Research Data Center of IZA (IDSC)
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G2LM|LIC – Impacts of Labeling Remittances on Migrants and their Households in the Philippines
No full textThe study seeks to support the Philippine COVID-19 response by quantifying the role of international migrant remittances in helping households cope with the pandemic’s economic consequences. To investigate how pandemic closures and restrictions affect migrants’ income and remittances, researchers built on a previous study to conduct
two rounds of phone surveys between Filipino migrants in the UAE and their families in the Philippines to answer the following questions:
1. Risk‐coping role of remittances: How do migrant remittances respond to COVID‐19‐induced negative shocks in migrant‐origin households
2. Impact of migrant shocks on risk‐coping: Is the risk‐coping role of remittances (empirical relationship #1 above) attenuated when migrants themselves experience COVID‐19‐induced negative shocks?
3. Impact of labeled remittances: How does having an ability to label remittances with the migrant’s intended use affect the risk‐coping role of remittances, and the impact of migrant shocks on risk coping (empirical relationships #1 and #2 above)?
This project has a strong gender component, contributing to G2LM|LIC objectives. 74% of our migrant study participants are female, working as domestic helpers and in-service industries
G²LM|LIC- Women’s Well-Being During a Pandemic and its Containment
No full textData is based on a phone survey of 1,545 rural Indian households collected in August 2020 in 20 districts across 6 states (Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra) in Northern India in August 2020. Households participated in a 20–30 min survey with two parts, a household head module and a female respondent module. In the household head module the household head surveyed about the household’s socioeconomic conditions, household head’s income, the male and female heads’ nutrition, and the number of days the respondent wished for more food for themselves or their children. The nutrition questions were taken from the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) 2015–16, allowing to use the pre-pandemic responses to the survey from the same district to benchmark nutritional outcomes.
After the head module, if the head was male, the head was asked to pass the phone to a female household member (typically the female household head). The female responded to an additional survey asking about her mental health and status within the household, as well as if this had changed since the pandemic. In cases where the respondent to the head module was female, the same respondent answered the female survey. Altogether, this allowed the female module to be conducted with 573 women. To ascertain information on women’s mental health, a selection of questions from the PHQ9 depression diagnostic scale and the GAD7 anxiety scale was asked.
For a subset of questions, respondents’ were asked if outcomes have changed due to the pandemic. For example, for each of the mental health questions above (as well as the safety question), respondents were asked a follow-up question about whether their experiences have improved, worsened, or stayed the same since the pandemic. Measuring changes in these outcomes, enables to both assess the aggregate effects of the pandemic and measure the relationship between lockdowns and outcome variables, accounting for pre-pandemic differences across individuals.
Additional data on case rates/deaths
The phone survey data were supplemented with additional district level data on COVID-19 cases and deaths between the start of the pandemic and the time of the survey. Also hospitalization data from HMIS were used
The Broken Chain: Evidence Against Emotionally Driven Upstream Indirect Reciprocity
No full textPsychologists claim that being treated kindly puts individuals in a positive emotional state: they then treat an unrelated third party more kindly. Numerous experiments document that subjects indeed ‘pay forward’ specific behavior. For example, they are less generous after having experienced stinginess. This, however, is not necessarily driven by emotions. Subjects may also imitate what they regard as socially adequate behavior. Here, I present an experiment in which imitation is not possible at the next opportunity to act with a stranger: after being given either a fun or an annoying job, subjects have to decide whether to be generous or not. I find that although subjects who are given the annoying job report more negative emotions than those with the fun job, they do not treat an unrelated third person more unkindly in terms of passing on less money.
Hypotheses: The objective of the study was to see whether people donate less money to an uninvolved bystander after having been assigned an annoying job (encryptor=1) rather than a fun job (encryptor=0). As a manipulation check, Happiness is recorded at various moments during the experiment using a Manikin-scale.
Measurement Instruments: Subjects gave answers via a computer interface in a laboratory. Donation choices were paid out accordingly.
