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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Müller, Dagmar (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)) |
| Abstract: | Relying on Swedish linked employer-employee data over a 30-year period, I study the importance of work during high school for graduates’ school-to-work transition and labor market outcomes. I show that employer links established through work during school provide students with an important job-search channel, accounting for 30 percent of direct transitions into regular employment. I use the fact that some graduates are deprived of this channel due to establishment closures just prior to graduation and labor market entry. I compare classmates from the same vocational high school tracks to identify the effects of the closures and show that the closure of a previous in-school establishment leads to an immediate and sizable negative effect on employment after graduation. The lost employer connections have also persistent, but diminishing negative effects on employment and earnings for up to 10 years. Parts of the negative effect are driven by the loss of employers links that offer job opportunities in industries related to graduates’ specialization in vocational school. I find evidence supporting that students who lose such relevant links shift towards jobs in less- relevant industries. |
| Keywords: | Social contacts; Young workers; Labor market entry; Establishment closures |
| JEL: | J01 J64 |
| Date: | 2021–01–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1381&r=all |
| By: | David G. Blanchflower; Alex Bryson |
| Abstract: | We examine the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction over the life-course using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracking all those born in Great Britain in a single week in March in 1958 through to age 55 (2013). Data from immigrants as well as non-respondents to the original 1958 Perinatal Mortality Study (PMS) are added in later years. Conditioning on one’s social class at birth, together with one’s education and employment status, we find there is a significant negative correlation between union membership and job satisfaction that is apparent across the life-course. Lagged union membership status going back many years is negatively correlated with current job satisfaction, though its effects become statistically non-significant when conditioning on current union membership status. These results provide a different perspective to longitudinal studies showing short-term positive responses to switches in membership status. They are consistent with earlier work showing that this cohort of workers, and others before them, have persistently lower job satisfaction as union members compared to their non-union counterparts. |
| JEL: | J28 J50 J51 |
| Date: | 2020–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28206&r=all |
| By: | Rafael Dix-Carneiro; João Paulo Pessoa; Ricardo M. Reyes-Heroles; Sharon Traiberman |
| Abstract: | We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with two key ingredients: (a) Consumption-saving decisions in each country commanded by representative households, leading to endogenous trade imbalances; (b) labor market frictions across and within sectors, leading to unemployment dynamics and sluggish transitions to shocks. We use the estimated model to study the behavior of labor markets in response to globalization shocks, including shocks to technology, trade costs, and inter-temporal preferences (savings gluts). We find that modeling trade imbalances changes both qualitatively and quantitatively the short- and long-run implications of globalization shocks for labor reallocation and unemployment dynamics. In a series of empirical applications, we study the labor market effects of shocks accrued to the global economy, their implications for the gains from trade, and we revisit the “China Shock” through the lens of our model. We show that the US enjoys a 2.2% gain in response to globalization shocks. These gains would have been 73% larger in the absence of the global savings glut, but they would have been 40% smaller in a balanced-trade world. |
| JEL: | F1 F16 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28315&r=all |
| By: | Chiara Castelli (Università degli Studi di Brescia); Angela Parenti (Università degli Studi di Pisa) |
