Séminaire GREDEG : Sarra Ben YAHMED (ZEW - Leibniz)

Title: "Local labour market resilience: the role of digitalisation and working-from-home"


Abstract:
We show that digital capital, and to a lesser extent working-from-home, were essential for the resilience of local labour markets to the COVID-19 crisis in Germany. Employment responses differed widely across local labour markets, with differences in short-time work rates of up to 20 percentage points at the beginning of the pandemic. Using an empirical strategy that combines a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score weighting, we find that pre-pandemic digital capital reduced short-time work usage by up to 3 percentage points and the effect lasted for about 8 months. One channel of impact is working-from-home, which was more often adopted in regions with higher digital capital. Working-from-home potential lowered short-time work rates, but only in local labour markets exposed to digital capital, and in the first four months of the pandemic when a strict lockdown was in place. Differences in unemployment rates across local labour markets were at most 2 percentage points in Germany and did not depend on digital capital or working-from-home potential.


Sarra Ben Yahmed is a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, and works in the Research Unit “Labour Markets and Social Insurance”. Her research covers the fields of labour economics, international trade, and development economics. She studies how transformations in the world of work affect inequalities in the labour market. Her current research agenda includes projects on how digitalisation and new work arrangements, such as working from home, affect employment, job mobility and gender inequality.
She holds a PhD from Aix-Marseille University and received the university’s 2013 PhD Thesis Prize. Prior joining ZEW in 2014, Sarra Ben Yahmed worked at the Department of Economics of Sciences Po Paris.
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