Uschi Backes-Gellner

University of Zurich | UZH · Department of Business Administration - IBW

Given the increase in global refugee and migration flows and the severe labor shortages in host countries, actively helping refugees enter the labor market constitutes a critical need. Targeted training programs for refugees can potentially improve labor market and social integration. Using a quasi-experimental approach, we investigate a comprehens...

Purpose Our study explores the effects of immigration on the employment of native middle-skilled workers, focusing on how this effect varies with the specificity of their occupational skill bundles. Design/methodology/approach Exploiting the 2002 opening of the Swiss labor market to EU workers and using register data on the location and occupation...

Background: Despite worldwide expansion of higher education, the impact of higher education institutions on local economic activity is still poorly understood. We analyze the local economic effects of branch campus openings in Tennessee and Texas, two states representative of the underlying U.S. enrollment patterns. To overcome the lack of adequate...

Plain English Summary Universities of applied sciences (UASs) foster regional firm location but not for all fields of study or industries. Most gains stem from UASs in Chemistry & Life Sciences or Business, Management & Services and emerge mainly in service industries. UASs as knowledge suppliers provide regional firms as knowledge consumers with r...

Young immigrants who often lack country-specific human capital face greater challenges in the transition from education to the labor market (e.g., lower employment probabilities, longer unemployment spells) than native adolescents. This paper analyzes the importance, for a successful transition, of occupational skills and workplace-based cultural s...

This paper examines the relation between the nature of updates in training curricula and graduates’ skills and wages. Using vocational education and training (VET) curriculum texts as data, we apply natural language processing methods to identify the nature of changes in curriculum updates based on before-after comparisons of the skills the curricu...

Workers’ occupational skill sets play a crucial role in successfully handling digital transformation. We investigate whether and how different types of occupational skill sets benefit from digital transformation. We theoretically and empirically analyze wage returns of workers in occupations with more or less specialized skill sets and with more or...

By exploiting a labor market reform causing an outflow of German workers to Switzerland, we examine the effect of negative labor supply shocks on training in firms using the market for apprenticeships as an example. Analysis of administrative data reveals that the reform led to more apprentices in German firms despite a decrease in apprentice wages...

Zusammenfassung Länder mit einer starken Betonung der beruflichen Bildung in ihren Bildungs- und Innovationssystemen, beispielsweise Deutschland und die Schweiz, zählen seit Jahren zu den innovativsten der Welt. Gleichzeitig konstatiert internationale Innovationsforschung, dass ein hoher Akademisierungsgrad (und damit gerade nicht die berufliche Bi...

We analyze the relationship between social gender norms and adolescents' occupational choices by combining regional votes on constitutional amendments on gender equality with job application data from a large job board for apprenticeships. The results show that adolescent males in regions with stronger traditional social gender norms are more likel...

This paper develops a novel procedure for proxying economic activity with daytime satellite imagery across time periods and spatial units, for which reliable data on economic activity are otherwise not available. In developing this unique proxy, we apply machine-learning techniques to a historical time series of daytime satellite imagery dating bac...

This paper examines how workers’ earnings change after involuntary job separations depending on the workers’ acquired IT skills and the specificity of their occupational training. We categorize workers’ occupational skill bundles along two independent dimensions. First, we distinguish between skill bundles that are more specific or less specific co...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate self-competence—the ability to act responsibly on one’s own—and likely nonlinear wage returns across different levels of self-competence as part of training curricula. Design/methodology/approach: The authors identify the teaching of self-competence at the occupational level by applying machine-l...

This paper examines the role of lifelong learning in counteracting skill depreciation and obsolescence. We differentiate between occupations with more hard skills versus more soft skills and draw on representative job advertisement data that contain machine‐learning categorized skill requirements and cover the Swiss job market in great detail acros...

In an environment of accelerating technological change and increasing digitalization, firms need to adopt new technologies faster than ever before to stay competitive. This paper examines whether updates of education curricula help to bring new technologies faster into firms’ workplaces. We study technology changes and curriculum updates from an ea...

We use vocational training curricula to investigate how IT skills are trained within broader skills packages and how these relate to labour market outcomes. Skills packages are the typical combinations of IT skills (e.g., CNC) and technical or nontechnical skills (e.g., material sciences or work safety) that are jointly required in the real world a...

Auf Mint-Fächer ausgerichtete Fachhochschulen wirken sich positiv auf die Gewinne der Unternehmen in ihrem regionalen Umfeld aus. Insbesondere forschungsintensive Firmen der IT-, der Elektrotechnik- und der Pharmabranche profitieren.

Workers’ occupational skill sets play a crucial role in successfully handling digital transformation. We investigate whether and how different types of occupational skill sets benefit from digital transformation. We theoretically and empirically analyze wage returns of workers in occupations with more or less specialized skill sets and with more or...

This study investigates the impact of a tertiary education expansion on regional firm development, as measured by average profits per firm. We exploit the quasi-random establishment of universities of applied sciences (UASs)-bachelor's degree-granting three-year colleges teaching and conducting applied research-to construct treatment and control gr...

