A new GLO Discussion Paper makes the case that the COVID-19 pandemic may cause a permanent reduction in innovation and entrepreneurship and may even bring the 4th industrial revolution to a premature end.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Industrialization is vital for inclusive and sustainable global development. The two engines of industrialization – innovation and trade – are in danger of being compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, under conditions increasingly reminiscent of the medieval world. It comes at a time when innovation had already been stagnating under guild-like corporate concentration and dominance, and the multilateral trade system had been buckling under pressure from a return to mercantilist ideas. The COVID-19 pandemic may cause a permanent reduction in innovation and entrepreneurship and may even bring the 4th industrial revolution (4IR) to a premature end. Hence the post-COVID-19 world may be left with trade as the only engine for industrialization for the foreseeable future. If the global community fails to fix the multilateral trade system, the world may start to resemble the Middle Ages in other, even worse, aspects.
A new GLO Discussion Paperdocuments that in Africa both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity’s historical homeland and a theory-based instrumental variable approach, we find that regions crossed by historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. We uncover several key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity and weak property rights.
Featured image: Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash; Amboseli National Park Kenya
A new GLO Discussion Paperdemonstrates that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich ethnographic methods. Here, we demonstrate that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences. We employ publicly available data across nearly 60,000 topic dimensions drawn from two billion Facebook users across 225 countries and territories. We first validate that cultural distances calculated from this measurement instrument correspond to traditional survey-based and objective measures of cross-national cultural differences. We then demonstrate that this expanded measure enables rich insight into the cultural landscape globally at previously impossible resolution. We analyze the importance of national borders in shaping culture, explore unique cultural markers that identify subnational population groups, and compare subnational divisiveness to gender divisiveness across countries. The global collection of massive data on human behavior provides a high-dimensional complement to traditional cultural metrics. Further, the granularity of the measure presents enormous promise to advance scholars’ understanding of additional fundamental questions in the social sciences. The measure enables detailed investigation into the geopolitical stability of countries, social cleavages within both small and large-scale human groups, the integration of migrant populations, and the disaffection of certain population groups from the political process, among myriad other potential future applications.
A new GLO Discussion Paperfinds for European countries that school friendship networks arise according to homophily along many characteristics (gender, school achievement and ethnic and cultural backgrounds).
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: This paper investigates the determinants of school friendship networks among adolescents, proposing a model of network formation and estimating it using a sample (CILS4EU) of about 10,000 secondary school students in four countries: England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We test the idea that networks arise according to homophily along many characteristics (gender, school achievement and ethnic and cultural backgrounds), and assess the relative importance of each factor. In addition to gender, we find that country of origin, generational status and religion predict friendship for foreign-born students. For country-born individuals, ties depend on a broader set of factors, including socioeconomic status and school achievement. In sum, homophilic preferences go considerably beyond ethnicity. Multiculturalism, which gives prominence to ethnic backgrounds, risks emphasising the differences in that dimension at the expense of affinity in others.
A new GLO Discussion Papercarefully analyzes the components of the low female work participation in MENA countries and draws policy conclusions.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: This paper considers the female labor force participation (FLFP) behavior over the past decade in five MENA countries namely, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Tunisia. Low FLFP rates in these countries, as it is in other MENA countries, are well documented. We conduct synthetic panel analysis using age-period-cohort (APC) methodology and decompose FLFP rates into age, period and cohort effects. We present our results with Hanoch-Honig/Deaton-Paxson normalization and maximum entropy estimation approaches to the APC methodology in order to observe robustness of our results. We first study the aggregate FLFP and note the differentials in age, period and cohort effects across the countries we consider. The analysis is carried also out by rural/urban regional differentiation, marital status and educational attainment. Implications of our results for possible government policies to increase FLFP rates are discussed.
A new GLO Discussion Paper studies the short-term labor market effects of the Great Lockdown in the United States. It shows that jobs with a high non-routine content are especially well-protected, even if they are not teleworkable, and underlines the importance of their task content.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: I examine the short-term labor market effects of the Great Lockdown in the United States. I analyze job losses by task content (Acemoglu & Autor 2011), and show that they follow underlying trends; jobs with a high non-routine content are especially well-protected, even if they are not teleworkable. The importance of the task content, particularly for non-routine cognitive analytical tasks, is strong even after controlling for age, gender, race, education, sector and location (and hence for differential demand and supply shocks). Jobs subject to higher structural turnover rates are much more likely to be terminated, suggesting that easier-to-replace employees were at a particular disadvantage, even within sectors; at the same time, there is evidence of labor hoarding for more valuable matches. Individuals in low-skilled jobs fared comparatively better in industries with a high share of highskilled workers.
