On Wednesday, 21 May, RFBerlin welcomes Lorenzo Lagos, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Brown University, for a seminar. He will present his research on “Union-Specific Rents and Inequality,” based on Brazilian administrative data. The study estimates the wage effects of over 4,800 unions and shows that union-specific rent extraction accounts for a significant share of earnings variation. It also examines how union characteristics relate to rent levels and how unions influence gender and racial wage gaps.

This event is part of the RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series, which brings researchers to Berlin to share their work and foster discussion.

Location: RFBerlin Office, Gormannstraße 22, 10119 Berlin

Please find more information here.

The Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi), the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), the Leibniz Education Research Network (LERN), and the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER) are delighted to invite you to the CIDER-LERN Conference 2025 “Educational Success: Support, Measurement and Evaluation” on November 10-11, 2025, at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg.

The conference will bring together scholars from various disciplines to discuss findings as well as methodological and conceptual issues associated with educational research.

The general aim is to extend the CIDER network to other LERN institutes, universities and research institutions in order to support interdisciplinary cooperation among educational researchers. We invite all doctoral and postdoctoral researchers to participate by presenting their own work in a paper or a poster presentation.

Submission deadline: June 15, 2025.

Please find more information here.

On 17 September 2025, RFBerlin will host a one-day conference on worker co-determination and governance, featuring keynote speaker Benjamin Schoefer (UC Berkeley).

We invite submissions of full papers or extended abstracts (max. 250 words) on topics like worker participation, productivity, innovation, and workplace wellbeing — from both empirical and theoretical perspectives.

Submission deadline: May 5, 2025.

Please find more information here.

The Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL is holding their 14th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference.

Workshop Overview: (Monday – Friday, July 28 – August 1, 2025)

The workshop will cover the design of true randomized experiments and contrast them to natural or quasi experiments and to pure observational studies, where part of the sample is treated, the remainder is a control group, but the researcher controls neither which units are treated vs. control, nor administration of the treatment. It will assess the causal inferences one can draw from specific “causal” research designs, threats to valid causal inference, and research designs that can mitigate those threats.

Most empirical methods courses survey a variety of methods.  The workshop will begin instead with the goal of causal inference, and how to design a research plan to come closer to that goal, using messy, real-world datasets. The methods are often adapted to a particular study.

Advanced Workshop Overview:  (Monday – Wednesday, August 4-6, 2025)

The advanced workshop provides in-depth discussion of selected topics that are beyond what can be covered in the main workshop.  The principal topics for 2025 are application of machine learning methods to causal inference; difference-in-differences methods for staggered treatments (applied to different units at different times); and advanced instrumental variable methods.

Target Audience for Main Workshop:  

Quantitative empirical researchers (including faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and other
researchers) in social science, including law, political science, economics, many business-school areas (finance, accounting, management, marketing, etc.), medicine, sociology, education, psychology, etc. –anywhere that causal inference is important.

Target Audience for Advanced Workshop: Empirical researchers who are familiar with the basics of causal inference (from our main workshop or otherwise), and want to extend their knowledge.

There will also be a Zoom option, but in person attendance is preferred.

Get more information here

On 27–28 May, Arindrajit Dube and Attila Lindner will lead a two-day masterclass in Berlin, as part of the ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin’s Handbook Masterclass Series linked to the Handbook of Labour Economics.

They will present insights from their chapter, “Minimum Wages in the 21st Century,” on the effects of minimum wage policies, covering the latest research on employment, inequality, firm behavior, and more.

Application deadline: 27 April.

Please find more information here.

The Institute of Economic Analysis is looking for candidates interested in applying for a two-year postdoctoral grant funded by the AXA foundation. The AXA Fellowship is a funding scheme aimed at supporting young promising researchers on a priority topic aligned with AXA and the Society.

