Research Data Center of IZA (IDSC)
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G²LM|LIC - Ethiopian Manufactoring Enterprise Survey
No full textThe data were collected during April and May 2016 on a sample of 300 Ethiopian manufacturing firms and 3.000 workers. As sampling frame the 2015 Census of Manufacturing Firms was used conducted by the Central Statistical Agency (CSA) of Ethiopia that captures all manufacturing firms that use power-driven machinery and employ at least 10 workers. The Census is officially referred to as "Large and Medium Scale Manufacturing and Electricity Survey".
The sampling frame followed the 2015 Census of Manufacturing Firms by using regional states as strata. Because of their minimal number of manufacturing firms, the researchers excluded five regional administrations at this stage of sampling. These include the Afar, Benishangul-Gumuz, Gambella, Harari and Somali regions, which are often referred to as small states. The survey thus includes the Amhara, Oromia, SNNPR and Tigray regional states and the city administrations of Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa.
Since manufacturing firms tend to concentrate in major urban centers, the survey was limited to manufacturing firms located in the capital cities of the respective regions except for the Amhara region where two large cities were included, i.e., the regional capital Bahir Dara and the city of Gondar. Since nearly 70 per cent of manufacturing firms in the CSA census are located in and around Addis Ababa, the same proportion of firms in the sample were selected from the nation’s capital. The remaining 30 percent of firms were randomly selected from the other regions each with a six per cent share.
Once the firms were selected, the survey was conducted on 10 randomly selected workers from each firm. Retrospective questions were used to collect data on wages and pension contributions from administrative records of firms. This allows to capture the evolution of wages before and after the pension reform at the worker level without relying on interviewee memories. Such data were collected for the month of March for seven year from 2009 to 2015.
In addition to wages and pension contributions, the survey captures workers’ highest level of formal education, occupation, age, gender, marital status, and parental education. The survey has a module on firm-level information including total number workers, hiring and firing activities, location, and industry
G²LM|LIC - Browsers Don't Lie
No full textThe project collaborated with PY Insights, an internet-browser analytics platform, and Dynata, a global first-party data platform, to field the survey between mid-May and early June 2020. Individuals drawn from Dynata’s marketing pools in India, Kenya and Nigeria were invited to participate in an online survey that ended with a consensual browser data upload using the PY Insights software. Participants with valid data were compensated for their effort. PY Insights’ internet browser extension collects retrospective data stored in each user’s browser account history. This is identical to what a participant would observe if they visited the History section of their internet browser on their personal computer. The records cover up to 90 days of past activity on the browser account, accumulated across all electronic devices (computer, smartphone, tablet). The researchers observe every website visit, including the URL (uniform resource locator, i.e., web address) and timestamp.
Although browser data can include records from multiple types of electronic devices, most smartphone browser apps do not support internet browser extensions or add-ons, so the PY Insights technology only collects data from personal computers. No information is collected from private browsing or Incognito mode, and personal identifiers are removed prior to analysis.
Each URL has an associated title, which conveys meaningful information, such as a Google search phrase, the headline of a newspaper article, or a YouTube video title. Using the URL, title, and timestamp for each website visit, PY Insights calculates its duration in seconds and provides a detailed categorization scheme for each website domain. The categories are based on Google Cloud Platform’s natural language processing algorithm. The project used these categories to identify websites as being primarily related to leisure (entertainment) or production (non-recreational). Leisure includes Adults, Arts & Entertainment, Games, Online Communities (including social media), and Shopping. Production includes Business & Industrial, Computers & Electronics, Finance, Internet & Telecom (including e-mail and search engines), Jobs & Education, Law & Government, News, Science, and Reference. Other Google Cloud categories combined cover 0.8% of our data. Some websites – such as spam webpages – are also labelled as “other”. Median “other” category usage on a day covers 7% of total time use. Because YouTube represents a sizeable portion of usage and is classified as leisure by PY Insights, also robustness checks were conducted in which YouTube videos as leisure or production related using Google’s YouTube API were re-classified.