A new GLO Discussion Paperprovides evidence for the existence of social barriers to female migration.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Traditional gender norms can restrict independent migration by women, thus preventing them from taking advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. However, women may be able to circumvent such restrictions by using marriage to engage in long-distance migration – if they are able to match with migrating grooms. Guided by a theoretical model in which women make marriage and migration decisions jointly, we hypothesize that marriage and labor markets will be inextricably linked by the possibility of marital migration. To test our hypotheses, we use the event of the construction of a major bridge in Bangladesh – which dramatically reduced travel time between the economically deprived north-western region and the manufacturing belt located around the capital city Dhaka – as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in migration costs. Our empirical findings support our model’s main predictions and provide strong evidence for the existence of social barriers to female migration.
Interested researchers are cordially invited to submit their abstracts or papers for presentation consideration. The 34th EBES Conference – Athens/Greece will take place on January 6-8, 2021 co-organized with Department of Economics, School of Economics, Business and International Studies, University of Piraeus. (Online/Virtual Presentation Only)
This is aGLO supported event. EBESis theEurasia Business and Economics Society, a strategic partner and institutional supporter of GLO. GLO President Klaus F. Zimmermann is also President of EBES.
Invited Speakers
EBES is pleased to announce that distinguished colleagues Jonathan Batten, Douglas Cumming, Kevin Lang, Narjess Boubakri, Keun Lee, Wolfgang Kürsten, Christos Kollias, and Michael Chletsos will join the conference as the invited editors and/or the keynote speakers.
Jonathan Batten is professor of finance and CIMB-UUM Chair in Banking and Finance at the School of Economics, Finance and Banking at the University Utara Malaysia (Malaysia). Prior to this position, he worked at the Monash University (Australia), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong), and Seoul National University (Korea). He is a well-known academician who has published articles in many of the leading economics and finance journals and currently serves as the Editor of Emerging Markets Review (SSCI), Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money (SSCI), and Finance Research Letters (SSCI). He was also the President of EBES from July 2014 till December 2018. His current research interests include: financial market development and risk management; spread modelling arbitrage and market integration; and the investigation of the non-linear dynamics of financial prices.
Douglas Cumming, J.D., Ph.D., CFA, is the DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the Florida Atlantic University (USA). In his prior position, he was a Professor and the Ontario Research Chair at York University (Canada) and has also held visiting appointments at Essex Business School, Kobe University, and EMLyon, among others. He has published over 18 academic books and 150 articles in leading refereed academic journals in finance, management, and law and economics, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking &Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of International Business Studies and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. His papers were cited more than 17K (Google Scholar). He is currently serving in numerous academic journals: Review of Corporate Finance (Founding Editor-in-Chief), British Journal of Management (Managing Editor-in-Chief), Corporate Governance: An International Review (Co-Editor), European Journal of Finance (Assoc. Editor), Studies in Economics and Finance (Assoc. Editor), and Journal of Banking and Finance (Assoc. Editor). Previously, he was the Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Corporate Finance and Finance Research Letters and Co-Editor of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. His areas of expertise are crowdfunding, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds and law & finance. He earned both a law degree and a doctoral degree in Economics and Finance at the University of Toronto.
