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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Non, Arjan (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Rohde, Ingrid M.T. (Istanbul Bilgi University); de Grip, Andries (ROA, Maastricht University); Dohmen, Thomas (University of Bonn and IZA) |
| Abstract: | We conduct a discrete choice experiment to investigate how the mission of high-tech companies affects job attractiveness and contributes to self-selection of science and engineering graduates who differ in prosocial attitudes. We characterize mission by whether or not the company combines its profit motive with a mission on innovation or corporate social responsibility (CSR). Furthermore, we vary job design (e.g. autonomy) and contractible job attributes (e.g. job security). We find that companies with a mission on innovation or CSR are considered more attractive. Women and individuals who are more altruistic and less competitive feel particularly attracted to such companies. |
| Keywords: | mission of the company, sorting, discrete choice experiment, job characteristics, social preferences |
| JEL: | J81 J82 M52 |
| Date: | 2021–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14836&r= |
| By: | Scott Daewon Kim; Petra Moser |
| Abstract: | How do children affect women in science? We investigate this question using rich biographical data, linked with patents and publications, for 83,000 American scientists in 1956 at the height of the baby boom. Our analyses reveal a unique life-cycle pattern of productivity for mothers. While other scientists peak in their mid-thirties, mothers become more productive after age 35 and maintain high productivity in their 40s and 50s. Event studies show that the output of mothers increases after 15 years of marriage, while other scientists peak in the first 10 years. Differences in the timing of productivity have important implications for tenure and participation. Just 27% of mothers who are academic scientists get tenure, compared with 48% of fathers and 46% of women without children. Mothers face comparable tenure rates to other assistant professors for the first six years but fall behind afterwards, suggesting that they face higher standards of early productivity. Mothers who survive in science are extremely positively selected: Compared with other married women, mothers patent (publish) 2.5 (1.4) times more before the median age at marriage. Compared with men, female scientists are more educated, half as likely to marry, one-third as likely to have children, but half as likely to survive in science. Employment records indicate that a generation of baby boom mothers was lost to science. |
| JEL: | J13 J16 J24 N3 N32 O3 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29436&r= |
| By: | Berno Buechel; Selina Gangl; Martin Huber |
| Abstract: | We analyze the impact of obtaining a residence permit on foreign workers' labor market and residential attachment. To overcome the usually severe selection issues, we exploit a unique migration lottery that randomly assigns access to residence permits for workers with an employment contract in Liechtenstein, which is situated centrally in Europe. Using an instrumental variable approach, our results show that lottery compliers raise their employment probability in Liechtenstein by on average 24 percentage points across outcome periods (2008 to 2018) as a result of receiving a permit. Relatedly, their activity level and employment duration in Liechtenstein increase by on average 20 percentage points and 1.15 years, respectively, over the outcome window. These substantial and statistically significant effects are predominantly driven by individuals not (yet) working in Liechtenstein prior to the lottery rather than by previous cross-border commuters, but even for the latter group, positive employment effects emerge in the longer run. Indeed, we find both the labor market and residential effects to be persistent even several years after the lottery with no sign of fading out. These results suggest that granting resident permits to foreign workers can be effective to foster labor supply, despite the alternative of commuting cross-border from adjacent regions. |
| Keywords: | international migration, cross-border commuting, natural experiment, lottery |
| JEL: | F22 J61 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9390&r= |
| By: | Adjemian, Stéphane; Karamé, Frédéric; Langot, François |
| Abstract: | This study demonstrates that nonlinearities, coupled with worker heterogeneity, make it possible to reconcile the Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides model with the labor market dynamics observed in the United States. Nonlinearities, induced by firings and downward real wage rigidities, magnify adjustments in quantities, whereas heterogeneity concentrates them on the low-paid workers’ submarkets. The model fits the job finding, job separation, and unemployment rates well. It also explains the Beveridge curve’s dynamics and the cyclicality of the involuntary component of separations. The estimated dynamics of the aggregate shock that allows generating the US labor market fluctuations has a correlation with unemployment that changes of sign during the 80s. We also show that the differences in adjustment between submarkets predicted by the model are consistent with the data of job flows by educational attainment. |
