Research on Occupational Change in the Serbian Labour Market: Identifying Trends for Future Workforce Developments and Policy Responses – ROCS

Project framework: DIASPORA 2024, Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia

Project manager: Dr. Kosovka Ognjenović

Project implementation period: 2025 – 2026

Description:

The project is carried out by the team of the Institute of Economic Sciences in co-operation with a diaspora researcher from the Department of Economics of the University of Cyprus. The project examines the changes in the structure of occupations in the Serbian labour market caused by technological and demographic factors in the period from 2010 to 2024. The research will be based on data from the Labour Force Survey and the conclusions of the analysis will result from the application of the relevant methodological guidelines. The ROCS project was approved for funding in a group of 45 projects out of a total of 91 project proposals submitted under this Science Fund call.

Read more about the project HERE.

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

Methodological seminar "Quantitative Methods for the Evaluation of Public Policies"

As part of the ROCS project, supported by the Diaspora Science Fund 2024 programme – research visits, the project team will organise a methodological seminar on 16 April 2026 as part of activities related to knowledge transfer. The seminar will be delivered by Ružica Savčić from the University of Cyprus.

Those interested in attending the methodological seminar are invited to register by 10 April 2026. The registration form is available at the following link: REGISTRATION

The methodological seminar is free for participants. Attendees will receive presentations, exercise data, and working files for the software package. The agenda for the seminar will be published on this page before the seminar begins

About the methodological seminar:

The seminar provides an introduction to Difference-in-Differences methods and newer methodological approaches for analyzing the effects of public policies and other interventions using panel data. The seminar was organized as a combination of a theoretical presentation and a practical workshop in the statistical software Stata. Theoretical blocks alternate with short demonstrations and examples in Stata, through which participants can directly see how the presented methods are applied in empirical analysis.

In the first part of the seminar, the basic intuition of the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach is developed. It starts from a simple 2×2 framework and explains the assumption of parallel trends as a key identification condition. It is then shown how the basic DiD logic can be expressed in regression form and how, when working with panel data, it naturally extends to a model with unit and time fixed effects.

Next, an event study approach is discussed, which extends the DiD framework by allowing treatment effects to change over time relative to the moment of intervention. Participants are introduced to the concept of event time, the construction of indicators for different distances from the moment of treatment, as well as the interpretation of coefficients before and after the intervention.

The final theoretical part discusses the situation in which the treatment is introduced in different periods for different units (so-called staggered treatment). This pattern is very common in empirical research, but can lead to problems in standard estimation using twin fixed effects (TWFE) regression. The seminar explains why these problems occur, what implicit comparisons TWFE regression uses, and why already treated units can become an inadequate control group. Then, a more flexible regression approach is presented, based on modern methodological results, which allows treatment effects to differ across cohorts and over time.

Through the practical part of the seminar, participants will implement Difference-in-Differences and event study specifications in Stata, analyze examples with time-shifted introduction of treatment and learn how to interpret estimated coefficients and graphical displays of results. After the seminar, participants will be able to understand the conceptual foundations of these methods, recognize key identification challenges and apply appropriate empirical tools in their own research.

About the lecturer:

Ružica Savčić specialises in the economics of education, the labour market, and applied microeconometrics. At the University of Cyprus, she teaches Labour Economics and conducts classes in Microeconomics, Quantitative Methods, and Econometrics. Her research combines theoretical and empirical approaches, including work on the evaluation of public policies using the Difference-in-Differences method, published in journals such as the Journal of Population Economics. In addition to her academic work, she has participated in numerous research projects in economic policy and the labour market, where she has applied quantitative methods to the analysis of specific economic problems. She participates in the ROCS project as a researcher from the diaspora, and through this seminar she will demonstrate the transfer of knowledge to enhance the research capacities of scientists in Serbia.