| Abstract: | Commuting shapes countless everyday-lives around the world, with dynamics varying from city to regional and cross regional level. Taking as reference the free-movement EU-28 area (plus Switzerland and Norway), the analysis considers a total sample of 195 NUTS2 regions over the decade 2007-2017 to depict regional cross-border dynamics, thus including the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis. The tested presence of spatial interactions among regions leads to the adoption of the Spatial Durbin Model in a panel context, thus including fixed effects in order to eliminate any time influence on variables as well as any regional idiosyncrasy (i.e. cultural, institutional etc.). The outcoming analysis highlights the potentiality of temporary contracts in preserving jobs during crisis, as they offer a flexible tool for employment adjustments. Moreover, the regional specialization in the knowledge sector is found to be an important attractor of external workers as well as a relatively effective retaining factor of the domestic labour force. But there are also other factors affecting mobility. For instance, the perceived commuting distance significantly depends on the time needed to reach the corresponding workplace and this study finds that the more diffused is the transportation system (in terms of highways’ density) the higher the commuting outflow. A similar impact is found with respect to housing costs, that is the cheaper is the relative house price of the region of residence with respect to the surrounding territories, the more travel-to-work becomes an attractive option, even in its extend of long-distance commute. Finally, a last strong push factor of mobility is found in the lack job opportunities, here expressed as the unemployment rate differential for each single territory with respect to its surroundings. Indeed, the higher the lack of job opportunities in the domestic market with respect to its neighbours, the higher the share of workers that will try to seek their fortune crossing the regional border. |
| Keywords: | Cross-border Commuting Outflows, Regional Economics, Panel Analysis, Fixed Effects, Spatial Econometrics |
| JEL: | C51 C54 C55 J21 J61 J62 R11 R12 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2020.19&r=all |
| By: | Vannutelli, Silvia; Scicchitano, Sergio; Biagetti, Marco |
| Abstract: | The Routine-Biased Technological Change (RBTC) has been called as a relatively novel technology-based explanation of social changes like job and wage polarization. In this paper we investigate the wage inequality between routine and non-routine workers along the wage distribution in Italy. Thanks to unique survey data, we can estimate the wage differential using both actual and perceived level of routine intensity of jobs to classify workers. We adopt semi-parametric decomposition techniques to quantify the importance of characteristics of workers in explaining the gaps. We also employ non-parametric techniques to account for self-selection bias. We find evidence of a significant U-shaped pattern of the wage gap, according to both definitions, with non-routine workers earning always significantly more than routine workers. Results show that workers' characteristics fully explain the gap in the case of perceived routine, while they account for no more than 50% of the gap across the distribution in the case of actual routine. Thus, results highlight the importance of taking into account workers' perceptions when analyzing determinants of wage inequality. Overall, we confirm that, after leading to job polarization, RBTC induced a similar polarizing effects on wages in Italy. |
| Keywords: | Blinder/Oaxaca,Counterfactual distribution,Italy,Non-parametric methodology,Quantile regression,Routine,Semi-parametric methodology,Wage inequality |
| JEL: | J31 J82 C14 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:763&r=all |
| By: | Piracha, Matloob; Tani, Massimiliano; Cheng, Zhiming; Wang, Ben Zhe |
| Abstract: | The objective of this paper is to analyse how immigrants' ethnic identity correlates with their labour market outcomes. More precisely, we estimate the role of ethnic identity in employment, wages, under-employment (i.e., they would prefer to work more hours but are not given the opportunity), three measures of job satisfaction, overeducation and wages. We further explore whether economic downturn has a differentiated impact on our measures. Using Australian longitudinal data, we find that ethnic identity strongly is associated with employment and wages as well a number of job satisfaction measures. We then split our data and repeat the estimations for before and after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09. We find important differences in the way ethnic identity is associated with different measures of labour market outcomes under different economic conditions. Finally, we explore the mechanisms through which some of results could be explained. |
| Keywords: | Ethnic Identity,Assimilation,Employment,Wages,Job Quality,Overeducation |
| JEL: | F22 J15 J16 J21 Z13 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:767&r=all |
| By: | Wang, Xintong; Flores, Carlos A.; Flores-Lagunes, Alfonso |