The literature on the economics of science and technology shows that academic universities—institutions focusing on basic research—positively affect innovation activities in regional economies. Less is known about the innovation effects of universities of applied sciences (UASs)—bachelor-granting three-year colleges teaching and conducting applied...

This paper examines the role of lifelong learning in counteracting skill depreciation and obsolescence. We build on findings showing that different skill types have structurally different depreciation rates. We differentiate between occupations with more hard skills versus more soft skills. To do so, we draw on representative job advertisement data...

This study analyzes the impact of a tertiary education expansion on regional firm development---measured by average profits per firm---using administrative tax data at the municipality level. A policy change in Switzerland, leading to a quasi-random establishment of universities of applied sciences (UAS)---bachelor’s degree-granting three-year coll...

We analyze the relationship between social gender norms and adolescents’ occupational choices by combining regional votes on constitutional amendments on gender equality with job application data from a large job board for apprenticeships. Results show that adolescent males in regions with stronger traditional social gender norms are more likely to...

The literature on the economics of science and technology shows that academic universities— institutions focusing on basic research—positively affect innovation activities in regional econo- mies. Less is known about the innovation effects of universities of applied sciences (UASs)— bachelor-granting three-year colleges teaching and conducting appl...

Despite the common view that innovation requires academically educated workers, some countries that strongly emphasize vocational education and training (VET) in their education systems—such as Switzerland and Germany—are highly competitive internationally in terms of innovation. These countries have dual VET programs, that is, upper-secondary-leve...

This paper contributes to the literature on non-monetary benefits of Vocational Education and Training (VET) by investigating its influence on a firm’s innovation process. While an increasing number of studies finds positive effects of VET on innovation in firms, the role that apprentices play in this mechanism has largely been unexplored. To analy...

We analyze how preferences for STEM fields moderate the effect of classroom gender composition on the math grades of girls in high school. Using data from Switzerland, we compare students who have self-selected into a STEM specialization with students who have self-selected into a language specialization. Our identification exploits the random assi...

This study analyzes how worker pay is related to educational diversity, i.e., diversity in the educational composition of work groups in terms of the different types of vocational and academic education. As previous research shows that various types of diversity have positive effects in the workplace, a positive effect due to ‘educational diversity...

We analyze how preferences for STEM fields moderate the effect of classroom gender composition on the math grades of girls in high school. Using data from Switzerland, we compare students who have self-selected into a STEM specialization with students who have self-selected into a language specialization. Our identification exploits the random assi...

We examine whether firms increase their employment of R&D personnel in response to an expansion of tertiary education institutions, i.e., a supply shock of skilled labor. We use the staggered introduction of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs) in Switzerland as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects. Firms located near a new UAS...

This paper examines how workers’ earnings change after involuntary job separations depending on the workers’ acquired IT skills and the specificity of their occupational training. We categorize workers’ occupational skill bundles along two independent dimensions. First, we distinguish between skill bundles that are more specific or less specific co...

This paper develops a novel procedure for proxying economic activity with daytime satellite imagery across time periods and spatial units, for which reliable data on economic activity are otherwise not available. In developing this unique proxy, we apply machine-learning techniques to a historical time series of daytime satellite imagery dating bac...

Female leaders continue to face bias in the workplace compared to male leaders. When employees are evaluated differently because of who they are rather than how they perform, an ethical dilemma arises for leaders and organizations. Thus, bridging role congruity and social identity leadership theories, we propose that gender biases in leadership eva...

The new training literature views regulated labour markets as critical for firms’ willingness to participate in apprenticeship training. These regulations allow training firms to retain their apprenticeship graduates at the end of the training period and recoup training costs. Yet, in spite of an only loosely regulated labour market, many Swiss fir...

This book provides an overview of selected research results on the economics and governance of Vocational and Professional Education and Training (VPET), particularly apprenticeship training. It compiles over 25 research articles published in leading peer-reviewed journals, places their results in a broader context — thereby making them accessible...

We analyse the regional innovation effect of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs)—bachelor-granting three-year colleges teaching and conducting applied research—and whether their embeddedness in the diverse landscape of research institutions in Germany creates knowledge complementarities. To account for endogeneity, we apply fixed effects estima...

We study the role of occupational skills for labour market transitions after layoffs. Drawing on Lazear’s skill-weights approach, we develop empirical measures for occupational specificity and the skill distance between occupations to investigate how skills map into job mobility and wages. Our analysis reveals several important insights. First, hig...

Previous studies typically relate apprenticeship training or more generally ‘Vocational Education and Training’ (VET) to training that is highly specific and that uses well-established technologies. Accordingly, apprenticeship training is typically not expected to have positive effects on innovation. In contrast, we argue in this paper that the typ...

We study the causal effects of negative and positive demand shocks on the returns to specific skills by using variation from international trade shocks. To measure specific skills, we use task information from an official data set for career guidance and merge this information with a large register data set. Our results show that negative demand sh...

