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Labor Group


During the 2002-03 academic year, several leading institutes of empirical transition economics launched a major research initiative, the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), at the research and outreach center. In addition to EERC and NaUKMA, the following partner institutions will contribute human capital and at least $15,000 to the project during the first year: the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn; the Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation (CERT), Heriot-Watt University; the William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan Business School; the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research (RWI), Essen; and the LICOS Centre for Transition Economics, Catholic University of Leuven.

The ULMS panel data set, similar to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, is conceived as a statistically representative sample of the Ukrainian population aged between 15 and 72 years, comprising 4,000 households and approximately 8,500 individuals. Work on the development of a household and an individual questionnaire started in 2001 and, after a pre-test conducted in July 2002, the questionnaires have now been finalized and the first survey is currently underway. The Labor Group will be officially inaugurated in early July 2003, shortly after it has received the initial ULMS data set.

The survey is very detailed. The household questionnaire contains questions on the demographic structure of the household, its income and expenditure patterns, as well as living conditions. The individual questionnaire, which tries to elicit very detailed information about the labor market experience of Ukrainian workers, forms the core of the survey. Apart from standard sections that inquire about primary and secondary employment, search activities, non-employment and participation in labor market programs in the reference week, there is an extensive retrospective part, which tracks workers’ labor market involvement at specific points in the past and which allows a complete reconstruction of workers’ labor market histories between January 1998 and the date of the interview. In addition there are sections on education and skills, the ownership structure and its evolution at workers’ firms, spatial mobility, health status, and political and environmental attitudes. Finally, there is a large set of questions about wage arrears, payments in kind, unpaid leave, etc. in order to address specific adjustment mechanisms that take place in Ukraine and other post-socialist countries. The ULMS will provide arguably the most complete data source on labor market developments in any country in the region.

The NaUKMA-based Labor Group will be associated with CERT, IZA, and RWI, as well as a larger research effort that covers several transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Ten research projects on labor market adjustment in transition countries are under preparation by researchers from these three institutions. The ten projects are not country-specific but have topical themes, for example, dynamic aspects of labor supply and demand, gross job flows, migration and wage determination.

Besides ULMS data, the research center has been acquiring data from commercial data providers as well as from the Ukrainian State Committee of Statistics. For example, establishment-level registry data on Ukrainian manufacturing spanning the years 1993-2000 and firm-level data for both the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors derived from the Amadeus database are already at the disposal of the Labor Group. The group will try to collect as many high-quality data sets as possible allowing rigorous research on all aspects of the Ukrainian labor market.

The group is led by Hartmut Lehmann, Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation (CERT), Heriot-Watt University, and Program Director at the Institute for Labor Studies (IZA), Bonn.

Olha Kupets, an EERC graduate who is now studying for the candidate of sciences degree at NaUKMA, and Serhiy Stetsenko (EERC 2003) have been hired as the first researchers working for the Labor Group. In addition, 3 research assistants recruited from EERC class of 2004 have been hired. The junior researchers and research assistants will be supervised by senior labor economists from CERT, IZA, and RWI, as well as faculty in the EERC M.A. program.