| Keywords: | search and matching; unemployment dynamics; nonlinearities; particle filter; maximum likelihood estimation |
| JEL: | C51 E24 E32 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpm:dynare:071&r= |
| By: | Agurto, M.; Bazan, M.; Hari, S.; Sarangi, S. |
| Abstract: | Gender disparities in STEM fields participation are a major cause of concern for policymakers around the world. In addition to talent misallocation, low female enrollment rates in STEM careers contribute to gender-based inequalities in earnings and wealth, given the higher average level of earnings in these fields. This paper studies the effects of exposure to role models on female preferences for STEM majors. We conduct a randomized control trial where female senior students currently enrolled in engineering programs at an elite private university in Peru give talks about their experiences at randomly selected high schools. We find that exposure to this treatment increases high ability female students' preferences for engineering programs by 14 percentage points. The effect is only statistically significant for the subgroup of female students with baseline math scores in the top 25 percentile, and who reside close to the city where the role models' university is located. We also find positive but smaller effects on "low ability" male students. In a context where females are discouraged from enrolling in STEM fields, our results have important policy implications. |
| Keywords: | Enrollment gender gap,field experiment,role models,Higher Education,career choices,stereotypes |
| JEL: | C93 I23 I24 J16 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:975&r= |
| By: | Francisco Cabrera-Herández (Universidad de Monterrey and Center for Institutional Studies); María Padilla-Romo (Department of Economics, University of Tennessee) |
| Abstract: | Caregiving responsibilities and the lack of family-friendly policies often prevent women from participating in the labor market. This study analyzes the effects of an implicit childcare subsidy—through longer school days—on the labor supply of grandmothers in the context of Mexico’s full-time schools program. Since 2007, this program has gradually increased the school day’s length by three-and-a-half hours in public elementary schools. We document how the availability of full-time schools in a municipality affects grandmothers’ decisions to participate in the labor market. These effects are estimated by using data collected through a rotating panel design and within-individual variation in full-time schools’ availability. Childcare subsidies through longer school days increase grandmothers’ labor force participation and employment, especially in the informal market. |
| Keywords: | Childcare; Full-time Schools; Childrearing; Grandmothers; Labor Supply |
| JEL: | J13 J16 J22 |
| Date: | 2021–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ten:wpaper:2021-03&r= |
| By: | Lonsky, Jakub; Ruiz, Isabel; Vargas-Silva, Carlos |
| Abstract: | The role of ethnic immigrant networks in facilitating international trade is a well-established phenomenon in the literature. However, it is less clear whether this relationship extends to illegal trade and unauthorized immigrants. In this paper, we tackle this question by focusing on the case of the heroin trade and unauthorized Chinese immigrants in the early 1990s United States. Between mid-1980s and mid-1990s, Southeast Asia became the dominant source of heroin in the US. Heroin from this region was trafficked into the US by Chinese organized criminals, whose presence across the country can be approximated by the location of unauthorized Chinese immigrants. Instrumenting for the unauthorized Chinese immigrant enclaves in 1990 with their 1900 counterpart, we first show that Chinese presence in a community led to a sizeable increase in local opiates-related arrests, a proxy for local heroin markets. This effect is driven by arrests for sale/manufacturing of the drugs. Next, we examine the consequences of Chinese-trafficked heroin by looking at its impact on US Vietnam-era veterans - a group particularly vulnerable to heroin addiction in the early 1990s. Using a triple-difference estimation, we find mostly small but statistically significant detrimental effects on labor market outcomes of Vietnam veterans residing in unauthorized Chinese enclaves in 1990. |
| Keywords: | Trade networks,heroin markets,Vietnam veterans,labor market outcomes |
| JEL: | F16 F22 J15 K42 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:974&r= |
| By: | Campos, Nauro F. (University College London); Coricelli, Fabrizio (Paris School of Economics); Franceschi, Emanuele (Paris School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the productivity effects of integration deepening. The identification strategy exploits the 1995 European Union (EU) enlargement, when all candidate countries joined the Single Market but one — Norway — did not join the EU. Our synthetic difference-in-differences estimates on sectoral and regional data suggest had Norway chosen deeper integration, the average Norwegian region would have experienced an increase in yearly productivity growth of about 0.6 percentage points. This method also helps determining the sources of heterogeneity, apparently inherent to integration, highlighting higher costs of the missed deeper integration for more peripheral regions and industrial sector. |