Below is a summary of the conditions and a link to the call:

Expression of interest: April 25th, 2025

Application deadline: June 13th, 2025

Grant amount: €140,000 for a two-year contract

Eligibility: Candidates must have obtained their PhD no more than 5 years ago and demonstrate scientific excellence and high potential for innovation, transformation, and dissemination.

More information can be found here

Dear all,

We are excited to announce the new Berlin Applied Micro Lunch series which is jointly organized by the Berlin Network for Labor Market Research (BeNA) and the research group “Transformations in the Labor Market”. We invite you to sign up to present your work!

The seminar will take place every Monday from 1:00 to 1:45 pm starting on May 5^th, 2025, right before BAMS, in the Elinor-Ostrom-Hall at DIW Berlin. A light lunch will be provided.

We aim to create an informal, constructive space for feedback and exchange for researchers in and around Berlin working on topics in applied microeconomics to present their work. The idea is especially to provide a format to receive feedback for early-stage work and research ideas.

How to participate

To sign up for a presentation slot, simply enter your name into one of the available slots in the sign-up sheet: 👉 Google Sheet

Slots are allocated on a first come, first served basis. If you plan to present, we kindly ask that you attend other sessions as well to support your peers. See below for the presentation guideline.

Presentation guideline

If no one signs up for a particular date, we will still meet for lunch and can discuss general topics.

We look forward to a lively and engaging seminar series and hope many of you will share your work!

We kindly ask you to sign up if you are planning to attend the first iteration of the Berlin Applied Micro Lunch taking place on May 5th, 2025 at Elinor-Ostrom-Hall at DIW Berlin so we can plan enough lunches.

Please sign up until Friday 25.04.2025 in the mask below.

Note: This form is for attendee sign-up. The call for presentations and instructions on signing up for a presentation can be found here.

Researchers worldwide are invited to test a shared set of hypotheses on how having daughters influences behavior and preferences, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Research teams (RTs) of up to two people (from PhD students to full professors) will submit pre-analysis plans (PAPs) and analysis codes.

The project coordinators (PCs) will implement submitted analysis codes and analyze the results to gain insights into both the scientific process as well as the impact of having daughters on various outcomes. They will study variation in analytical choices and findings, and write a metascience paper on the topic. All RTs whose analysis codes are implemented will also be included as co-authors.

Workload: all participating RTs will be asked to write a pre-analysis plan outlining detailed hypothesis tests to assess four hypotheses. Each RT will receive access to 5% of the data, with access timing randomized across RTs. Additionally, all RTs will be asked to write analysis code in Stata based on their pre-analysis plan.

Registration deadline: April 27, 2025.

Please find more information here.

Date: May 20, 2025

Location: ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin

The one-day workshop provides young labor economists the chance to present and discuss their research. It provides a forum to meet and exchange with fellow doctoral students, post-docs and professors from the field of labor economics. The workshop is targeted at PhD students and aims to facilitate exchange between junior and senior academics. This year, we are happy to announce that Martina Uccioli (University of Nottingham) and Lorenzo Navarini (University of Vienna) will be our excellent guest speakers at the workshop.

We are looking forward to submissions from PhD students working on topics in labor economics from a theoretical, empirical or experimental perspective. Equally, we encourage the submission of work in early stages. All projects presented at the BeNA workshop will be considered for the BeNA Innovative Research Award in the amount of €200.

The workshop will take place in the friendly atmosphere of the ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin on May 20, 2025.

If you want to present your work, please submit an abstract or a draft of your paper by April 4, 2025, to workshop@labor-research.net. The decision on your submission will be communicated by April 16, 2025. If you’d like to join the workshop as an attendee rather than a presenter, please contact us with your name and affiliation at workshop@labor-research.net.

You can download the call for papers here.

BeNA Organizers:

Lars Felder (Berlin School of Economics, DIW Berlin)
Maximilian Schaller (Berlin School of Economics, DIW Berlin)
Lukas Tohoff (Berlin School of Economics, RFBerlin)