Since the 1990s, research on publication outputs in business and economics has almost exclusively focused on journal articles. While earlier work has shown that journal articles and other publications were indeed complements in the 70s and 80s, we find that this is no longer the case when we include the most recent decades. Apparently, the notable...

Expatriation research has been intrigued by the question of how to prevent the unplanned return of expatriates to their home country. Although a majority of studies have focused on assigned expatriates (AEs), only recently have researchers expanded the scope of analysis by focusing on self-initiated expatriates (SIEs). For SIEs, research has identi...

We use vocational training curricula to investigate how IT skills are trained within broader skills packages and how these relate to labour market outcomes. Skills packages are the typical combinations of IT skills (e.g., CNC) and technical or nontechnical skills (e.g., material sciences or work safety) that are jointly required in the real world a...

Because the extent to which multinational companies (MNCs) benefit from foreign subsidiaries depends on how effectively MNCs manage their foreign subsidiaries’ workforce, the international management literature has long focused on how MNCs transfer Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. However, the literature has only vaguely dealt with instit...

Background: By applying the inventory theory to hiring skilled workers under uncertainty, the authors explain how firms decide on their optimum investment in an “inventory of skills.” This paper investigates the conditions under which firms are willing to make investments in a skilled workforce themselves rather than relying on skills produced with...

Youth apprenticeship is a major topic globally and in the United States, and Colorado’s current pilot youth apprenticeships—implemented by CareerWise Colorado in partnership with companies, schools, state leaders, and philanthropic partners—is the most compelling American initiative in this area. The two pilot cohorts already underway are anecdotal...

An extensive literature examines the effects of tertiary education expansion on wages of workers with and without tertiary degree. However, the question how tertiary education expansion affects the tasks of these workers remains unexplored. We examine whether such an expansion crowds out sophisticated tasks such as R&D in jobs of workers without te...

We examine how education expansions affect the job opportunities for workers with and without the new education. To identify causal effects, we exploit a quasi-random establishment of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs), bachelor-granting three-year colleges that teach and conduct applied research. By applying machine-learning methods to job ad...

Researchers in academia typically perform different tasks: research, teaching and services to the scientific community. We analyze the opportunity costs in terms of a potentially reduced publication productivity associated with becoming a dean in the German institutional setting where deans are non-professional expert-leaders who temporarily take t...

A series of seminal papers argues that poaching hampers company-sponsored general training. Empirically, however, the existence and extent of poaching remain open questions. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identify poaching. We find that only few apprenticeship training firms in Germany are ‘poaching victims’ or ‘poaching raiders’. Victims...

We use a unique longitudinal data set to study the development of non-cognitive skills in adolescence. We measure – for the first time – the development over six years of the recently introduced non-cognitive skill “Grit.” We also measure the traditional Big Five personality traits. For Grit, we find significant within-person mean-level increases o...

This paper contributes to the literature on non-monetary benefits of Vocational Education and Training (VET) by investigating its influence on a firm’s innovation process. While an increasing number of studies finds positive effects of VET on innovation in firms, the role that apprentices play in this mechanism has largely been unexplored. To analy...

Evidence suggests that acquiring human capital is related to better life outcomes, yet young peoples' decisions to invest in or stop acquiring human capital are still poorly understood. We investigate the role of time and reference-dependent preferences in such decisions. Using a data set that is unique in its combination of real-world observations...

This paper summarizes results of a project that tries to examine how the revision of vocational training (apprenticeship) curricula affects the training behavior and investment decision of training companies. The project paid particular attention to IT-related changes in curricula and firms' investments in IT and new production technology. Unfortun...

This paper proposes a new measurement for the specificity of occupations based on a content analysis of training curricula that we link to labor market demands. We apply Lazear's (2009) skill weights approach and test predictions on labor market outcomes derived from his theory. We find clear evidence of a trade-off between earning higher returns w...

We examine whether firms increase their employment of R&D personnel in response to an expansion of tertiary education institutions, i.e., a supply shock of skilled labor. We use the staggered introduction of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs) in Switzerland as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects. Firms located near a new UAS...

Eine der Stärken des deutschen Produktions- und Innovationsmodells ist eine spezifische Verbindung von im dualen Berufsausbildungssystem ausgebildeten Facharbeitern mit Absolventen aus dem Hochschulsystem vor allem aus natur- und ingenieurwissenschaftlichen Fachrichtungen (vgl. EFI 2014, S. 30 ff.). Diese Stärke des deutschen Innovationssystems wur...

Firms generate new knowledge that leads to innovations by recombining existing knowledge sources. A successful recombination depends on the availability of a knowledge stock (human capital pool) and the flow of knowledge within the firm (induced by HRM systems). While human resource theory expects complementarities between human capital pools and H...

The leadership literature shows consistent, sizeable, and persistent effects indicating that female leaders face significant biases in the workplace compared with male leaders. However, the social identity leadership literature suggests these biases might be overcome at the team level by adjusting the number of women in the team. Building on this w...