| Keywords: | institutional integration, economic integration, productivity growth, European Union, European Economic Area |
| JEL: | C33 F15 F55 O43 O52 |
| Date: | 2021–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14834&r= |
| By: | Gordon H. Hanson; Chen Liu |
| Abstract: | Job choice by high-skilled foreign-born workers in the US correlates strongly with country of origin. We apply a Fréchet-Roy model of occupational choice to evaluate the causes of immigrant sorting. In a gravity specification, we find that revealed comparative advantage in the US is stronger for workers from countries with higher education quality in occupations that are more intensive in cognitive reasoning, and for workers from countries that are more linguistically similar to the US in occupations that are more intensive in communication. Our findings hold for immigrants who arrived in the US at age 18 or older (who received their K-12 education abroad) but not for immigrants who arrived in the US as children (who received their K-12 education domestically). We obtain similar results for immigrant sorting in Canada, which supports our interpretation that origin-country education quality, rather than US immigration policy, is what drives sorting patterns. In counterfactual analysis, we evaluate the consequences of reallocating visas for college-educated immigrants according to origin-country education quality. |
| JEL: | F22 I25 J61 O15 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29418&r= |
| By: | Janet Currie; Esmée Zwiers |
| Abstract: | Using data on over 420,000 first time Dutch mothers, we examine the effects of postpartum antidepressant use on a wide range of maternal outcomes including further treatment for severe mental illness, labor market outcomes, and family formation. We exploit rules which state that Dutch general practitioners (GPs) must be available to make house calls to their patients. In practice many therefore use postal code boundaries to limit their practices. We instrument a postpartum woman’s receipt of antidepressants with the propensity to prescribe antidepressants to women aged 46 to 65 among GPs in her postal code. Ordinary Least Squares estimates suggest highly negative effects of postpartum treatment with antidepressants, but this is mainly due to selection into treatment. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that the marginal patient treated with postpartum antidepressants is much more likely to continue taking antidepressants long-term, with little evidence of effects on other outcomes. |
| JEL: | I1 J19 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29439&r= |
| By: | Elsby, Michael W.L. (University of Edinburgh); Smith, Jennifer C. (University of Warwick, CAGE, Migration Advisory Committee); Wadsworth, Jonathan (Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE, CReAM at UCL and IZA Bonn) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the role of population flows on labour market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations in the United Kingdom. Population flows are large, and cyclical, driven first by the maturation of baby boom cohorts in the 1980s, and latterly by immigration in the 2000s. New measures of labour market flows by migrant status uncover both the flow origins of disparities in the levels and cyclicalities of immigrant and native labour market outcomes, as well as their more recent convergence. A novel dynamic accounting framework reveals that population flows have played a non-trivial role in the volatility of labour markets among both the UK-born and, especially, immigrants. |
| Keywords: | Immigration ; worker flows ; labour market dynamics JEL Classification: E24 ; J6 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:1383&r= |
| By: | Michael Peters; Conor Walsh |
| Abstract: | Population growth has declined markedly in almost all major economies since the 1970s. We argue this trend has important consequences for the process of firm dynamics and aggregate growth. We study a rich semi-endogenous growth model of firm dynamics, and show analytically that a decline in population growth reduces creative destruction, increases average firm size and concentration, raises market power and misallocation, and lowers aggregate growth in the long-run. We also show lower population growth has positive effects on the level of productivity, making the short-run welfare impacts ambiguous. In a quantitative application to the U.S, we find that the slowdown in population growth since the 1980s and the projected continuation of this trend accounts for a substantial share of the fall in the entry and exit rates and the increase in firm size. By contrast, the impact on markups is modest. The effect on aggregate growth is positive for around two decades, before turning negative thereafter. |
| JEL: | J11 L11 O3 O4 O44 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29424&r= |
| By: | Anne-Lise Breivik; Ana Costa-Ramón |
