Demographic change is leaving its mark on labor markets, with the workforce getting older and many experienced workers moving into retirement. Companies are urgently hunting for young talent to replace them, and yet the youth employment rate remains high in many countries.
In her project entitled “Entry-Level Hiring in Tightening Labor Markets: Frictions, Firm Heterogeneity and Public Policy” (ENTRYHIRE), which is being funded by the European Research Council (ERC), Assistant Professor Amelie Schiprowski studies how firms hire and train entry-level employees in the face of tightening labor markets. “We need a sound empirical understanding of entry-level labor markets to find effective answers to this phenomenon,” explains the economist.
“I will analyze how demographic change is altering the ‘matching process’ between young workers and firms,“ Schiprowski explains. What factors are complicating this process? What is the impact of labor market policy? By finding answers to these questions, Schiprowski is hoping to furnish an evidence base for public policy interventions that will improve the matching between young talent and companies. She is focusing primarily on the German training and apprenticeship market, which serves as an empirical “laboratory” for analyzing entry-level labor markets.
The ERC will be funding her project to the tune of some €1.5 million in funding over five years. Assistant Professor Schiprowski is extremely pleased with her funding: “The grant will give me the financial resources and the time I need to build a rich data base together with a team of postdocs and doctoral students, and thus answer novel research questions.”
Amelie Schiprowski studied economics at Sciences Po and École Polytechnique in Paris before going on to obtain her doctorate from the University of Potsdam in 2018. Since 2019, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bonn’s Department of Economics. Amelie Schiprowski is a member of the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne as well as the Individuals and Societies Transdisciplinary Research Area at the University of Bonn. She is also principal investigator in the “Economic Perspectives on Societal Challenges: Equality of Opportunity, Market Regulation, and Financial Stability” Collaborative Research Center, a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Mannheim. In 2020, she was awarded the Joachim Herz Award in Economics.