Kevin Lang is a professor in the Department of Economics at Boston University (USA), elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (University College, London), a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn) and a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University), and a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum. He served as a co-editor of Labour Economics, the Journal of the European Association of Labor Economists and remains as an associate editor. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Labor Economics. Prior to BU, he spent a year at the NBER as an Olin Foundation Fellow and before that was an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. He has also visited MIT as a visiting scholar and professor and spent his sabbatical at the Collegio Carlo Alberto (Italy), the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration. He has published many articles in top journals such as Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. His research interests are economics of labor markets and education, including such topics as discrimination, unemployment, the relation between education and earnings and the relation between housing prices, taxes and local services. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
Narjess Boubakri is professor of Finance at American University of Sharjah (AUS) (United Arab Emirates) where she joined in 2007. She is currently the Dean of the School of Business Administration at AUS as well. She has taught at Laval University and HEC Montreal School of Business (Canada). She has also several editorial roles at leading journals such as Editor (Finance Research Letters), Co-Editor (Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance), Associate Editor (Journal of Corporate Finance), and Subject Editor (Emerging Markets Review; Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions, and Money; and Journal of International Business Policy). Her papers were published in well-known journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Accounting Research. Her research has been widely cited (Google Scholar=6,000+). Her research areas are corporate governance, privatization, corporate finance, international finance, mergers and acquisitions, legal and political institutions, lobbying, and earnings management.
Keun Lee is a Professor of Economics at the Seoul National University (South Korea). He had also short-term positions at University of California, Davis (USA) and University of Aberdeen (UK). He was the winner of the 2014 Schumpeter Prize for his monograph on Schumpeterian Analysis of Economic Catch-up (2013 Cambridge Univ. Press). He is currently Editor of Research Policy, an associate editor of Industrial and Corporate Change, and a council member of the World Economic Forum since 2016. He served as the President of the International Schumpeter Society (2016-18), a member of the Committee for Development Policy of UN (2014-18). One of his most cited articles is a paper on Korea’s Technological Catch-up published in Research Policy, with 1.3K citations (Google Scholar). His research areas are economics of development, transition, and catch-up, economics of innovation, and corporate organization and growth, among others. He obtained Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley (USA).
Wolfgang Kürsten is a Full Professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany. Prior to his current role, he worked in many leading institutions such as the Catholic University of Eichst, Germany, the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and University of Hannover, Germany, among others. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Operations Research Spectrum – Quantitative Approaches in Management and the Managing Editor of Review of Managerial Science (SSCI). He also served as Co-Editor in Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft and Operations Research Spectrum-Quantitative Approaches in Management. He has published many articles in journals such as Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics and Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft. His research interests include investments, capital structure, and asymmetric information, optimal credit contracts under moral hazard, credit rationing, asset-liability-management of banks, hedging with derivatives, stock options, and management incentives, corporate finance and governance, risk measures and stochastic dominance, decisions under uncertainty, mergers and acquisitions and firm valuation.
Christos Kollias is a Professor of Applied Economics and Acting Dean at the University of Thessaly, Greece. In his career, he has published more than 100 papers and many edited volumes and books. His papers were published in many of the leading journals such as Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Applied Economics, Applied Economics Letters, Finance Research Letters, Public Choice, Southern Economic Journal, and Journal of Business Ethics. He is currently the Editor of Defence and Peace Economics (SSCI) and a member of the Editorial Boards of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy and the Economics of Peace and Security Journal and a member of the governing body of the Network of European Peace Scientists (NEPS). His research interests include defence economics, terrorism, international political economy, and applied macroeconomics.
Michael Chletsos is a Professor of Economic Analysis at the Department of Economics at the University of Piraeus where he is currently the Director of the Postgraduate Program. Prior to his current position, he taught at the University of Thessaly, the University of Crete, and the University of Ioannina. He was the head of the Dept. of Economics at the University of Ioannina and a senior researcher at the National Labour Institute and the Centre of Planning and Economic Research and Director of the Research Department of the Employment Observatory Research and Informatics S.A. He has been elected by Cedefop to serve as National Expert in skills forecasting and labor market developments. His research interests are labor economics, public economics, health economics and economics of social protection, poverty, and income inequalities, and economics of education. He holds a Ph.D. in economics degree from the University of Picardie, France.
Board Prof. Klaus F. Zimmermann, UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, & GLO. Prof. Jonathan Batten, University Utara Malaysia, Malaysia & GLO Prof. Iftekhar Hasan, Fordham University, U.S.A. Prof. Euston Quah, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Prof. John Rust, Georgetown University, U.S.A., & GLO Prof. Dorothea Schäfer, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Germany, and GLO Prof. Marco Vivarelli, Università Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, Italy, & GLO
Abstract/Paper Submission
Authors are invited to submit their abstracts or papers no later than December 10, 2020.