| Abstract: | We provide novel evidence on the impact of a child's health shock on parental labor market outcomes. To identify the causal effect, we leverage long panels of high-quality Finnish and Norwegian administrative data and exploit variation in the timing of the health shock. We do this by comparing parents across families in similar parental and child age cohorts whose children experienced a health shock at different ages. We show that these families have very similar characteristics and were following parallel trends before the event. This allows us to use a simple difference-in-differences model: we construct counterfactuals for treated households with families who experience the same shock a few years later. We find a sharp break in parents' earnings trajectories that becomes visible just after the shock. The negative effect is persistent and stronger for mothers than for fathers. We also document a substantial impact on parents' mental well-being. Our results suggest that the effect on maternal labor earnings results from the combination of the increased time needed to care for the child and the worsening of mothers' mental health. |
| Keywords: | Children, health, mortality, parents, earnings, labor supply, mental health |
| JEL: | I10 I12 |
| Date: | 2021–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:econwp:399&r= |
| By: | Jorge Alvarez; Carlo Pizzinelli |
| Abstract: | This paper documents the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns on the Colombian labor market using household micro-data. About a quarter of employment was temporarily disrupted at the height of the first pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020. Women, the young, and the less educated were the most affected groups. Since then, a remarkable recovery, led by a rebound in informal employment, has taken place. By adjusting both employment levels and hours faster, the informal sector acted as an important margin of adjustment, particularly in those industries most affected by the first lockdown. The informal sector also appears to have played a role in decreasing the sensitivity of aggregate employment to more recent lockdowns in 2021, as the economy has learned to cope with pandemic restrictions, although the possibility of higher informality rates becoming embedded remains an substantial downside risk for long-term productivity. |
| Keywords: | Colombia, COVID-19, Labor Markets, Informality. |
| Date: | 2021–09–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2021/235&r= |
| By: | Christina D. Romer; David H. Romer |
| Abstract: | This paper considers fiscal policy during the pandemic through the lens of optimal social insurance. We develop a simple framework to analyze how government taxes and transfers could mimic the insurance against pandemic income losses that people would like to have had. Permutations of the framework provide insight into how unemployment insurance should be structured, when and how much hazard pay is called for, and whether fiscal policy should aim just to redistribute income or also to stimulate aggregate demand during a pandemic. When we use the insights from the model to evaluate unemployment insurance measures taken during the pandemic, we find that some, but far from all, of the implications of the social insurance framework were followed. In the case of hazard pay, we find that the proposal for a national program (the never-implemented HEROES Act) was both broader and more generous than a social insurance perspective would call for. We suggest that the social insurance perspective on fiscal policy is likely to become increasingly relevant as pandemics and climate-related natural disasters become more common causes of unemployment and recessions. |
| JEL: | E62 E65 H21 H31 I18 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29419&r= |
| By: | Joshua Angrist; Michal Kolesár |
| Abstract: | Two-stage least squares estimates in heavily over-identified instrumental variables (IV) models can be misleadingly close to the corresponding ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates when many instruments are weak. Just-identified (just-ID) IV estimates using a single instrument are also biased, but the importance of weak-instrument bias in just-ID IV applications remains contentious. We argue that in microeconometric applications, just-ID IV estimators can typically be treated as all but unbiased and that the usual inference strategies are likely to be adequate. The argument begins with contour plots for confidence interval coverage as a function of instrument strength and explanatory variable endogeneity. These show undercoverage in excess of 5% only for endogeneity beyond that seen even when IV and OLS estimates differ by an order of magnitude. Three widely cited microeconometric applications are used to explain why endogeneity is likely low enough for IV estimates to be reliable. We then show that an estimator that’s unbiased given a population first-stage sign restriction has bias exceeding that of IV when the restriction is imposed on the data. But screening on the sign of the estimated first stage is shown to halve the median bias of conventional IV without reducing coverage. To the extent that sign-screening is already part of empirical workflows, reported IV estimates enjoy the minimal bias of sign-screened just-ID IV. |
| JEL: | C21 C26 C31 C36 J08 |
| Date: | 2021–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29417&r= |