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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Buttler, Dominik; Sierminska, Eva |
| Abstract: | We examine supply-side determinants of transition from the wage and salary sector to selfemployment of women and men living Poland. The empirical analysis is made possible due to a unique and under explored longitudinal survey -- Social Diagnosis – that contains rare indicators such as job preferences and work events. The empirical results in the 2007-2015 period indicate that women and men transitioning into self-employment are differently motivated. In terms of job attributes, women find independence at work and for those in professional occupations a job matching their competences as a desirable job attribute, while for men the lack of stress, a good salary and independence is key. The analysis of work events and its influence on selfemployment weakly confirms the glass-ceiling hypothesis. In line with other research, our analysis indicates that financial constraints strongly determine the entry into self-employment. A key human capital determinant is past entrepreneurial experience indicating a slow, cautious transition process into self-employment. |
| Keywords: | Risk,Self-Employment,Work conditions,Gender,Poland |
| JEL: | D31 G11 J61 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:403&r=all |
| By: | Kato, Takao (Colgate University); Kodama, Naomi (Hitotsubashi University) |
| Abstract: | There is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of Short-Time Compensation (STC), a subsidy to promote worksharing in a recession, in achieving its intended goal of curtailing layoffs and preventing a sharp rise in unemployment. However, very little is known about the consequences of STC for firm performance. We apply the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) with difference-in-differences methodology to unique data from Japan, a country known for its extensive use, and find that STC results in improved profitability. The improved profitability is further found to be achieved through sales growth without raising labor costs. We explore possible mechanisms behind the observed positive consequences of STC for sales and profits. Additional evidence tends to favor what the psychology literature calls "shared adversity"- worksharing promoted by STC facilitates supportive interactions among workers in the firm and strengthens commitment of workers to the firm, and thereby enhances goal alignment between workers and the firm as well as between coworkers. Such workers are more open to the firm's effort to increase sales/revenues without raising cost. |
| Keywords: | short-time work, short-time compensation, worksharing, employment adjustment, firm performance |
| JEL: | J23 J65 J68 H25 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12596&r=all |
| By: | Congressional Budget Office |
| Abstract: | In 1995, 33 percent of people ages 55 to 79 worked. By 2018, that share rose to 44 percent. That growth was the result of continued increases in employment for women and a reversal of previously declining employment for men. The changes in employment of people ages 55 to 79—the period during which many people stop working—were related to changes in their demographic characteristics and the jobs they held, as well as to changes in Social Security. |
| JEL: | E24 J00 J10 J11 J26 |
| Date: | 2019–09–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbo:report:55454&r=all |
| By: | Averett, Susan L. (Lafayette College); Smith, Julie K. (Lafayette College); Wang, Yang (University of Wisconsin-Madison) |
| Abstract: | States are increasingly resorting to raising the minimum wage to boost the earnings of those at the bottom of the income distribution. In this paper, we examine the effects of minimum wage increases on the health of the children of immigrants. Their parents are disproportionately represented in minimum wage jobs, typically have less access to health care and are a growing part of the U.S. labor force. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy and data drawn from the National Health Interview Survey from the years 2000 - 2015, we examine whether children of low-educated immigrants experience any changes in health or access to care when the minimum wage increases. |
| Keywords: | minimum wage, immigrant children, access to care, health insurance, health |
| JEL: | J15 I12 I13 I14 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12606&r=all |
| By: | Galassi, Gabriela (Bank of Canada); Koll, David (European University Institute); Mayr, Lukas (University of Essex) |
| Abstract: | We document a substantial positive correlation of employment status between mothers and their children in the United States, linking data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults. After controlling for ability, education, and wealth, a one-year increase in a mother's employment is associated with six weeks more employment of her child on average. The intergenerational transmission of maternal employment is stronger to daughters than to sons, and it is higher for low-educated and low-income mothers. Potential mechanisms we were able to rule out include networks, occupation-specific human capital and conditions within the local labor market. By contrast, we provide suggestive evidence for a role-model channel through which labor force participation is transmitted. |
| Keywords: | intergenerational transmission, preferences for work, female employment |
| JEL: | E24 J21 J22 J62 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12595&r=all |
| By: | beg, Sabrin |
| Abstract: | I test the land and labor market effects of a property rights reform that computerized rural land records, and provided access to digitized records and automated transactions to agricultural landowners and cultivators in Pakistan. Using the staggered roll-out of the program, I find that while the reforms do not shift land ownership, landowning households are more likely to rent out land and lower their agricultural participation. At the same time, cultivating households have access to more land, as rented in land and overall farm size per cultivating household increases. Improved tenure security also shifts the type of rental contracts, and the input choices of cultivators. Aggregate district level data suggests an improvement in overall crop yield. These results have implications for both the allocation of land across farmers and the selection of labor into farming. |