Data Collection Method: Data Collection in the presence of an experimenter
Group Administration
Computer-Supported</li
G²LM|LIC - Reducing Extreme Poverty through Skill Training for Industry Job Placement
No full textThe experimental intervention of this study was inspired by the Department for International Development (DFID)-funded training program conducted in the Northern Bangladesh by Gana Unnayan Kendra (GUK).
By employing randomized controlled trial (RCT) technique, this study addresses which component of a successful training program helps individuals find and secure jobs in the manufacturing sector in general and RMG sector in particular. The researchers provided four different variations of job-related interventions randomly to eligible participants which are the following:
Day-long job-related information session,
One-month long residential skill training,
Month-long residential training with financial stipend for migration and forgone income and,
Same as 3. with one month paid internship (on-the-job training) in a factory located in the capital city (Full treatment).
The interventions were conducted with an active collaboration with a local NGO (GUK) in the north-eastern part (Gaibandha) of Bangladesh, one of the poverty stricken areas of Bangladesh. To select the sample for this experiment, a short survey to recruit eligible participants (eligibility requires that the prospective participant is interested in training if offered an opportunity) from a large population on the basis of age, education and poverty status was conducted.
After having the list of eligible participants for the study, each participant was randomly assigned to either a control group or to receive one of the interventions from the above mentioned four treatments. Before the randomization, a baseline study has been conducted to collect detailed information about the participants and their households. Six months after receiving the intervention, the participants were surveyed again over the phone for a short follow-up survey. A detailed panel survey of each participant was done after one year of the intervention. A second follow-up survey of the participants was done 18 months after the intervention. To track the participants for the purpose of the survey, each participant was given a mobile-phone connection and airtime topup incentive as a reward for participating in each of theses surveys.<br
G²LM|LIC - Nairobi Women’s Labor Market Panel Data
No full textThe project conducted a randomized evaluation of two labor market interventions between 2013 and 2017 targeted to 905 young women aged 18 to 19 in three of Nairobi’s poorest neighborhoods, Baba Dogo, Dandora, and Lunga-Lunga. Applicants to the program were stratified by neighborhood and application date and then randomly assigned to one of three treatment arms: a franchise treatment, a cash grant treatment, and a control group. This design allows to estimate the impact of the franchise and grant treatments on those invited to the program, and to compare the impacts of the cash grant treatment — which relaxes the credit constraint but provides no other training or support — to a multifaceted program designed to address many of the obstacles to youth entrepreneurship simultaneously.
Franchise Treatment: The first intervention, the Girls Empowered by Micro-franchise (GEM) program, was designed and implemented by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The GEM program helped out-of-school teens launch branded franchise businesses to two well-known Kenyan brands – either salons featuring “Darling” brand hair products or mobile food carts selling “Kenchic” chicken – through a package business and life skills training, franchise-specific training, start-up capital (in the form of the specific physical capital/ business inputs required to start the franchise), and ongoing business mentoring.
Cash Grant Treatment: The second intervention was implemented by the research team and consisted of an unconditional cash grant disbursed to randomly selected applicants to the GEM program. The cash grant program, implemented by IPA, provided unconditional cash grants of 20,000 Kenyan shillings (approximately 230 US dollars in 2013). The program included an initial meeting, where women assigned to the cash arm learned about the program, and a follow-up meeting within one week where the grant was distributed with no training or other support. Women were not encouraged to use their grant in any particular way.
The project draws on three main sources of data. First, a brief baseline survey to all eligible applicants prior to randomization was administered. Also a midline survey 7 to 10 months after the end of the intervention was conducted. The midline surveys were conducted via phone. The midline included detailed questions about income-generating activities, but did not ask about a broader range of outcomes (this was not feasible in a short phone interview).
Also an extremely brief phone survey 2 to 5 months after the intervention was conducted, but did not ask about income-generating activities at that time. The goal of that survey was to collect better contact information than had been gathered at baseline (not in the data). A more comprehensive endline survey was conducted 14–22 months after the end of the intervention. Attrition rates are extremely low in both the midline and the endline surveys: 94.0 percent of the baseline sample at midline and 92.5 percent of the baseline sample at endline
G²LM|LIC - Tracking the Value of Time of Informal Sector Workers During and Post-Curfew in Nairobi
No full textPoverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal field experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of working mothers, a population who is especially likely to experience severe time poverty. Participants received vouchers for services designed to reduce their burden of unpaid labor. We compared the effect of these vouchers against equivalently valued unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) and a neutral control condition.