| Abstract: | We analyze the short- and long-term effects of the U.S. Vietnam-era military service on veterans' health outcomes using a restricted version of the National Health Interview Survey 1974-2013 and employing the draft lotteries as an instrumental variable (IV). We start by assessing whether the draft lotteries, which have been used as an IV in prior literature, satisfy the exclusion restriction by placing bounds on its net or direct effect on the health outcomes of individuals who are nonveterans regardless of their draft eligibility (the "never takers"). Since we do not find evidence against the validity of the IV, we assume its validity in conducting inference on the health effects of military service for individuals who comply with the draft-lotteries assignment (the "compliers"), as well as for those who volunteer for enlistment (the "always takers"). The causal analysis for volunteers, who represent over 75% of veterans, is novel in this literature that typically focuses on the compliers. Since the effect for volunteers is not point-identified, we employ bounds that rely on a mild mean weak monotonicity assumption. We examine a large array of health outcomes and behaviors, including mortality, up to 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War. We do not find consistent evidence of detrimental health effects on compliers, in line with prior literature. For volunteers, however, we document that their estimated bounds show statistically significant detrimental health effects that appear 20 years after the end of the conflict. As a group, veterans experience similar statistically significant detrimental health effects from military service. These findings have implications for policies regarding compensation and health care of veterans after service. |
| Keywords: | Veteran health,Treatment effects,Bounds,Instrumental variables |
| JEL: | I12 C31 C36 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:764&r=all |
| By: | Paul Jackson (National University of Singapore); Victor Ortego-Marti (Department of Economics, University of California Riverside) |
| Abstract: | We integrate the SIR epidemiology model into a search and matching framework with skill loss during unemployment. As infections spread, fewer jobs are created, skills deteriorate and TFP declines. The equilibrium is not efficient due to infection and skill composition externalities. Job creation increases infections due to increased interactions among workers. However, lower job creation decreases TFP due to skill loss. A three-month lockdown causes a 0.56% decline in TFP, i.e. nearly 50% of productivity losses in past recessions. We study the efficient allocation given the trade-off between both externalities and show that quantitatively the skill composition externality is sizable. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19; Skill loss; TFP; Search and matching; Unemployment; Pandemics |
| JEL: | E24 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucr:wpaper:202104&r=all |
| By: | John Coglianese (Federal Reserve Board of Governors); Brendan M. Price (Federal Reserve Board of Governors) |
| Abstract: | Joblessness is highly seasonal. To analyze how households adapt to seasonal joblessness, we introduce a measure of seasonal work interruptions premised on the idea that a seasonal worker will tend to exit employment around the same time each year. We show that an excess share of prime-age U.S. workers experience recurrent separations spaced exactly 12 months apart. These separations coincide with aggregate seasonal downturns and are concentrated in seasonally volatile industries. Examining workers most prone to seasonal work interruptions, we find that these workers incur large earnings losses during the off-season. Lost earnings are 1) driven mainly by repeated separations from the same employer, 2) not recouped at other firms, 3) partly offset by unemployment benefits, and 4) amplified by concurrent drops in partners’ earnings. On net, household income falls by about $0.80 for each $1 lost in own earnings. |
| Keywords: | seasonality, seasonal employment, job loss, household income, household labor dynamics, unemployment, unemployment insurance |
| JEL: | D10 E32 J63 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:upj:weupjo:20-337&r=all |
| By: | M Niaz Asadullah (Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya); Nazia Mansoor (INTO City, University of London); Teresa Randazzo (Department of Economics, University Of Venice Cà Foscari); Zaki Wahhaj (School of Economics, University of Kent) |
| Abstract: | Historically, son preference has been widely prevalent in South Asia, manifested in the form of skewed sex ratios, gender differentials in child mortality, and worse educational investments in daughters versus sons. In the present study, we show, using data from a purposefully designed nationally representative survey for Bangladesh that, among women of childbearing age, son bias in stated fertility preferences has weakened and there is an emerging preference for gender balance. We examine a number of different hypotheses for the decline in son preference, including the increasing availability of female employment in the manufacturing sector, increased female education, and the decline of joint family living. Using survival analysis, we show that, in contrast to stated fertility preferences, actual fertility decisions are still shaped by son preference. |
| Keywords: | Fertility, gender bias, birth spacing, female employment, Bangladesh |
| JEL: | J11 J13 J16 O12 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ven:wpaper:2020:24&r=all |
| By: | Suppa, Nicolai |