| Keywords: | Property Rights, Rural Mobility, Agricultural Land Markets, ICT in Development, Institutions |
| JEL: | O1 O10 O12 O13 |
| Date: | 2019–09–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:96110&r=all |
| By: | Conrad Miller; Jennifer Peck; Mehmet Seflek |
| Abstract: | Where social norms favor gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. If the costs of integration are largely fixed, firms will integrate only if their expected number of female employees under integration exceeds some threshold. Motivated by a simple model of firm hiring, we develop a methodology that uses the distribution of female employment across firms to estimate the share of firms with binding integration costs and counterfactual female employment at all-male firms. We validate our approach using administrative data and unique policy variation from Saudi Arabia. We provide suggestive evidence that integration costs reduce aggregate female employment. Using survey data on manufacturing firms in 65 countries, we find significant integration costs in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia but not in other regions. |
| JEL: | J16 J23 J71 O53 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26271&r=all |
| By: | Giambra, Samuele (Brown University); McKenzie, David (World Bank) |
| Abstract: | There is a widespread policy view that a lack of job opportunities at home is a key reason for migration, accompanied by suggestions of the need to spend more on creating these opportunities so as to reduce migration. Self-employment is widespread in poor countries, and faced with a lack of existing jobs, providing more opportunities for people to start businesses is a key policy option. But empirical evidence to support this idea is slight, and economic theory offers several reasons why the self-employed may in fact be more likely to migrate. We put together panel surveys from eight countries to descriptively examine the relationship between migration and self-employment, finding that the self-employed are indeed less likely to migrate than either wage workers or the unemployed. We then analyze seven randomized experiments that increased self-employment, and find their causal impacts on migration are negative on average, but often small in magnitude. |
| Keywords: | internal migration, international migration, self-employment, migrant selection, randomized experiment |
| JEL: | F22 J61 O15 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12624&r=all |
| By: | Esteban Rossi-Hansberg; Pierre-Daniel Sarte; Felipe Schwartzman |
| Abstract: | In the U.S., cognitive non-routine (CNR) occupations associated with higher wages are disproportionately represented in larger cities. To study the allocation of workers across cities, we propose and quantify a spatial equilibrium model with multiple industries that employ CNR and alternative (non-CNR) occupations. Productivity is city-industry-occupation specific and partly determined by externalities across local workers. We estimate that the productivity of CNR workers in a city depends significantly on both its share of CNR workers and total employment. Together with heterogeneous preferences for locations, these externalities imply equilibrium allocations that are not efficient. An optimal policy that benefits workers equally across occupations incentivizes the formation of cognitive hubs, leading to larger fractions of CNR workers in some of today's largest cities. At the same time, these cities become smaller to mitigate congestion effects while cities that are initially small increase in size. Large and small cities end up expanding industries in which they already concentrate, while medium-size cities tend to diversify across industries. The optimal allocation thus features transfers to non-CNR workers who move from large to small cities consistent with the implied change in the industrial composition landscape. Finally, we show that the optimal policy reinforces equilibrium trends observed since 1980. However, these trends were in part driven by low growth in real-estate productivity in CNR-abundant cities that reduced welfare. |
| JEL: | E23 E24 H23 H71 J61 R13 R23 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26267&r=all |
| By: | Moretti, Enrico (University of California, Berkeley) |
| Abstract: | The high-tech sector is increasingly concentrated in a small number of expensive cities, with the top ten cities in "Computer Science", "Semiconductors" and "Biology and Chemistry", accounting for 70%, 79% and 59% of inventors, respectively. Why do inventors tend to locate near other inventors in the same field, despite the higher costs? I use longitudinal data on top inventors based on the universe of US patents 1971 - 2007 to quantify the productivity advantages of Silicon-Valley style clusters and their implications for the overall production of patents in the US. I relate the number of patents produced by an inventor in a year to the size of the local cluster, defined as a city x research field x year. I first study the experience of Rochester NY, whose high-tech cluster declined due to the demise of its main employer, Kodak. Due to the growth of digital photography, Kodak employment collapsed after 1996, resulting in a 49.2% decline in the size of the Rochester high-tech cluster. I test whether the change in cluster size affected the productivity of inventors outside Kodak and the photography sector. I find that between 1996 and 2007 the productivity of non-Kodak inventors in Rochester declined by 20.6% relative to inventors in other cities, conditional on inventor fixed effects. In the second part of the paper, I turn to estimates based on all the data in the sample. I find that when an inventor moves to a larger cluster she experiences significant increases in the number of patents produced and the number of citations received. Conditional on inventor, firm, and city _ year effects, the elasticity of number of patents produced with respect to cluster size is 0.0662 (0.0138). The productivity increase follows the move and there is no evidence of pre-trends. IV estimates based on the geographical structure of firms with laboratories in multiple cities are statistically similar to OLS estimates. In the final part of the paper, I use the estimated elasticity of productivity with respect to cluster size to quantify the aggregate effects of geographical agglomeration on the overall production of patents in the US. I find macroeconomic benefits of clustering for the US as a whole. In a counterfactual scenario where the quality of U.S. inventors is held constant but their geographical location is changed so that all cities have the same number of inventors in each field, inventor productivity would increase in small clusters and decline in large clusters. On net, the overall number of patents produced in the US in a year would be 11.07% smaller. |