Participants completed a detailed survey. As part of this survey, they provided contact information and then they completed a series of subjective well-being measures from prior research. Specifically, participants answered questions about their overall subjective well-being and their positive and negative emotions. Participants then completed demographic items including their gender, age, marital status, whether they were currently living with their partner, or were the head of the household. They also reported on the highest level of formal education they had completed, the number of children they had living at home, their current childcare status, and they answered a series of income questions including how many people they financially supported, how many people relied on their income.
Third, they answered a series of employment questions including whether they currently worked for pay, how many jobs they worked, what kinds of jobs they worked in, how much money they earned per month, how their earnings and employment status had changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether they were currently looking for new employment opportunities and why.
Fourth, respondents answered questions about the earnings of their household members and the amount of savings and debt that they had, and how these estimates had changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants also reported how many hours they spent on unpaid labor in the past 7 days, and whether they had experienced any of the negative impacts of COVID-19 for their own health and their concerns with COVID-19 exposure.
Participants also reported how valuable they felt their time was on a series of different measures. Lastly, participants reported how much money they expected to earn in the next six months as well as their predictions for their expenses over the next 6 months
WageIndicator Survey of Living and Working in Coronavirus Times
No full textWageIndicator is interviewing people around the world to discover what makes the Coronavirus lockdown easier (or tougher), and what is the COVID-19 effect on our jobs, lives and mood.
WageIndicator shows coronavirus-induced changes in living and working conditions in over 110 countries on the basis of answers on the following questions among others in the Corona survey:
Is your work affected by the corona crisis?
Are precautionary measures taken at the workplace?
Do you have to work from home?
Has your workload increased/decreased?
Have you lost your job/work/assignments?
The survey contains questions about the home situation of respondents as well as about the possible manifestation of the corona disease in members of the household. Also the effect of having a pet in the house in corona-crisis times is included
What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?
No full textWhen employers’ explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women’s (men’s) share of call-backs to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 62 (146) percent. The removal ‘worked’ in this sense because it generated a large increase in gender-mismatched applications, and because those applications were treated surprisingly well by employers, suggesting that employers’ gender requests often represented relatively weak preferences or outdated stereotypes. The job titles that were integrated by the ban, however, were not the most gendered ones, and were disproportionately lower-wage jobs.
The data here is provided by a Xiamen-based job board, XMRC. Two samples are used, the main analysis sample and the DiD sample. To construction of the main analysis sample started with the universe of applications that were made on XMRC between January 1, 2018 and October 25, 2019, and the corresponding ads. Only the following job ads were retained:
Job ads that received at least one application both before and after the ad ban (March 1, 2019), and
Applications to those ads that were made between August 3,1 2018 and August 29, 2019.
This results in a sample of 52 complete weeks (26 before and 26 after the ban), in which the first post-ban week begins on Friday March 1, 2019 -- the first day of the ban. This ends with a wide window (almost two years) to make sure that all the job ads that ‘straddled’ the ban were captured. Then only the ads that actually straddled the ban (received at least one application before and after it) were retained. Finally, the analysis sample comprises all applications to those ads that occurred during a one-year window surrounding the ban.
To allow comparison of changes on XMRC around the ban with changes in 2018, also a DiD sample was created. To do so, the main estimation sample was replicated -- which comprises applications that were made between September 2018 and August 2019 -- on two different periods: January -- August 2018 and January-August 2019. The latter period contains the date on which the 2019 ban occurred, and the former contains the date on which it would have occurred in 2018. Unfortunately, these two periods cannot be designed to exactly mimic the main analysis sample because no XMRC data from 2017 are available. While this restricts the length of the pre-ban period in both years to just two months, it allows to compare trends in the main outcomes between 2018 and 2019 on both sides of the ban date. This sample was used to conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of the ban’s effect -- which uses equivalent days or weeks from 2018 as controls for 2019 -- as a robustness check of the main results. Notably, since important events affecting China’s labor market -- especially the Spring Festival -- are determined by the lunar calendar, this new DiD sample requires to line up days and weeks between 2018 and 2019 to that they represent the same days and weeks relative to the start of the Spring Festival in both years.