The researchers collected data on individuals aged 22 to 54 located in 28 states across India, as well as Kenya and Nigeria. Individuals were prevented to use a new browser account or a secondary browser type that is not used regularly from participating by requiring at least 30 days of browser data. One user was dropped who preferred not to state their gender and took two steps to avoid computer bots: by including an attention test question in the survey and all users with an average of more than 3,000 URL visits per day were manually dropped
G²LM|LIC - The Effects of Employer Responses to COVID-19 on Female Garment Workers in Bangladesh
No full textThis study developed and implemented a mobile-phone-based survey of garment workers in Bangladesh, providing insights about COVID-19 responses in their workplace and the effects on workers.
The study asked about factory shutdowns, the rate of safety measures like masks and increased distance between workspaces, late payment and earnings, working conditions, time out of the labor force, beliefs and aspirations, and physical and mental health, both during the pandemic and retrospectively in January 2020.
Because of the possibility that the pandemic caused separations (either voluntary or involuntary) from the garment sector, the project defined a garment worker as someone who was working in the garment industry in January 2020, even if they were no longer doing so at the time of the survey. For those workers no longer in the industry, the survey also asked about their reasons for separation and any alternate economic activity they were engaged in
The Evolution of the Regulation of Labor in the USSR, the CIS and the Baltic States, 1985–2009
No full textWe have generated new data on Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic States - from 1985 - 2009. We adopted the OECD approach to quantifying regulations of the labor market and calculated detailed time series for each of the items used in version II of the OECD EPL Index. The data were obtained in a consistent fashion across countries and over time from a large array of national and international legal sources. To date the OECD data on employment protection remain not only the most widely used, but also perhaps the least criticized on methodological . </br
IZA/IAB Linked Evaluation Dataset
No full textThe IZA/IAB Linked Evaluation Dataset 1993-2010 was created in the context of the research project trying to obtain reliable estimates for the impact of active labor market policies (ALMP) and understand why and how programs work or not.In cooperation with the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg (IAB), an extensive data base for analysing the effectiveness of active labour market policy measures was compiled.
From the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEB) of the IAB, which comprise administrative individual-level data about benefits received, job search and participation in measures from the operational business of the Federal Employment Agency, a random sample of persons who entered unemployment between January 2001 and December 2008 was taken. For selected persons with entries in unemployment between June 2007 and May 2008, an additional telephone interview was carried out on behalf of IZA. In total, about 17,400 people were interviewed. These persons were asked for their consent to link the survey data with the information available at the IAB: 15,274 persons gave their consent and finally the data of 15,173 individuals could be matched.
Hence the administrative data have been reshaped so that information on the period before unemployment is provided on a yearly basis and information on the period after entering unemployment on a monthly basis. The variables concerning the participation in active labour market programmes are reduced as well. Furthermore some variables of the survey data have to be deleted or values have to be pooled into new categories.
The IZA/IAB Linked Evaluation Dataset in the factual anonymous version is available as SUF at the FDZ and the IDSC. In order to be able to use the data, it is first necessary to submit an application to the FDZ and the IDSC. The application will be reviewed in the FDZ and the IDSC. When approval has been granted, a data use agreement is concluded with the researcher’s institution. Details on applying for the dataset and possibilities for data processing can be found on the websites of the FDZ and the IDSC. </br
IZA Expert Opinion Survey
No full textThe IZA Expert Opinion Survey on the Single European Labor Market was conducted in February 2014. The purpose of the survey was to get a fresh collection of opinions regarding the current state of the Single European Labor Market, its determinants and the importance of the crisis. All IZA Research Fellows and Policy Fellows based in Europe were approached by email and invited to participate in this online survey consisting of nine questions. IZA asked the participants for their general satisfaction and attitudes towards the European Union the European Labor Market Integration, its determinants and obstacles.
Topics of the survey comprise Satisfaction with the EU; Importance of Single European Labor Market; Factors Influencing Achievement of Single European Labor Market; State of Integration of European Labor Market; Factors Influencing Labor Mobility in Europe; Economic Divergence a Long-Lasting Phenomenon; Importance of Policies for Dealing with Economic Divergence.
Demographics consists of asking Gender; Age; Living Outside Home Country; PhD Studies Outside Home Country; Origin (Country Groups); Place of Affiliation (Country Groups); Paper in A/A+ Journal; Top Author in Europe; Migration Research Interest; Type of Affiliatio
G²LM|LIC- Assisting Job Search in Low-Employment Communities
No full textIn the original research project, two interventions that are designed to help young urban dwellers search for employment by removing spatial and informational obstacles to job search were evaluated experimentally in Addis Ababa. The first intervention was a transport subsidy lowering the cost of job search. In Addis Ababa, job seekers needed to make regular trips to the centre of town to look for job opportunities. The subsidy covers the cost of this journey. The second intervention was a job application workshop, designed to improve job seekers’ ability to signal their skills to employers. Participants were offered orientation on how to make effective job applications using CVs and cover letters, and on how to approach job interviews. Further, they took a mix of standardised personnel selection tests.
