The Department of Social Policy and Labour Markets focuses on the following areas:
The methodological core competencies of the department include:
Striking the right balance between allocative efficiency and fair distribution is the central task of a policy that shapes the social protection system and the institutions of the labour markets. One of the major challenges for politics it to guarantee the unemployed the opportunity to find a new job while providing an appropriate minimum income. In its applied labour market research the department analyses and evaluates instruments to secure social protection of the minimum existence wage for individuals who are fit to work and thereby further develops insightful evaluation methods. In view of international experiences it also develops and compiles its own proposals for the social protection system, which can be realised by striking a new balance between incentives to work and income security for low-skilled workers. In its theoretical labour market research the department focuses primarily on friction and institutions in the labour market. It investigates the impact of friction and institutions on the rate of unemployment, the duration of unemployment, wage distribution and the formulation of staffing policy.
Social and family-policy measures are often discussed from a distributional policy point of view. However, in addition to the impact on the relative income situation of the beneficiaries, there are also implications in terms of job offers. In its research the department focuses on the effects of selected social and family policy instruments on job offers for parents. This involves analysing the impact of publicly subsidized child care on employment among mothers and on the incentives to work created by alternative treatments of families by income tax law: Its research also assesses parents’ reactions to employment offerings in the light of monetary benefits. Furthermore, the department looks at questions of demographic change with a view to describing the economic consequences of falling birth rates and an ageing population, and to outlining the resulting demands made of existing labour market and social policy.
Politicians are much more interested in direct causal relations than in correlations. They want to know how certain policy measures can have a casual impact on previously defined target variables. Another focus of the Labour Markets and Social Policy Department is therefore micro-econometric evaluation reports, whereby the causal effects of social, family and labour market policy measures are identified using quasi-experimental methods. This not only provides policy decision-makers with valuable information on the effects of policy measures, but the methods used to obtain this information are also at the cutting edge of empirical labour market research.
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