Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36820314›Full record

ArticleDe Economist2023

Does Automatic Wage Indexation Destroy Jobs? A Machine Learning Approach.

Gert Bijnens, Shyngys Karimov, Jozef Konings

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in De Economist, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
3citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

3 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Local inequalities of the COVID-19 crisis.Regional science and urban economics · 2022
    Article
  3. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Gert BijnensNational Bank of Belgium, de Berlaimontlaan 14, 1000 Brussels, Belgium.ORCID 0000-0002-0929-5752
Shyngys KarimovAmazon UK Services Ltd., 1 Principal Place, Worship St, London, EC2A 2FA UK.ORCID 0000-0001-8384-9146
Jozef KoningsGraduate School of Business, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of automatic wage indexation on employment. To boost competitiveness and increase employment, Belgium suspended its automatic wage indexation system in 2015. This resulted in a 2% fall in real wages for all workers. In the absence of a suitable control group, we use machine learning for the counterfactual analysis. We artificially construct the control group for a difference-in-difference analysis based on the pre-treatment evolution of treated firms. We find a positive impact on employment of 1.2%, which corresponds to a labor demand elasticity of - 0.6. This effect is more pronounced for manufacturing firms, where the elasticity reaches - 1. These results show that a suspension of the automatic wage indexation mechanism can be effective in preserving employment.

Indexed as

Counterfactual analysisLabor demandMachine learningWage elasticity

Identifiers

PMID36820314
PMCPMC9932419

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.