| Abstract: | This chapter summarizes the latest state of the art in economic research on unemployment and subjective well-being. Outcomes covered are general life satisfaction, affective well-being, and mental health. Special attention is paid to empirical evidence as obtained from popular panel data sets. Both prominent methodological issues and substantive themes are introduced. Topics covered include the estimation of non-pecuniary costs of unemployment, unemployment over time, the role of others' unemployment, spill-over effects, and re-employment, among others. |
| Keywords: | unemployment,subjective well-being,life satisfaction,happiness,mental health |
| JEL: | I31 J60 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:760&r=all |
| By: | Dukes, Ruth; Streeck, Wolfgang |
| Abstract: | This paper revisits the notions of contract and status found in classical sociology, legal theory, and labour law. Adopting an historical perspective, it explores the fragmentation of the status of industrial citizenship during the neoliberal period and discusses the enduring usefulness of the status/contract distinction in analyzing current trends in the regulation of working relations, including the spread of "gig" or platform-mediated work. Elements of status, it is argued, must always be present if work is to be performed and paid for as the parties require it. Claims to the contrary - for example, that the gig economy creates a labour market without search frictions and only minimal transaction costs: contracts without status - assume an undersocialized model of (monadic) social action that has no basis in the reality of social life (Durkheim, Weber). Still, status may come in a variety of forms that are more or less desirable from the perspective of workers, businesses, and society at large. The paper traces what it conceives as the privatization of status via contracts between employers and workers under the pressure of marketization and dominated by corporate hierarchies. Towards the end of the twentieth century, sociologists observed the division of workers into two groups or classes - core (with relatively well-paid and secure employment) and peripheral (low-paid and insecure). Thirty years later, gross inequalities of wealth and conceptions of the neoliberal self as ever-improving, ever-perfectible, are combining to create novel forms of status not fully anticipated by the literature. |
| Keywords: | contract and status,corporatism,entrepreneurialism,gig economy,industrial citizenship,industrial democracy,master and servant,precarity,industrielle Bürgerrechte,industrielle Demokratie,Korporatismus,master and servant,Prekarität,Unternehmertum,Vertrag und Status |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:2013&r=all |
| By: | Chakraborty, Tanika; Pandey, Manish |
| Abstract: | We use panel data for rural Kyrgyzstan to examine households' international migration response when faced with shocks. Using a household fixed effects regression model, we find that while a drought shock increases the likelihood of migration, winter and earthquake shocks reduce the likelihood of migration. We use a simple theoretical framework to illustrate the trade-off between two effects of a shock for a household: loss of income and increase in the need of labor services. We show that migration increases when the former effect of a shock dominates, it reduces when the latter effect dominates. We explore these mechanisms by examining how the migration-response to shocks changes in the presence of alternate coping mechanisms and by evaluating the effect of shocks on a household's decision to send and recall a migrant member. We find that when households have easier access to informal finance the migration-response is muted only for shocks for which the adverse income effect dominates. Our findings also suggest that while shocks for which the loss of income effect dominates have a greater effect on the decision to send a migrant, shocks for which the need of labor services effect dominates only affect the decision to recall a migrant. These findings provide evidence in favor of the proposed mechanisms through which shocks affect temporary migration. |
| Keywords: | Temporary migration,shocks,insurance,informal finance,Asia,Kyrgyzstan |
| JEL: | J61 O15 O16 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:759&r=all |
| By: | Waitkus, Nora; Minkus, Lara |
| Abstract: | This study examines the role of occupational class in the Gender Wealth Gap (GWG). Despite rising interest in gender differences in wealth, the central role of occupations in restricting and enabling its accumulation has received less scrutiny thus far. Drawing on the German Socio-economic Panel, we employ quantile regressions and decomposition techniques. We find explanatory power of occupational class for the gender wealth gap, which operates despite accounting for other labour-market-relevant parameters, such as income, tenure, and full-time work experience at all points of the wealth distribution. Wealth gaps by gender vary between and within occupational classes. Particularly, women's under-representation among the self-employed and over-representation among socio-cultural professions explain the GWG. Our study thus adds another dimension of stratification - occupational class - to the discussion of the gendered distribution of wealth. |
