|
on Labour Economics |
| By: | Joseph J. Sabia; Taylor Mackay; Thanh Tam Nguyen; Dhaval M. Dave |
| Abstract: | Ban-the-box (BTB) laws, which prevent employers from asking prospective employees about their criminal histories at initial job screenings, have been adopted by 25 states and the District of Columbia. Using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, the Uniform Crime Reports, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study is the first to estimate the effect of BTB laws on crime. We find some evidence that BTB laws are associated with an increase in property crime among working-age Hispanic men. This finding is consistent with employer-based statistical discrimination as well as potential moral hazard. A causal interpretation of our results is supported by placebo tests on policy leads and a lack of BTB-induced increases in crime for non-Hispanic whites and women. Finally, we find that BTB laws are associated with a reduction in property crime among older and white individuals, consistent with labor-labor substitution toward those with perceived lower probabilities of having criminal records (Doleac and Hansen 2017). |
| JEL: | J01 J08 K14 K31 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24381&r=lab |
| By: | Burnette, Joyce (Wabash College); Stanfors, Stanfors (Lund University) |
| Abstract: | Women have always earned less than men, with men’s greater physical strength explaining a large portion of the difference. This raises the question of why the gender gap did not disappear when the importance of physical strength waned with the emergence of the modern labor market. This paper explores the wage gap among Swedish compositors, an occupation featuring the main traits of modernity, circa 1900. We exploit matched employer-employee data with national coverage,and examine information on men and women holding the same jobs. On average, women’s hourly wage was about 70 percent of men’s. Individual characteristics explain much, but not all, of this gender gap. To explain the remainder of the gap, we examine training and differences across firms. Our findings suggest that women received less training than men, and accounting for differences across firms explains the gender gap. We also find differences across firms by size and location. Smaller firms outside the major cities treated men and women fairly, but large firms in big cities did not offer women the same opportunities as men, creating a gender wage gap. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that firms which set up internal labor markets treated men and women differently. |
| Keywords: | earnings; manufacturing industry; firm-level data |
| JEL: | J16 J31 |
| Date: | 2018–03–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2018_001&r=lab |
| By: | Guy Lacroix; Marie Albertine Djuikom Tamtchouong |
| Abstract: | Immigrants often experience difficulties integrating the local labor market. In Canada, the government of Quebec implemented a program back in 1996 that explicitly selected highly qualified workers (Bachelors’, Masters’ or PhD’s). This paper investigates the extent to which the return to foreign-acquired human capital is different from the education acquired in Quebec. Specifically, we seek to estimate the benefits of post-migration education over foreign-education on the transitions between qualified and unqualified jobs and unemployment by means of a multiple-spells and multiple-states model. Our results indicate that immigrants originating from well-off countries have no need to further invest in domestic education. On the other hand, immigrants from poorer countries, despite being highly qualified, benefit greatly from such training in the long run as it eases their transitions into qualified and unqualified jobs and out of unemployment. Our results also indicate that selection into domestic education needs to be accounted for to avoid significant selection problems. |
| Keywords: | Post-migration schooling, foreign education, labour market histories, multiple-spells multiple-states models |
| JEL: | C31 C41 J15 J24 J64 J61 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:crrecr:1802&r=lab |
| By: | Warning, Anja (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]); Weber, Enzo (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]) |
| Abstract: | "In this paper we examine how employment and hiring processes develop in the course of digitalisation in German establishments. To this end we use a large representative business survey - the IAB Job Vacancy Survey - that was extended in 2015 to include special questions about the state of digital development in each establishment surveyed, thereby permitting a direct link between the topics of digitalisation and employment/hiring. We distinguish between different forms of digitalisation and enquire about both the development in the past and that expected for the future. Regression analyses show that digitalisation is already having noticeable effects on both the quantitative developments of hires, separations, vacancies and abandoned search processes and on the structure of labour demand in terms of qualifications, requirements and working conditions of new hires. The duration of the recruitment process, too, is influenced by digitalisation, though the wages agreed at the time of hiring are not." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) |
| JEL: | J23 J63 M5 O3 |
| Date: | 2018–03–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iab:iabdpa:201810&r=lab |
| By: | Bernini, Andrea; Facchini, Giovanni; Testa, Cecilia |
| Abstract: | The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened elective offices to blacks in the US South, but systematic evidence on its immediate effects remains scant. Using a novel data-set on black elected officials between 1964-1980, we assess the causal impact of the VRA on the racial make-up of local governments. Since the VRA mandated federal scrutiny (coverage) over a group of Southern counties, we deploy a differences-in-differences estimation strategy using non-covered counties as a comparison group. Our results show that coverage doubled the extent to which black enfranchisement led to gains in black office-holding, particularly among bodies controlling local public finances. |
| Keywords: | Black Representation; Local Elections; Public Good Provision; Voting Rights Act |
| JEL: | D72 J15 N92 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12774&r=lab |
| By: | Henry Sauermann; Chiara Franzoni; Kourosh Shafi |
