Best Paper Award: `The findings could have a real impact´
NHH PhD candidate Pallavi Prabhakar has won the Best Paper Award for a doctoral student at the annual Economists´ meeting: `I am surprised and very happy!´
What shapes Careers? Firms, Policies and the Workplace
A workshop in Oslo this week gathered researchers to present new findings on how firm policies, family support and labour market institutions shape people’s careers.
The event brought together scholars using German and Norwegian register data to understand how family policy, workplace practices and firm decisions affect workers over time.
These rich, long-run datasets make it possible to trace people’s careers across jobs, firms and policy reforms — offering insights difficult to obtain elsewhere.
Similiar questions
`Our aim is to build a long-term research community around these data, ´ says Astrid Kunze.
She is a Professor at the Department of Economics at NHH and head of the project Equality in Firms (EquiFirm 2021–2027). At the conference, she presented her discussion paper Parental Leave from the Firm’s Perspective.
Workshop:
The workshop is jointly organized by Astrid Kunze (NHH), Dana Müller (Institute for Employment Research, IAB), Arvid Raknerud (Statistics Norway) and Thor O. Thoresen (Statistics Norway/Norwegian Fiscal Studies, University of Oslo).
`There is clear value in combining methodological expertise across institutions. This workshop shows how much we gain from looking at similar questions in different national contexts, she says.
More than 20 researchers presented new work on labour markets, family policy and workplace technologies, highlighting the different strengths of Norwegian and German register data and how institutional differences between Germany and Norway create opportunities for comparative research.
`By bringing together researchers working on comparable data in Germany and Norway, we learn from each other’s institutional differences and similarities, and the strengths and opportunities of register data. ´
Shortage of childcare places
The programme opened with a keynote by Anna Raute (Queen Mary University), who examined how firm policies can reduce gender inequality. In Germany, nearly half of parents want a childcare place, yet only one-third of under-three year olds are enrolled.
The shortage has pushed firms to offer employer-provided childcare as a recruitment and retention tool.
The effects are clear: mothers with access to firm-based childcare are more likely to return to work, and the child penalty falls by more than ten percent for high-wage mothers. These firms also attract more skilled women.
Uncertainty in the Green Transition
On Wednesday 3 December Ingrid Emilie Flessum Ringstad will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Raute’s talk set the tone for a series of presentations on how workplace practices influence early careers, job mobility, and long-term outcomes:
Day 1: Networks, child penalties and parental leave
The first session included research on:
- student-job networks and labour market entry (Friederike Hertweck, RWI)
- coworker exposure to the child penalty (Arnim Seidlitz, IAB)
- gender differences in remote-work sorting (Chiara Bernardi, Queen Mary University)
See also Astrid Kunze´s paper Expansions in paid parental leave and mothers’ economic progress Expansions in paid parental leave and mothers’ economic progress, published in European Economic Review in 2024. Here, Kunze and coauthors investigate the impact of reforms extending paid parental leave on mothers’ progress to the upper echelons of their companies.
A second session turned to firms’ adjustments, pay structures and internal labour markets, with presentations by Mirjam Wetzel and Maria Forthun Hoen (ISF). Kunze presented her own work on parental leave from the firm’s long-term perspective.
The day ended with a joint data session led by Dana Müller (IAB) and Lasse Eika (Statistics Norway), giving participants practical insight into the German and Norwegian register systems. Junior and senior researchers actively participated in this rare occasion to exchange access and usage of merged register data with the data producers.
Day 2: Job ads, cities and household taxation
The second day opened with a keynote by Manudeep Bhuller (University of Oslo) on what job ads reveal about both pay and non-pay attributes — a growing area of interest as digital recruitment expands.
Further presentations included:
- assortative matching in cities (Stefan Leknes, SSB/NTNU)
- cash-and-care policies and child poverty (Thor O. Thoresen, UiO)
- spillover effects of childcare on firms (Yushao Ye, NHH)
- wage transparency and wage setting (Trine Engh Vattø, SSB)
- household taxation and gender norms (Elena Herold, ifo)
- long-run labour outcomes for employees working from home (Maike Steffen, TU Dresden/IAB)
About time
On Friday November 28th Simen Bø will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.