| Keywords: | gender wealth gap; inequality; gender; wealth; occupational class |
| JEL: | R14 J01 N0 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:108206&r=all |
| By: | Jha, Chandan Kumar; Sarangi, Sudipta |
| Abstract: | This paper argues that the availability of arable land in antiquity created gender norms that continue to affect current gender inequality. We show that countries with greater ancestral arable land have lower levels of gender inequality, better female reproductive health outcomes, and greater female labor force participation. Using more than 80,000 individual-level observations from over 70 countries, we find that it is positively associated with attitudes regarding women’s rights and abilities. We show that the primary mechanism driving this relationship is the shaping of norms that promote female labor force participation. |
| Keywords: | gender inequality, historical factors, ancestral arable land, cultural norms |
| JEL: | D03 J16 N30 Z1 |
| Date: | 2020–11–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:104336&r=all |
| By: | Maria Marchenko (Department of Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business); Hendrik Sonnabend (Department of Economics and Business Administration, University of Hagen) |
| Abstract: | Using comprehensive data from German visual artists, we provide strong empirical evidence of a gender gap in revenues. We find that female artists have significantly lower revenues from the art market and are about ten percentage points less likely to remain in the top category over three years. This gap persists in the most prominent art forms and is more pronounced for younger artists. Only 30 to 40 percent of these gaps can be explained by differences in observable characteristics. We also find differences in the networking behaviour of the artists of different genders: females are connecting more, whereas males tend to create tighter links, suggesting the importance of the latter for the art market. |
| Keywords: | art market, artists’ earnings, gender gaps |
| JEL: | J4 J16 Z11 |
| Date: | 2020–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwwuw:wuwp307&r=all |
| By: | Karen Eggleston ⓡ; Yong Suk Lee ⓡ; Toshiaki Iizuka |
| Abstract: | In one of the first studies of service sector robotics using establishment-level data, we study the impact of robots on staffing in Japanese nursing homes, using geographic variation in robot subsidies as an instrumental variable. We find that robot adoption increases employment by augmenting the number of care workers and nurses on flexible employment contracts, and decreases difficulty in staff retention. Robot adoption also reduces the monthly wages of regular nurses, consistent with reduced burden of care. Our findings suggest that the impact of robots may not be detrimental to labor and may remedy challenges posed by rapidly aging populations. |
| JEL: | I11 J14 J23 O30 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28322&r=all |
| By: | Diogo Geraldes; Arno Riedl; Martin Strobel |
| Abstract: | The gender gap in income and leadership positions in many domains of our society is an undisputed pervasive phenomenon. One explanation for the disadvantaged position of women put forward in the economic and psychology literature is the weaker response of women to competitive incentives. Despite the large amount of literature trying to explain this fact, the precise mechanisms behind the gender difference in competitive responsiveness are still not fully uncovered. In this paper, we use laboratory experiments to study the potential role of stereotype threat on the response of men and women to competitive incentives in mixed-gender competition. We use a real effort math task to induce an implicit stereotype threat against women in one treatment. In additional treatments we, respectively, reinforce this stereotype threat and induce a stereotype threat against men. In contrast to much of the literature we do not observe that women are less competitive than men, neither when there is an implicit nor when there is an explicit stereotype threat against women. We attribute this to two factors which differentiates our experiment from previous ones. We control, first, for inter-individual performance differences using a within-subject design, and, second, for risk differences between non-competitive and competitive environments by making the former risky. We do find an adverse stereotype threat effect on the performance of men when there is an explicit stereotype threat against them. In that case any positive performance effect of competition is nullified by the stereotype threat. Overall, our results indicate that a stereotype threat has negative competitive performance effects only if there is information contradicting an existing stereotype. This suggests that the appropriate intervention to prevent the adverse effect of stereotype threat in performance is to avoid any information referring to the stereotype. |
| Keywords: | competitiveness, gender gaps, stereotype threat, experiment |
| JEL: | C91 D01 J16 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8809&r=all |