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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Maridueña-Larrea, Ángel; Martín-Román, Ángel L. |
| Abstract: | This research explores the long-term equilibrium relationship between unemployment and labour force participation rates for six selected countries in Latin America at both aggregate and gender-disaggregated levels. Cointegration analysis focused on the study of time series is used to validate the unemployment invariance hypothesis and explore added and discouraged worker effects in depth. The results suggest mixed dynamics for the aggregate model; however, a clear gender bias is revealed towards the added worker effect for women, while the discouraged worker effect is confirmed for men. The validity of the unemployment invariance hypothesis in several countries appears to reflect some rigidities that prevent the improvement of nations’ labour markets, exposing issues that economic policies must strategically address. |
| Keywords: | cointegration; added worker effect; discouraged worker effect; unemployment invariance; unemployment rate; labour force participation rate |
| JEL: | C10 E24 J21 J64 J68 |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:115966&r=lab |
| By: | Bonaccolto-Töpfer, Marina (University of Genova); Schnabel, Claus (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) |
| Abstract: | Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of workers' gross wages, this finding suggests that it pays off to be a union member. Our results show that the wage premium differs substantially between various occupations and educational groups, but not between men and women. We do not find that union wage premia are higher for those occupations and workers which constitute the core of union membership. Rather, unions seem to care about disadvantaged workers and pursue a wider social agenda. |
| Keywords: | union membership, collective bargaining, union wage premium, Germany |
| JEL: | J31 J53 |
| Date: | 2023–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15844&r=lab |
| By: | Pedro Portugal; John T. Addison; Pedro Raposo |
| Abstract: | Using a unique linked employer-employee dataset Portuguese dataset, the Quadros de Pessoal, 1986-2020, this paper offers an extension of the standard Mincerian model of wage determination by allowing for different returns to experience and tenure in the sequence of jobs that constitute a career of up to ten jobs. In addition to such heterogeneity, we also allow for the possibility of a distinct wage hike each time workers change jobs. We report that workers achieve the highest returns to experience on the second job. For its part, the returns to tenure are sizable, most notably on the first job. The sequence of wage uplifts attendant upon job changes reflects the returns to job search investments over the life cycle. They shape the curvature of the earnings profile, with the returns to job mobility tending to decline over the sequence of jobs. Further, the ability to distinguish the order of the jobs held by the worker enabled us to disentangle the returns to experience from those to tenure in a model with a job match fixed effects in a more satisfactory manner than the conventional routes followed in the literature. In a final application, we investigate how worker, firm, and job match heterogeneity influence the returns to mobility, experience, and tenure. The returns to job mobility were found to partially reflect sorting into better job matches and into firms offering more generous wage policies. Also, the estimated returns to experience are upwardly biased because more productive worker tend to be more experienced. However, none of the three components of the job match fixed effect had a clear impact on the returns to tenure. |
| JEL: | C23 J31 J63 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w202221&r=lab |
| By: | Urs Fischbacher; Dorothea Kübler; Robert Stüber |
| Abstract: | Many occupations and industries are highly segregated with respect to gender. This segregation could be due to perceived job-specific productivity differences between men and women. It could also result from the belief that single-gender teams perform better. We investigate the two explanations in a lab experiment with students and in an online experiment with personnel managers. The subjects bet on the productivity of teams of different gender compositions in tasks that differ with respect to gender stereotypes. We obtain similar results in both samples. Women are picked more often for the stereotypically female task and men more often for the stereotypically male task. Subjects do not believe that homogeneous teams perform better but bet more on diverse teams, especially in the task with complementarities. Elicited expectations about the bets of others reveal that subjects expect the effect of the gender stereotypes of tasks but underestimate others’ bets on diversity. |
| Keywords: | gender segregation, hiring decisions, teams, discrimination, stereotypes |
| JEL: | C91 D90 J16 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10187&r=lab |
| By: | OECD |
| Abstract: | While still in its infancy, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in labour market matching, whether by private recruiters, public and private employment services, or online jobs boards and platforms. Applications range from writing job descriptions, applicant sourcing, analysing CVs, chat bots, interview schedulers, shortlisting tools, all the way to facial and voice analysis during interviews. While many tools promise to bring efficiencies and cost savings, they could also improve the quality of matching and jobseeker experience, and even identify and mitigate human bias. There are nonetheless some barriers to a greater adoption of these tools. Some barriers relate to organisation and people readiness, while others reflect concerns about the technology and how it is used, including: robustness, bias, privacy, transparency and explainability. The present paper reviews the literature and some recent policy developments in this field, while bringing new evidence from interviews held with key stakeholders. |
| Keywords: | Artificial Intelligence, Employment Services, Human Resources, Matching, Recruitment |
| JEL: | J01 J20 J60 J70 |
| Date: | 2023–01–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:elsaab:284-en&r=lab |
| By: | OECD |
| Abstract: | Sweden is undergoing a major reform of its public employment service (PES) Arbetsförmedlingen, shifting its main role from providing in-house services towards monitoring of providers and working with different stakeholders in guiding and implementing labour market policies. At the same time, the PES is undergoing a significant restructuring, resulting in a downscaling of physical presence across the country and an increased digitalisation of services. To support this reform and services to jobseekers across urban and rural settings, this report a describes the main features of the Swedish labour market and employment system and analyses the challenges of the reform from a local perspective. In light of international examples, it outlines policy options for contracting services to ensure coverage in all places and for all jobseekers, managing the balance between physical and digital services, and coordinating services at the local level. |
