Labor Economics Commons^™

Architecture, Social Norms, And Their Economic Consequences In Japan, Koichi Kume

Japanese Society and Culture

Law and market mechanisms presuppose that people are rational. With the diversification of lifestyles and values, however, there is a limit to appealing only to economic rationality to implement social policies. In this study we focus on architecture as a policy instrument that does not presuppose people’s rationality and empirically analyze the effect on economic consequences in Japan. Specifically, we examine the relationship between bank transfers and poverty reduction, and that between statues (Sontoku Ninomiya, Jizo) and labor norms. The results suggest that the use of architecture in policy can improve policy effectiveness regardless of people’s irrationality and heterogeneous preferences.

The Case For Public Investment In Higher Pay For New York State Home Care Workers: Estimated Costs And Savings, Isaac Jabola-Carolus, Stephanie Luce, Ruth Milkman

Publications and Research

This report explores one potential solution to the mounting home care labor shortage in New York State: substantially raising wages for the state's home care workers. The analysis presents detailed projections, based on the best available data, of the economic effects of such an intervention, estimating the costs and benefits that would result. We find that public funding to raise home care wages would require significant resources, but those costs would be surpassed by the resulting savings, tax revenues, and economic spillover effects. The net economic gain would total at least $3.7 billion. Lifting wages would also help fill nearly …

Comments On Three Papers On Labor Market Effects Of Opportunity Zones, Timothy J. Bartik

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Labor Market Monopsony And Wage Inequality: Evidence From Online Labor Market Vacancies, Samuel I. Thorpe

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper estimates the effects of employer labor market power on wage inequality in the United States. I find that inequality as measured by interdecile range is 23.7% higher in perfectly monopsonistic labor markets than in perfectly competitive markets, even when controlling for commuting zone and occupation fixed effects. I also decompose these results into 50/10 and 90/50 ratios, finding much larger impacts on inequality among low earners. These results suggest that monopsony power has significant and policy-relevant impacts on wage inequality, and particularly harms the lowest earning subsets of the labor force.

Covid-19'S Impacts On The Labor Market In 2020, Brad J. Hershbein, Harry J. Holzer

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

The Covid-19 Pandemic's Evolving Impacts On The Labor Market: Who's Been Hurt And What We Should Do, Brad J. Hershbein, Harry J. Holzer

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In this paper, we shed light on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market, and how they have evolved over most of the year 2020. Relying primarily on microdata from the CPS and state-level data on virus caseloads, mortality, and policy restrictions, we consider a range of employment outcomes—including permanent layoffs, which generate large and lasting costs—and how these outcomes vary across demographic groups, occupations, and industries over time. We also examine how these employment patterns vary across different states, according to the timing and severity of virus caseloads, deaths, and closure measures. We find that the …

Job Creation Policies Can Raise Local Employment Rates, Especially For Distressed Communities, Timothy J. Bartik

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Income In The Off-Season: Household Adaptation To Yearly Work Interruptions, John Coglianese, Brendan M. Price

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Occupational Licensing And Immigrants, Hugh Cassidy, Tennecia Dacass

Economics Faculty Scholarship

This study examines the incidence and impact of occupational licensing on immigrants using two sources of data: the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that immigrants are significantly less likely to have a license than similar natives and that this gap is largest for men, workers in the highest education level, and nonnaturalized immigrants. The licensing rate increases with years since migration and shows large variation by immigrants’ region of origin. A lack of English proficiency reduces the probability that an immigrant has a license. The wage premium from having a license is …

Educational Investments In Low-Income Households: The Role Of Parental Occupational Identity And Substitutability, Aparna Anand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poor parents face difficult trade-offs when investing in their children's education. This dissertation studies how low-income urban households in Southern India, where child labor is a concern, make educational investments for their children. First, I build a model that shows how educational investments are shaped by the possibility of children substituting labor for their parents. Second, I collect parent surveys, child surveys, and student-level administrative data from schools and construct a linked dataset. Third, I examine the relationship between educational investments and several pertinent factors, with an emphasis on child labor substitution and the strength of occupational identity. I find …

Informed Choices: Gender Gaps In Career Advice, Yana Gallen, Melanie Wasserman

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper estimates gender differences in access to informal information regarding the labor market. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek information from 10,000 working professionals about various career paths, and we randomize whether a professional receives a message from a male or a female student. We focus the experimental design and analysis on two career attributes that prior research has shown to differentially affect the labor market choices of women: the extent to which a career accommodates work/life balance and has a competitive culture. When students ask broadly for information about a career, we …

The National-Level Economic Impact Of The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Mep): Estimates For Fiscal Year 2020, Jim Robey, Kathleen Bolter, Natalie Patten, Edison Rolle

Reports

No abstract provided.