| Abstract: | Crowdfunding may provide much-needed financial resources, yet there is little systematic evidence on the potential of crowdfunding for scientific research. We first briefly review prior research on crowdfunding and give an overview of dedicated platforms for crowdfunding research. We then analyze data from over 700 campaigns on the largest dedicated platform, Experiment.com. Our descriptive analysis provides insights regarding the creators seeking funding, the projects they are seeking funding for, and the campaigns themselves. We then examine how these characteristics relate to fundraising success. The findings highlight important differences between crowdfunding and traditional funding mechanisms for research, including high use by students and other junior investigators but also relatively small project size. Junior investigators are more likely to succeed than senior scientists, and women have higher success rates than men. Conventional signals of quality - including scientists' prior publications - have no relationship with funding success, suggesting that the crowd applies different decision criteria than traditional funding agencies. Our results highlight significant opportunities for crowdfunding in the context of science while also pointing towards unique challenges. We relate our findings to research on the economics of science and on crowdfunding, and we discuss connections with other emerging mechanisms to involve the public in scientific research. |
| JEL: | I23 O31 O32 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24402&r=lab |
| By: | Julie Beugnot Marie Claire Villeval; Bernard Fortin; Guy Lacroix; Marie Claire Villeval |
| Abstract: | We investigate whether peer effects at work differ by gender and whether gender differences in peer effects -if any- depend on work organization. We develop a social network model with gender heterogeneity that we test in a real-effort laboratory experiment. We compare sequential networks in which information flows from peers to the worker and simultaneous networks where it disseminates bi-directionally. We identify strong gender differences as females disregard their peers’ performance in simultaneous networks, while males are influenced by peers in both networks. Females may perceive the environment in simultaneous networks as being more competitive than in sequential networks. |
| Keywords: | Gender, Peer effects, Social Networks, Work effort, Experiments |
| JEL: | C91 J16 J24 J31 M52 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:crrecr:1803&r=lab |
| By: | Nathan Chappell; Adam B. Jaffe; Trinh Le |
| Abstract: | The 21st century global decline in productivity growth is not well understood. One possible contributor is a decline in economic dynamism. We explore the contribution of firm formation and employee movement to productivity using administrative data on the population of New Zealand construction firms from 2001-2012, along with linked data on their employees and working proprietors, to study the relationships among entry, worker flows and firm productivity. Entrants are more productive than pre-existing firms. Firms that enter and stay exhibit a persistent productivity advantage that averages about seven percent, but which grows as experience accumulates. We find that job churn is prevalent in construction, with around 60 percent of firm-worker pairs not existing previously or not existing subsequently. Firms with new employees are more productive than those with no change in workforce, in part because of knowledge flows from other construction firms. In our preferred specification, with firm fixed effects, a standard deviation increase in the productivity of new employees' previous firms is associated with a 0.6 percent increase in productivity. The entry and worker-knowledge-flow phenomena are distinct, in that the entry effect is not explained by employee composition, and non-entrant firms also benefit from worker knowledge flows. |
| JEL: | D24 J63 L74 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24376&r=lab |
| By: | Jeannine Bailliu; Xinfen Han; Mark Kruger; Yu-Hsien Liu; Sri Thanabalasingam |
| Abstract: | The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017. We use a supervised machine learning approach by training a support vector machine classification model. The information content and the forecast ability of our LMCI are tested against official labour market activity measures in wage and credit growth estimations. Surprisingly, one of our findings is that the much-maligned official labour market indicators do contain information. However, their information content is not robust and, in many cases, our LMCI can provide forecasts that are significantly superior. Moreover, regional disaggregation of the LMCI illustrates that labour conditions in the export-oriented coastal region are sensitive to export growth, while those in inland regions are not. This suggests that text analytics can, indeed, be used to extract useful labour market information from Chinese newspaper articles. |
| Keywords: | Econometric and statistical methods, International topics, Labour markets |
| JEL: | C38 E24 E27 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bca:bocawp:18-12&r=lab |
| By: | Alexandr Kopytov; Nikolai Roussanov; Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel |
| Abstract: | Recent empirical evidence suggests that job polarization associated with skill-biased technological change accelerated during the Great Recession. We use a standard neoclassical growth framework to analyze how business cycle fluctuations interact with the long-run transition towards a skill-intensive technology. In the model, since adopting the new technology disrupts production, firms prefer to do so in recessions, when profits are low. Similarly, workers also tend to learn new skills during downturns. As a result, recessions are deeper during periods of technological transition, but they also speed up adoption of the new technology. We document evidence for these mechanisms in the data. Our calibrated model is able to match both the long-run downward trend in routine employment and the dramatic impact of the Great Recession. We also show that even in the absence of the Great Recession the routine employment share would have reached the observed level by the year 2012. |
| JEL: | E24 E25 E3 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24373&r=lab |
| By: | Pfeifer, Christian (Leuphana University Lüneburg); Stephan, Gesine (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg) |
| Abstract: | The authors analyze gender differences in fairness perceptions of own wages and subsequent wage growth. The main finding is that women perceive their wage more often as fair if controls for hourly wage rates, individual and job-related characteristics are taken into account. Furthermore, the gender difference is more pronounced for married than for single women. This points to the fact that social norms, gender roles, and gender identity are at least partly responsible for the gap in fairness perceptions. Further analysis shows that individuals, who perceive their wage as unfair, experience larger wage growth in subsequent years. An explanation would be that a wage perceived as unfair triggers negotiations for a better wage or induces individuals to search for better paid work. Thus, differences in wage perceptions can contribute to explain the nowadays still persistent gender wage gap. |
| Keywords: | gender differences, fairness, social norms, wages, wage growth |
| JEL: | J16 J31 J71 A12 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11320&r=lab |