institute for Employment Research (M.Moritz). I also did a PhD internship at the Dutch National Bank (C. Biesenbeek & M. Mastrogiacomo).
CV: access here
E-mail: sona.badalyan.v@gmail.com ; sona.badalyan@cerge-ei.cz
Working papers
"Firm Responses to Raising Women's Retirement Age" [Job Market Paper, Latest version]
Abstract: 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 the universe of social security 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 only in the years when the first affected cohorts of women are between the pre-reform and post-reform pensionable ages, with no adjustments prior. These crowd-out effects are particularly pronounced among middle-aged female coworkers and external hires. The average impact on both directly affected women's retention at an older age and spillovers on their coworkers hide substantial heterogeneity related to the availability of internal and external substitutes, highlighting the importance of labor market frictions.
Awards:
1st place: Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank, 2024)
2nd place: Young Economist of the Year in the Czech Republic (Czech Economic Society, 2024)
Presented at: EWMES (scheduled); IAB Brown Bag Seminar; 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" [Latest version]
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 shapes 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.
Presented at: AIEL
"Disclosure Discrimination: An Experiment Focusing on Communication in the Hiring Process" (with D.Korlyakova & R.Rehák) [SSNR link; CERGE-EI WP; AEA RCT Registry]
Abstract: 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.
Presented at: pregame in the team of John List at UChicago
Work in progress
"Coworker Peer Effects in Retirement" [in coding stage]
Idea: Reforms raising the retirement age may affect not only the workers themselves but also spill over to their old-age peers at the workplace through the social multiplier, i.e. peer effects. I employ a regression discontinuity design by utilizing the 1999 reform in Germany that increased women's retirement ages by at least 3 years, making pensionable ages gender-neutral. The main outcome variable is the retirement age. The mechanisms I plan to investigate are (1) conformity and (2) information transmission. To test for conformity, I investigate whether peer effects are larger in West Germany- a place with changing social norms in terms of women's labor supply. To test for the information transmission channel, I use heterogeneity by tenure, as workers with less tenure have more uncertainty about the employer's reaction to retirement. This study may help policymakers understand the total impact of retirement policies, as they may be underestimated without taking into account the social multipliers.
Presented at: CERGE-EI Applied student lunch
“The Costs of Job Displacement by Family Structure and Spillovers on Children's Labor Market Outcomes” (with C. Biesenbeek & M. Mastrogiacomo) [in coding stage]
Idea: Social security data do not always provide an opportunity to be linked to household members in Europe, for example in Germany. Hence, while we know about the individual-level costs of job displacement, less is known about spillover effects on family members. We are the first to estimate the costs of job displacement by the family structure of the households, including the number of children, using Dutch registry data. We exploit firm closures as a source of exogenous variation in parental labor market shocks. As a next step, we explore the long-run effects of experiencing parental job displacement in childhood on the careers of grown-up children.
Not in progress (pre-PhD papers)
"The Gender Wage Gap in Hungary: an Unconditional Quantile Regression-based Decomposition Approach" [Latest version; MA thesis at CEU]
Main takeaway: Given the differences in the support of the distributions of characteristics by 2 groups, such as gender, caution is warranted when implementing wage gap decompositions by that group variable. In this paper, I empirically illustrate this issue by comparing the gender wage gap decomposition results obtained from two primary methods: unconditional quantile regression-based decompositions (UQRD), which do not address the differences in support of distribution, and matching-based decompositions, which address such differences. The analyses are conducted for 3 sample periods in Hungary- before joining the EU, between joining the EU and the recession, and after the recession. I show that gender segregation in industry employment, among some other characteristics, leads to differences in the decomposition results obtained by those two methods.
Presented at: CES-SEAM, 11th Biennial Conference of the CES