Long-Run Effects On Employment Rates Of Local Demand Shocks, Across And Within Local Labor Markets, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper estimates the long-run effects on a county’s prime-age employment rate of labor demand shocks to both the county and its overlying commuting zone (CZ). These effects are allowed to vary with local “distress” (baseline employment rate of the county or CZ), and with the size of the demand shock. In more distressed CZs, a county’s employment rate is more affected by county or CZ shocks. As a result, targeting or reallocating jobs to more distressed CZs will tend to raise employment rates. If a county is relatively distressed compared to its CZ, targeting job shocks at that county …

Job Creation Policies Can Raise Local Employment Rates, Especially For Distressed Communities, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Measuring Local Job Distress, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In this paper, estimates are presented on short-run effects of demand shocks on a local labor market’s employment to population ratio (employment rate). Based on the estimates, commuting zones (CZs) better define a local labor market than counties, because both employment and employment rate effects exhibit large spillovers across counties within a CZ. In addition, the estimates suggest that demand shock effects vary, by an amount that is both statistically and substantively significant, with a CZ’s prior overall employment rate.

Survey Of The Labor Market For New Ph.D. Hires In Economics 2021-2022, Mervin Jebaraj, David Sorto, Raja Kali

Labor Market Survey

This year, the survey questionnaire was sent to 368 organizations. Questionnaires were returned by 144 organizations (39.1 percent). Of this year’s responses, 53 (36.8 percent) were from those who responded to the last survey conducted for the 2020-21 academic year. Among the academic institutions responding, the distribution of highest degrees offered was as follows: Ph.D.—51.4 percent; Master’s—11.8 percent and Bachelor’s—35.4 percent.

The responses are reported for all respondents, and separately for Ph.D. Degree granting institutions and for schools whose highest degree offered is the Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree. Data for the top 30 institutions in the revised National Research Council’s …

Race And Jobs At Risk Of Being Automated In The Age Of Covid-19, Kristen E. Broady, Darlene Booth-Bell, Jason Coupet, Moriah Macklin

CCU Faculty Books

No abstract provided.

The Productivity Wage Gap, Monopsony, And Labor Share Decline: An Analysis Of Wage Suppression Perpetuated By Power, Alexandra Coulter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that wage suppression along with the decline in the labor share is caused by a rise in monopsony power realized as a significant increase in the profit share. It attributes the rise in monopsonistic behavior to the development and expansion of the modern corporation. This thesis investigates the reasons for wage suppression, identifies causes of the declining labor share left as exogenous in mainstream models, examines traditional economic wage determination and search models, and evaluates the political economy implications. This work reviews literature on imperfect competition, the corporation, contracts, search and match models, and the motivation of …

Employee Ownership And Moral Hazard: How Broad-Based Equity Sharing Can Lower Agency Costs And Reduce Inequality, Colin Clinton Hudson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Providing incentives to top managers by offering equity has become the norm; this practice, however, does not hold for all levels of employees. After tax incentives for employee ownership were introduced through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, there has been little legislative support to encourage companies to implement broad-based equity sharing programs. Moreover, decades of neoliberal policies have incentivized the pursuit of short-term profits and speculation, which contribute to economic instability and explain the growing gap between productivity and real wages observed since the late 1970s. Developments in the literature contend that employee ownership aligns the goals …

Children’S Health And Maternal Work Activities, Termeh Tavangar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I estimate the effect of poor child health on maternal labor force participation. Mothers of health-impaired children may decide not to work and stay at home to take care of their children. Alternatively, mothers may choose to enter the labor force to pay for these children’s additional resources. Which action dominates is the empirical question I answer in this paper. I control for the potential endogeneity of a child’s health status by using an instrumental variables approach. I find that if mothers have a child in poor health, the probability that the mother works is decreased by thirteen percentage points, …

Biased Technical Change, Institutional Shift, And The Functional Distribution Of Income: Who Benefits From Economic Growth?, Adam Szymanski-Burgos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Starting from the mid 1970s and early 1980’s, the US and other advanced economies observed a widening divergence between the growth of average and median real hourly labor compensation and the average growth of labor productivity. This decoupling between labor compensation and productivity indicates a decline in the labor share of national income. Opposite to movements in the labor share, the share of national income remunerated as capital income has increased with the rise of capital incomes concentrated largely in corporate sector profits. Key developments since the middle of the 20th century have coincided with the onset of medium-run fluctuations …

Investing In Entrepreneurship: The Sustainable Solution To Tunisia’S Youth Unemployment Crisis?, Hussein Noureldin

All Reports

Since the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, Tunisia’s youth unemployment crisis has worsened. As of 2020, it has the tenth highest youth unemployment rate in the world at 36.5%. Experts have long identified this as the main challenge to overcoming Tunisia’s economic woes, and reform – from the education and vocational training systems on the supply-side to the job market on the demand-side – must follow the democratic gains achieved since 2011. The failed approach in reducing regional inequality under Ben Ali had an adverse effect, creating unemployment disparities between Tunisia’s affluent coastal cities and its poorer interior regions. As such, …

Bengal Rising: Why Bangladesh & Pakistan’S Growth Trajectories Are Diverging, Sartaj Javed

All Reports

50 years after Henry Kissinger derided the nascent state of Bangladesh as an economic basket case, the country has emerged as the newest claimant to the mantle of being an Asian tiger economy. Borne out of a genocidal civil war with Pakistan, Bangladesh’s rise and Pakistan’s decline over a tumultuous half-century period necessitates a review of foreign policy orthodoxy as South Asia’s populace starts to assert its economic and political might.