| Keywords: | Local Labour Markets, Public Employment Services, Reform |
| JEL: | H53 H75 J48 J68 P11 R58 |
| Date: | 2023–01–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:cfeaaa:2023/03-en&r=lab |
| By: | Alexandra Solovyeva; W. Raphael Lam |
| Abstract: | The COVID-19 pandemic had posed a dramatic impact on labor markets across Europe. Forceful fiscal responses have prevented an otherwise sharper contraction. Many countries introduced or expanded job-retention schemes to preserve jobs and support households. This paper uses a microsimulation approach (EUROMOD) and household data to assess the effectiveness of those schemes in stabilizing household income during the pandemic across European countries. Empirical evidence shows that job-retention schemes were effective in stabilizing income and, along with other measures, absorbed nearly 80 percent of market income shocks—almost doubling the extent of the automatic stabilization of the pre-pandemic tax and benefit systems. The large effects are related to the widespread use and scaling up of those schemes and a deep but short-lived disruption to labor markets during the pandemic. Along with other fiscal support measures, job-retention schemes helped mitigate the rise in the unemployment rate, by about 3 percentage points, and income inequality during the pandemic. Our results show that job-retention schemes were largely targeted, in which households more vulnerable to income losses, such as lower-income families, youth, and low-skilled workers, are able to stabilize their income. |
| Keywords: | Job-retention schemes; COVID-19 pandemic; short-time work; inequality; income stabilization; Okun’s Law |
| Date: | 2023–01–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2023/003&r=lab |
| By: | Sandra Gomes; Pascal Jacquinot; Matija Lozej |
| Abstract: | Differences in labour market institutions and regulations between countries of the monetary union can cause divergent responses even to a common shock. We augment a multi-country model of the euro area with search and matching framework that differs across Ricardian and hand-to-mouth households. In this setting, we investigate the implications of crosscountry heterogeneity in labour market institutions for the conduct of monetary policy in a monetary union. We compute responses to an expansionary demand shock and to an inflationary supply shock under the Taylor rule, asymmetric unemployment targeting, and average inflation targeting. For each rule we distinguish between cases with zero weight on the unemployment gap and a negative response to rising unemployment Across all rules, responding to unemployment leads to lower losses of employment and higher inflation. Responding to unemployment reduces cross-country differences within the monetary union and the differences in consumption levels of rich and poor households. |
| JEL: | E24 E32 E43 E52 F45 |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w202301&r=lab |
| By: | Mr. Alain Jousten; Mario Mansour; Irena Jankulov Suljagic; Charles Vellutini |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how labor taxation (personal income taxes and social security contributions) in the Western Balkan contributes to labor market outcomes such as high informality and a significant gender gap in participation rates. We find that limited progressivity combined with high tax wedge on low incomes poses a major twin equity-efficiency challenge in the region, resulting in low redistributive capacity and inadequate incentives to enter the job market. Policy implications are discussed with a view to alleviating the excessively high tax wedges on low incomes, while improving progressivity of income taxation. |
| Keywords: | Western Balkan; labor taxation; labor tax wedge; personal income tax; corporate income tax; social security contributions; income taxation; SSC reduction; employer SSCs; Labor taxes; Tax wedge; Wages; Labor markets; Europe |
| Date: | 2022–12–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2022/239&r=lab |
| By: | Monica P. Bhatt; Sara B. Heller; Max Kapustin; Marianne Bertrand; Christopher Blattman |
| Abstract: | Gun violence is the most pressing public safety problem in American cities. We report results from a randomized controlled trial (N=2, 456) of a community-researcher partnership—the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI Chicago)—which provided 18 months of a supported job alongside cognitive behavioral therapy and other social supports. Algorithmic and human referral methods identified men with strikingly high scope for gun violence reduction: for every 100 people in the control group, there were over 11 shooting and homicide victimizations during the 20-month outcome period. Take-up and retention rates were comparable to programs for people facing far lower mortality risk. There is no statistically significant change in an index combining three measures of serious violence, the study's primary outcome. But one component, shooting and homicide arrests, shows a suggestive decline of 64 percent (p=0.15). Because shootings are so costly, READI generates social savings between $174, 000 and $858, 000 per participant, implying a benefit-cost ratio between 3.8 and 18.8 to 1. Moreover, participants referred by outreach workers—a pre-specified subgroup—show enormous declines in both arrests and victimizations for shootings and homicides that remain statistically significant even after multiple testing adjustments. These declines are concentrated among outreach referrals with high predicted risk, suggesting that human and algorithmic targeting may work better together. |
| JEL: | C53 C93 I38 J08 K42 |
| Date: | 2023–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30852&r=lab |
| By: | Jon D. Wisman; Nicholas Reksten |
| Abstract: | Nationalism is widely understood as a product of the nineteenth century, the doctrinal seeds for which were planted by the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution. It is an extension of tribalism to the nation and is understandable in terms of human evolution. It could be serviceable to first tribes and then nations as a means for acquiring social cohesion and domestic peace by convincingly identifying a foreign menace. But what explains the varying intensity of this strategy? This article claims that strengthening of nationalism’s expression has been substantially due to the threat to elites posed by the rise of powerful worker movements which gained increasing militancy during nineteenth century industrialization. Nationalism served to deflect attention from a system that workers found unjust to foreign forces as the cause of their malaise. In this expression, nationalism served as an ideology enabling the more powerful to assuage worker discontent and continue gaining at the expense of the weaker. |
| Keywords: | Group loyalty, ideology, worker militancy, patriotism |
| JEL: | B52 J5 N4 |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2023-02&r=lab |