Labour-England最新文献

This paper explores the short-run effects of minimum wage policies on the distribution of earnings and employment. We exploit the variation in the “bite” of the minimum wage across region-industry cells, employing data from the Greek Labour Force Survey over the period 2015–2020. Using a Difference-in-Differences strategy, we estimate unconditional quantile regressions that yield economically important effects, at the bottom end of the earnings distribution. In particular, the estimated coefficients suggest a 14% and 7% rise in the wages for workers concentrated around the 10th and the 20th percentile, respectively. Importantly, we find that this does not come at the expense of disemployment effects, either at the extensive or at the intensive margin.

We measure discrimination in access to employment toward people with visual impairment in France and explore its relationship with two public policies designed to facilitate the integration of disabled people into the workforce: the obligation on the employer to adapt the workstation, and a quota policy intended to incentivize the hiring of people with disabilities. We use the correspondence test method in combination with a difference-in-differences strategy, to explore the effects of these different policies. We show that applicants with visual impairments face significant discrimination, and we suggest that the level of discrimination is influenced by both policies.

The increase in poverty rates among families and individuals in Italy over the past two decades can be attributed largely to repeated periods of economic crisis. Growing concern over the problem has driven interest in the role of policy in supporting household welfare. Responding to the currently limited access to (or provision of) public aid and assistance, private institutions and philanthropic foundations have stepped up their efforts to create new initiatives for alleviating poverty. In this paper, we use a randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of a new Italian program aimed at supporting vulnerable individuals in four separate but related areas of household welfare: employment, financial circumstances, family responsibilities and housing conditions. The program, known as Integro, was introduced by the Compagnia di San Paolo, one of Italy's largest philanthropic institutions. Our findings indicate a positive and statistically significant impact of Integro on three of the four target outcomes considered, with only the fourth (housing conditions) not being affected. We also sought to identify any initial conditions potentially influencing the extent to which participants benefit from the program. Is Integro equally effective for everyone? According to our data, the program provides the best outcomes for males reporting lower human capital and greater socio-emotional stability.

In this paper, we study the effect of search and matching frictions, i.e., equilibrium unemployment, on fiscal financing decisions in the United States. We build a Real Business Cycle model with labour market frictions and a rich set of fiscal tools and estimate the model using Bayesian methods on US data for various fiscal rule specifications. Most importantly, we find that the model with unemployment, output and debt in the fiscal rules fits the data best. Under the fiscal rule that best fits the data, the reaction of fiscal instruments to output and debt are significantly quantitatively different than a rule that ignores unemployment. Fiscal instruments react stronger to cyclical factors except transfers. These changes also affect model dynamics in response to fundamental non-fiscal shocks.

We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after reunification (1990–99). We compare their wage assimilation to that of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Bloc countries and international immigrants to West Germany who arrived at the same time. The analysis uses administrative as well as survey data. The results suggest that East Germans faced significant initial earnings disadvantages in West Germany, even conditional on age and education. However, these disadvantages were smaller than those of international immigrants, supporting the beneficial role of cultural similarity. The earnings gap relative to West German natives narrowed over time for all immigrants. These findings are robust to controlling for potentially endogenous return migration and labor force participation. Controls for fixed effects reveal that positive assimilation for East German and international immigrants was concentrated among highly educated immigrants.

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and lifetime dimension of gender inequalities. Based on a dynamic microsimulation model, we analyse how gender differences accumulate over work lives to examine the lifetime dimension of the gender gap. We estimate an average gender gap in lifetime earnings of 51.5 per cent for birth cohorts 1964–72. We show that this unadjusted gender lifetime earnings gap increases strongly with the number of children, ranging from 17.3 per cent for childless women to 68.0 per cent for women with three or more children. Results from a counterfactual analysis approach show an adjusted gender gap in lifetime earnings of around 10 per cent, suggesting that the gender gap in lifetime earnings is rather driven by gender differences in observable characteristics than by differences in rewards.

This work examines the influence of locus of control on sorting into performance pay jobs. It uniquely examines different types of performance pay schemes, demonstrating sharp differences between them. Bivariate probit estimates indicate workers with an internal locus of control sort into individual schemes but not joint schemes. Wage equations reveal that adding locus of control modestly reduces the return to individual performance pay but that in more complete specifications, the return to an internal locus of control becomes vanishingly small, which suggests that its primary importance is in sorting (not only into performance pay but into education and occupation).