Three Essays On The High-Speed Rail Network In China, Shiyu Cheng

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

My dissertation consists of three essays that study the economic consequences of China’s high-speed rail (HSR) expansion.

In the first essay, I use the college admission cutoff scores to reveal students’ college preferences under the enrollment quota. By exploiting the quasi-experimental variation in whether or not college cities are connected by the HSR network, I document a two-point increase in the cutoff scores following a HSR station opening in the college city using difference-in-difference (DD) approach. Colleges in the megacities experience a larger increase in cutoff scores after the station opening. These findings suggest that the HSR network stimulates “brain …

Peer Effects: An In-Depth Analysis, Lauren O. Dirago-Duncan

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

The social multiplier effect of peers has the potential to influence all members of a group through changing the outcomes of a single member and thus poses a strong, low-cost channel for increasing student performance. As such, peer effects are much studied in education and inform important policy decisions such as classroom composition, ability tracking, and magnet schools. These studies are often limited in scope to the contemporaneous period—how one’s peers affect them while they are around one another, but we should also be concerned with whether peer group continues to influence student outcomes after their inevitable separation. I use …

The Global Issue Of Immigration: A Focus On Illegal Immigrants For U.S. Agriculture, Refugee Immigrants For Germany’S Trade And The Climate-Induced Diaspora From Least Developed Countries, Yunzhe Zhu

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

Nowadays, the large scale of migratory movements caused by violence, poverty or climate change have made topics related to this worldwide diaspora a vanguard of research on international development. For one thing, the so-called “caravan migrants” that traveled from Central America in search for a better life in the U.S. have been blocked at the U.S.-Mexico border while U.S. agricultural sectors that are labor-intensive, such as the sectors of fruits and vegetables where most illegal immigrant farmworkers are hired, have been suffering from the shortage of farm labors for years. Such a situation calls for a development of U.S. immigration …

Discrimination In Modern Labor Markets: A Field Experiment, Taekmin Nam

Economics Honors Papers

With the growing prominence of big data and algorithms in the hiring process, it seems only apt to systematically identify the effect that these changes are having on labor markets. In this paper, I seek to take the first step in filling this void by systematically analyze the effect of big data and algorithms on discrimination in the hiring process. I conduct a correspondence study adapted to the new job application process to see how big data and algorithms are affecting discrimination in the hiring process.

The Relationship Between Antecedent Variables And Collective Organizational Engagement In U.S. Manufacturers, Kristoffer Carlos Garringer

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Manufacturing leaders face challenges that influence organizational outcomes such as, collective organizational engagement. Because of the complexities in the U.S. manufacturing industry, manufacturing leaders must identify resources and strategies that influence collective organizational engagement levels. Grounded in employee engagement theory and resource management theory, the purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between motivating work design, human resource management practices, strategic implementation, and collective organizational engagement. The sample included 123 participants from large manufacturing organizations within the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region who held non-executive titles. The results of the multiple linear regression were significant, F(3, 122) = …

Three Essays In Regional Taxation, Kenneth Tester

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation looks at the role that geographically limited taxation and the behavioral response of economic agents to different forms of regional taxation. While geographic taxation is typically thought to be confined to state and local taxes, federal tax policy can also create designated areas that receive preferential tax treatment. In this dissertation, both types of regional taxation are examined and are unified under common themes such as tax mobility and the definition of the tax base.

In chapter 2, I examine the important effect of how the location of high income earners employment is influenced by taxes in the …

Financial Literacy And Retirement Preparedness In Sri Lanka: Evidence From The Private Sector Employees, Tiyani Lakshmi Rodrigo

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

The South Asian country of Sri Lanka has a rapidly aging population, but little attention has been paid to individuals and families' financial preparedness for retirement. This study aims to overview the current system of retirement preparedness in Sri Lanka, and to examine financial and pension literacy's role on the retirement preparedness. Specifically, this study evaluated three domains of retirement preparedness: planning for retirement and perceived retirement income adequacy (subjective measures, n = 142), and wealth accumulation (objective measure, n = 115). Results show that (1) financial literacy had a positive and statistically significant association with retirement preparedness (only with …