Firm Survey
The survey was conducted with a focus on understand the beliefs that each side of the market holds. The firm survey carefully elicits firm managers’ beliefs about the ability of jobseekers. Ability is measured as a jobseeker performance on a Raven test. The expectations both with respect to tertiary-educated applicants and high-school graduates were documented. The survey enables to measure the accuracy of beliefs. In particular, it is possible to contrast firms' answers with the true empirical counterparts obtained from the jobseeker survey and vice versa.
Jobseeker Survey
The jobseeker survey focused on reservation wages, the distribution of wages across sectors and the expected duration of unemployment. Beliefs about the distribution of wages were elicited by asking the jobseeker what proportion of jobs currently advertised paid a wage lower than a set of thresholds. Similarly, reservation wages we elicited by asking the jobseeker whether they would accept a job that would pay at least a certain amount. This amount was decreased until the wage bracket corresponding to the jobseeker reservation wage was found. To minimise complexity, the elicitation of beliefs among jobseekers were not incentivised. Finally, after belief elicitation was completed, jobseekers took a 12-item Raven test
G²LM|LIC - Occupational Health and Safety: The Role of Information and Financial Linkage
No full textThe intervention was carried out in October 2017. A baseline survey was conducted prior to the intervention in 2017 and two follow-up surveys were carried out in December 2018 and end of 2019. In addition, a special follow-up survey of the workers was carried out in January 2021 following the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak to gauge their wellbeing.
The project implemented a cluster randomized trial with 2,451 firms in 1,356 markets in Bangladesh. The markets are located in 79 sub-districts in 20 districts. All firms are in the light engineering sector, which is one of the largest sub-sectors of SMEs in Bangladesh.
The treatment group comprised of 1,172 firms and 1,279 firms were in the control group. Randomization was done at the market level. The randomized trial comprises of two treatment arms. The first treatment arm (T1) involved 597 firms. and provided five days of intensive occupational health and safety (OHS) training to firm owners (or managers).
The owners or managers received a 5-day training based on the OHS module. The training included information on the use of safety measures and videos to demonstrate safety awareness for owners, managers, and workers. It also covered topics such as fire and accident risk, working hours, and water and sanitation. Additionally, personalized sessions were provided to address any potential safety hazards in the working environment in each firm. In the second treatment arm (T2), the firms received the same OHS training as the firms in T1.
The second treatment arm (T2) involved 575 firms and provided the same OHS training as well as an additional nine days of training on business management and financial linkages to the firm owners (or managers). In addition, firms in T2 were provided with business training and financial linkages. The business training was done in 3 sessions, and each session took 3 days. The business training covered marketing, accounting, business planning, and cost structure. The program focused on assisting with financial linkages and value chain development. The materials also sought to improve skills in project development, decent work and sustainable business development, and knowledge transfer. The ultimate goal of the business training was to enable entrepreneurs to start a new business or expand their existing ones.
The surveys undertaken in 2017-2019 also include workers’ characteristics such as workers’ age, occupation (foreman, skilled worker, or apprentice), monthly salary, daily hours, experience in the workshop, and experience in the occupation. This information is collected in all three rounds, although the data provides only a repeated cross-section of workers and does not allow to link the same worker over time
The Age Twist in Employers' Gender Requests: Evidence from Four Job Boards
No full textWhen permitted by law, employers sometimes state the preferred age and gender of their employees in job ads. The researchers study the interaction of advertised requests for age and gender on one Mexican and three Chinese job boards, showing that firms’ explicit gender requests shift dramatically away from women and towards men when firms are seeking older (as opposed to younger) workers. This ‘age twist’ in advertised gender preferences occurs in all four of our datasets and survives controls for occupation, firm, and job title fixed effects.