The primary dataset comprises 3,130,317 applications made by 204,343 workers (resumes) to 116,725 ads, placed by 15,437 firms, resulting in 348,062 call-backs
IZA Evaluation Dataset Survey
No full textThe IZA Evaluation Dataset Survey (IZA ED) was developed in order to obtain reliable longitudinal estimates for the impact of Active Labor Market Policies (ALMP). Moreover, it is suitable for studying the processes of job search and labor market reintegration. The data allow analyzing dynamics with respect to a rich set of individual and labor market characteristics. It covers the initial period of unemployment as well as long-term outcomes, for a total period of up to 3 years after unemployment entry.
A longitudinal questionnaire records monthly labor market activities and their duration in detail for the mentioned period. These activities are, for example, employment, unemployment, ALMP, other training etc. Available information covers employment status, occupation, sector, and related earnings, hours, unemployment benefits or other transfer payments.
A cross-sectional questionnaire contains all basic information including the process of entering into unemployment, and demographics. The entry into unemployment describes detailed job search behavior such as search intensity, search channels and the role of the Employment Agency. Moreover, reservation wages and individual expectations about leaving unemployment or participating in ALMP programs are recorded.
The available demographic information covers employment status, occupation and sector, as well as specifics about citizenship and ethnic background, educational levels, number and age of children, household structure and income, family background, health status, and workplace as well as place of residence regions. The survey provides as well detailed information about the treatment by the unemployment insurance authorities, imposed labor market policies, benefit receipt and sanctions.
The survey focuses additionally on individual characteristics and behavior. Such co-variates of individuals comprise social networks, ethnic and migration background, relations and identity, personality traits, cognitive and non-cognitive skills, life and job satisfaction, risky behavior, attitudes and preferences.
The main advantages of the IZA ED are the large sample size of unemployed individuals, the accuracy of employment histories, the innovative and rich set of individual co-variates and the fact that the survey measures important characteristics shortly after entry into unemployment
Work Situation and Stress Perception of Dependent Employees in the Year 2021 Marked by the Corona Pandemic
No full textAgainst the background of COVID-19 and various measures to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, the German Federal Ministry for Labor and Social Affairs (BMAS) has commissioned the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) to document the work situation and stress levels of dependent employees during 2021. To achieve this goal, a total of nine monthly cross-sectional surveys, designed to be representative, were conducted between February and September 2021. In each survey, around 1,000 dependent employees aged 18 to 64 were interviewed by forsa Politik- und Sozialforschung GmbH (forsa).
More precisely, individuals initially identified within the context of forsa’s population-representative daily multi-topic survey, who had expressed their willingness to participate in subsequent interviews, were contacted again and surveyed through computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI). The realized sample size, around 1,000 participants in each survey, has become a standard for representative surveys in Germany. Furthermore, respondents were chosen through a systematic random approach, ensuring equal statistical inclusion chances for all individuals in Germany with a household telephone connection. Both listed and unlisted telephone numbers were considered. Additionally, a dual-frame approach was employed, incorporating a substantial number of mobile phone numbers. The basic requirements for the representativeness of the survey results are therefore met.
In terms of content, the survey centered around topics such as remote work during the pandemic, alterations in work circumstances due to the Corona Occupational Health and Safety Regulation, employees' perceived risk of infection at their workplaces, COVID-19 testing availability provided by employers, and the general perception of stress amid the pandemic. Many of the survey questions were asked repeatedly in an identical manner, allowing for a comparison over time.
No dates are included in the datasets as variables. Therefore, the following table illustrates the timing and achieved sample sizes of the surveys.
<img src="https://www.iza.org/wc/dataverse/izarr.126.1.jpg" alt="Table 1"/