Past studies have found that economy-wide gender and racial wage differentials are smaller in the nonprofit sector than in the for-profit sector. I show that the massive US hospital industry exhibits a different pattern. Gender and racial differentials in nonprofit hospitals are larger than in the for-profit hospitals. These findings are robust to various model specifications and appear throughout the earnings distribution and in most subsamples. Critically, the findings remain even after controlling for individual fixed effects. I argue this may reflect weakened monitoring in nonprofit hospitals and contrast this with the traditional theory that nonprofits must emphasize wage equality to motivate their workers.
The Short-Time Compensation (STC) program enables US firms to reduce work hours via pro-rated Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, rather than relying on layoffs as a cost-cutting tool. Despite the program's potential to preclude skill loss and rehiring/retraining costs, firms' participation rates are still very low in response to economic downturns. Using firm-level UI administrative data and semi-parametric methods, we show why by illustrating which type of firms benefit from the program and which do not. A key finding is that cyclically sensitive firms have about 14% lower layoff rates when they use STC, but we find no difference for more cyclically stable firms.
The question to what extent ethnic networks affect occupational mismatch has so far been overlooked. This paper exploits supraregional variation in ethnic composition in Germany and shows that a one standard deviation increase in the share of the own ethnic group per zip code significantly reduces the years of overqualification for females, by 0.27 years. For males, neither the foreign share nor the ethnic share per residency area is found to significantly impact the extent of overqualification. Selection into residency groups and occupations and different endowments in language capital explain the more efficient benefit of ethnic networks accrued to females.
This paper investigates the role that spatial mobility plays for early-career labor market outcomes across education programs and qualification levels. We use data for the full population of Danish graduates from upper (post-)secondary and tertiary education programs to estimate the labor market returns from migrating after graduation. Benchmark OLS estimates find positive correlations between migration, the employment probability, and entry wages. We further apply IV estimation with instruments constructed from exogenous push factors into migration at the individual, education institution, and local labor market level. Results confirm a mobility premium for graduates from tertiary but not from vocational education programs.
Using data for British workplaces, we compare the associations between human resource management (HRM) practices and schools' performance, comparing those effects to the effects of HRM among private sector workplaces. We do so using measures of workplace performance that are common across all workplaces. We find intensive use of HRM practices is correlated with substantial improvement in workplace performance, both among schools and other workplaces. Results are robust to panel estimates of the correlation between changes in performance and changes in HRM.