Chinese Data
The two new Chinese data sources used are job boards serving the city of Xiamen. In part because Xiamen was one of the five economic zones established immediately after China’s 1979 economic reforms, it is highly modernized relative to other Chinese cities, with an economy based on electronics, machinery and chemical engineering. One of these job boards, XMZYJS (the Xia-Zhang-Quan city public job board) is operated directly by government employees of the local labor bureau. Like state-operated Job Centers in the U.S., XMZYJS has a history as a brick-and-mortar employment service. XMZYJS’s mandate is to serve the less-skilled portion of the area’s labor market, and operates purely as a jobposting service: workers cannot post resumes or apply to jobs on the site. In fact, while XMZYJS now posts all its job ads online, many of these ads are viewed in XMZYJS‘s offices by workers who visit in person. This is done both on individual computer terminals and on a large electronic wall display. Applications are made by calling the company that placed the ad or by coming to a specific window on XMZYJS’s premises that has been reserved by the employer at a posted date and time.
The second Xiamen-based job board, XMRC , is a for-profit, privately-operated company that is sponsored by the local government. Its mandate is to serve the market for skilled workers in the Xiamen metropolitan area. XMRC operates like a typical U.S. job board: both job ads and resumes are posted online, workers can submit applications to specific jobs via the site, and firms can contact individual workers through the site as well.
By design, XMZYJS aggregates job postings from all local and specialized job boards for less-skilled workers in the metropolitan area, and XMRC is the main job board for skilled workers in the area. While there is potentially some cross-posting of job ads across the two sites, descriptive statistics on the types of jobs on offer suggest the sites do, indeed, serve very different populations. Like all our data sets, XMZYJS and XMRC serve private sector employers almost exclusively. Recruiting for public sector jobs, and most recruiting for State-Owned-Enterprises (SOEs) takes place via a different process.
The third Chinese database represents Zhaopin as the third-largest Internet job board in China; it operates nationally and serves workers who on average are considerably more skilled than even those on XMRC. This sample is based on all unique ads posted in four five-week observation periods in 2008-2010. In contrast to XMRC and XMZYJS where the data were supplied by the job boards, the Zhaopin data were collected by a web crawler. The sample is based on all unique ads posted in four five-week observation periods in 2008-2010. The Chinese data have 141,188, 39,727, and 1,051,038 ads in the XMZYJS, XMRC and Zhaopin samples respectively.
Mexican Data
The Mexican data allows to ascertain whether main results extend to a nation with different economic conditions, labor market institutions and culture. The Mexican data is a sample of job ads posted on Computrabajo. Of the new data sets explored, the Computrabajo data are most similar to Zhaopin in the sense that they come from a national online site that disproportionately serves highly skilled workers. To construct an analysis sample from the Computrabajo website, the authors collected advertisements daily for approximately 18 months between early 2011 and mid-2012 using a web crawler. Both the standardized fields and the open text portions of each ad were parsed to extract variables for the analysis. Computrabajo analysis sample contains 90,487 ads
G²LM|LIC - COVID-19 Returned Indian Migrant Panel
No full textOn March 24, 2020, the Indian Government announced a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19, effective with a few hours of notice. For an estimated 40 million migrant workers in the country, this resulted in loss of income, food shortages, and uncertainty about the future. Over 10 million returned to rural homes in one of the largest internal migrations in the country's history. Once returned, they faced stays in government-run quarantine centers, stigma, and uncertain labor prospects. Over the next year, migrants navigated shifting mobility restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of the pandemic, widespread outbreaks, and patchwork of social protection schemes in order to make ends meet.
In order to understand the long-term labor and well-being effects of the pandemic on this population, the research team conducted a panel survey across four rounds with a random sample of 8,265 migrants that had returned to Bihar and Chhattisgarh shortly after the nationwide lockdown in March 2020. The team constructed a post-lockdown sample frame drawing from the approximate population of returned migrants, drawing from government records that attempted to catalogue all entrants in a given time period. These phone surveys included a repeated set of questions on employment and earnings, migration, access to social protections, and coping strategies, as well as single-wave modules on quarantine experiences, health behaviors and beliefs, household composition, migration networks, and discrimination.
The questionnaires focused on different aspects of welfare as the pandemic in India has evolved. The following list below details important topics of the surveys:
Pre-Lockdown Work Details (Employment, Earnings)
Experiences Post-Migration (Harassment, Food Prices, Shortages, Bank Accounts)
Awareness and Perceptions of COVID-19
Migration Networks
Social Networks
Political Participation
Impact of COVID-19
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