Qualified papers can be published in EBES journals (Eurasian Business Review and Eurasian Economic Review) or EBES Proceedings books after a peer review process without any submission or publication fees. EBES journals (EABR and EAER) are published by Springer and both are indexed in the SCOPUS, EBSCO EconLit with Full Text, Google Scholar, ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide, CNKI, EBSCO Business Source, EBSCO Discovery Service, ProQuest International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, ProQuest ABI/INFORM, ProQuest Business Premium Collection, ProQuest Central, ProQuest Turkey Database, ProQuest-ExLibris Primo, ProQuest-ExLibris Summon, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, Naver, SCImago, ABDC Journal Quality List, Cabell’s Directory, and Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. In addition, while EAER is indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate Analytics), EABR is indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Current Contents / Social & Behavioral Sciences.
Also, all accepted abstracts will be published electronically in the Conference Program and the Abstract Book (with an ISBN number). Although submitting full papers are not required, all the submitted full papers will also be included in the conference proceedings in a USB. Conference program/abstract book with ISBN and conference proceedings will be available on a cloud server for participants to download as well.
After the conference, participants will also have the opportunity to send their paper to be published (after a refereeing process managed by EBES) in the Springer’s series Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics (no submission and publication fees). This is indexed by Scopus. It will also be sent to Clarivate Analytics in order to be reviewed for coverage in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). Please note that the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th (Vol. 2), 21st, and 24th EBES Conference Proceedings are accepted for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). Other conference proceedings are in progress. it is also indexed by Scopus.
Important Dates
Conference Date: January 6-7-8, 2021 Abstract Submission Deadline: December 10, 2020 Reply-by: December 14, 2020* Registration Deadline: December 20, 2020 Submission of the Virtual Presentation: December 21, 2020 Announcement of the Program: December 25, 2020 Paper Submission Deadline (Optional): December 20, 2020** Paper Submission for the EBES journals: March 15, 2021
* The decision regarding the acceptance/rejection of each abstract/paper will be communicated with the corresponding author within a week of submission.
** Completed paper submission is optional. If you want to be considered for the Best Paper Award or your full paper to be included in the conference proceedings in the USB, after submitting your abstract before December 10, 2020, you must also submit your completed (full) paper by December 20, 2020.
Contact Ugur Can, Director of EBES (ebes@ebesweb.org); EBES & GLO Dr. Ender Demir, Conferene Coordinator of EBES (demir@ebesweb.org); EBES & GLO
A new GLO Discussion Paperstudies how firms in Brazil respond to predictable, but uncertain, worker absences that arise from maternity and non-work-related sickness leave.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: The costs to a firm of employee absence depend on how easy it is to find a replacement. We study how firms respond to predictable, but uncertain, worker absences that arise from maternity and non-work-related sickness leave. Using administrative data on over two million spells of leave in Brazil, we identify the short-run effects of a leave spell starting on a firm’s employment, hiring, and separations. We find that firms respond immediately to the start of leave by hiring new workers, and to a lesser extent, by limiting job separations. However, firms replace leave-takers at far less than the one – for- one rate implied by a frictionless labor market model. Hiring responses are more pronounced for absences arising in occupations with more transferable skills and in firms operating in thicker labor markets. Altogether, our results suggest that replacing workers using external markets is costly and firms manage predictable worker absences through other channels.
A new GLO Discussion Paperfinds that the Bologna reform decreased the number of new highly educated apprentices and aggravated the skills shortage in the German economy.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Starting in 1999, the Bologna Process reformed the German five-year study system for a first degree into the three-year bachelor’s (BA) system to harmonize study lengths in Europe and improve competitiveness. This reform unintentionally challenged the German apprenticeship system that offers three-year professional training for the majority of school leavers. Approximately 29% of new apprentices are university-eligible graduates from academic-track schools. We evaluate the effects of the Bologna reform on new highly educated apprentices using a generalized difference-in-differences design based on detailed administrative student and labor market data. Our estimates show that the average regional expansion in first-year BA students decreased the number of new highly educated apprentices by 3%-5%; average treatment effects on those indecisive at school graduation range between -18% and -29%. We reveal substantial gender and occupational heterogeneity: males in STEM apprenticeships experienced the strongest negative effects. The reform aggravated the skills shortage in the economy.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