| Keywords: | agglomeration, spillovers |
| JEL: | J01 R00 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12610&r=all |
| By: | Michel Serafinelli (University of Essex); Guido Tabellini (Bocconi University) |
| Abstract: | Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? In this paper we match data on thousands of notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical data on city institutions and population. Our main variable of interest is the number of famous creatives (scaled to local population) born in a city during a century, but we also look at famous immigrants (based on location of death). We first document several stylized facts: famous births and immigrants are spatially concentrated and clustered across disciplines, creative clusters are persistent but less than population, and spatial mobility has remained stable over the centuries. Next, we show that the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms and promoting local autonomy facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent. |
| Keywords: | innovation, agglomeration, political institutions, immigration, gravity |
| JEL: | R10 O10 J61 J24 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1909&r=all |
| By: | Martins, Pedro S.; Saraiva, Joana |
| Abstract: | Abstract: How much value does collective bargaining add to the working conditions already established in general labour law? In this paper we propose a methodology to address this question: we compare the specific contents of collective agreements (except minimum wages) to their equivalent norms set by base law. We illustrate this approach by analysing in detail about 400 norms from six collective agreements in Portugal and then comparing them to the country’s Labour Code. We find that as many as 62% of those collective bargaining norms are exactly or virtually equal to the Labour Code; only 25% (an average of 16 norms per convention) are more favourable for the worker; and 12% (8) are more favourable for the employer. We conclude that collective bargaining in Portugal has a relatively small role as a source of effective labour law. We also present several potential explanations for our findings, including the wide range of base law, which may reduce the negotiating space of bargaining. |
| Keywords: | Labour law,Working conditions,Collective agreements |
| JEL: | J52 K31 J81 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:406&r=all |
| By: | Bellmann, Lutz (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg); Hübler, Olaf (Leibniz University of Hannover) |
| Abstract: | Using a new German individual data set, we investigate the influence on health with respect to personal traits measured by the Big Five, collegiality, commitment and job characteristics. Among the Big Five conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability correlate positively with good health. Job characteristics like activities combined with substantial decision authority, no physically demanding tasks, pleasant environmental conditions, little time pressure and no necessity of multitasking affect health in the same direction. If employees get help if needed from their colleagues and if they do not feel unfairly criticized by others in the firm, they usually have no health problems. For mental health, all Big Five items are influential whereas no statistical significance could be found for the number of days workers were absent due to sickness except in cases of neuroticism. |
| Keywords: | health status, working conditions, commitment to a company, collegiality, personality traits |
| JEL: | I12 J53 J54 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12597&r=all |
| By: | Grumstrup, Ethan (University of Nevada, Reno); Mobarak Hossain, Md. (University of Nevada, Reno); Mukhopadhyay, Sankar (University of Nevada, Reno); Shapoval, Olga (University of Nevada, Reno) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we examine whether the expansion of health insurance coverage brought on by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), led to a decline in absenteeism among overweight and obese individuals. We use data from the National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS) to compare absenteeism among overweight and obese workers to absenteeism among normal-weight workers before and after the ACA. Our results suggest that in the post-ACA period, the probability of being absent declined by about 1.3 (1.5) percentage points among obese (overweight) individuals. Disaggregated regressions suggest that the effect is significant among women, but not among men. Furthermore, our estimates (using a Tobit model) indicate that the obese (overweight) workers missed 0.33 (0.46) fewer days after the ACA. Again, the effect is concentrated among women. Our results show that improved health outcomes led to reduced absenteeism. Our results also show that there are no decline in absenteeism among elderly (age>=65) adults (who did not experience any increase in health insurance coverage as a result of the ACA), suggesting that the decline in absenteeism is indeed due to the expansion of health insurance coverage due to the ACA. Our estimates imply that the ACA reduced the cost associated with absenteeism by about $350 million per year. |
| Keywords: | Affordable Care Act, obesity, overweight, absenteeism |
| JEL: | I13 I18 J08 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12617&r=all |