Labour-England最新文献

An emerging consensus is that the Frisch elasticity of labor supply is small. This may reflect a lack of salience, inelastic preferences, or prevalence of frictions. Studying survey data collected during a tax holiday in Norway, when earnings were untaxed during a transition between tax systems, I report three findings. First, 80 per cent of adults were aware of the tax holiday. Second, one fifth of adults responded by working more. Third, frictions in adjusting working hours or nonworking time appear to be the reason for a majority of nonresponses. The findings support the long-held notion that labor supply choices are constrained.

This paper examines how income-inequality promotes racial discrimination. When the influence of income is intergenerational, it generates a strong correlation between parental income status and the race that their children inherit. This makes parents' income statuses identifiable through applicants' races and enables employers to discriminate against the races of the low-income group. Antidiscrimination policies may not be effective if they do not improve on income-inequality. An effective means of reducing income-inequality is to minimize the parental influence that causes inherited inequality. The implications of the discriminatory practice of legacy admissions are discussed in this context.

The flow of information continues to expand exponentially while, at the same time, decision-making becomes more complex. Employees, organizations, and societies face an increasingly hard challenge in identifying and utilizing information effectively. In the context of a crisis, the need for timely and correct information increases even more to support management decisions. Communication channels such as meetings and staff involvement committees (voluntary or mandatory) are crucial for efficient knowledge flows between employees, management, and within divisions. However, less is known about their pattern of creation at different stages of a crisis. This empirical study investigates the relevance of the Financial Crisis for the introduction and dissolution of staff involvement committees. Using the German IAB Establishment Panel, we use a conditional difference-in-differences framework and provide empirical evidence of whether employers initiated or abolished staff involvement committees in different stages of the recession. Our findings reveal that negatively affected establishments are more likely to introduce communication channels, especially during the crisis.

We propose a model-based decomposition method for the aggregate labour share in terms of the first moments of the joint distribution of total factor productivity, market power, wages and prices, and apply it to UK manufacturing using firm-level data for 1998–2014. Contrary to a narrative focussing on increasing disparities between firms, the observed decline in the aggregate labour share over the period is driven entirely by the decline in the labour share of the representative firm, mostly due to an increasing disconnect between average productivity and real wages. Changes in the dispersion of firm-level variables have contributed to slightly contain this decline.

I review and assess the evidence on minimum wage effects on health outcomes and health-related behaviors. The evidence on physical health points in conflicting directions, leaning toward adverse effects. Research on effects on diet and obesity sometimes points to beneficial effects, whereas other evidence indicates that higher minimum wages increase smoking and drinking and reduce exercise (and possibly hygiene). In contrast, there is evidence that higher minimum wages reduce suicides, partly consistent with the evidence of positive or mixed effects on other measures of mental health/depression. Overall, policy conclusions that minimum wages improve health are unwarranted or at least premature.

Using linked employer–employee data for workplaces in Britain, we find high-performance workplace practices (HPWPs) are positively associated with public sector workplace performance. Contrastingly, HPWPs are not associated with measures of public sector employees' well-being or motivation. The implication is that the performance effects of HPWP in the public sector constitute part of efficient management technology, without the need to invoke special employee responses as mediators. Public sector findings differ from those in the private sector: in the latter, HPWPs are positively associated with some performance outcomes but employee outcomes are a complex mix of non-significant, positive, and negative associations.

Occupation segregation explains a significant portion of the gender wage gap, with women working in lower paid female-dominated occupations. We examine how childhood and adolescent exposure to gender biased norms about work influence this occupational sorting. We document that early life exposure to traditional gender role attitudes, which view women's role as caretakers, increase women's likelihood of employment in care occupations and decrease the likelihood for men, thereby increasing the gender care occupation gap. A decomposition of the factors affecting this sorting shows that a primary channel is through differences in the choice of post-secondary field of study or major. Our results suggest that traditional gender role attitudes may work to segment the labor market for men and women and contribute to the gender wage gap. This suggests that more egalitarian gender role attitudes which increase the share of men entering care occupations would increase wages for both men and women, lowering the gender wage gap.

Telework has spread during the pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Using a unique individual-level survey in Japan, we investigate how telework has changed the way people live and work and what impediments hamper telework use. As a result, we find that telework allows workers to spend more time on leisure and their families. Compared with routine task workers, non-routine (abstract) task workers are more suited to telework. However, once engaged in telework, non-routine task workers have fewer opportunities to communicate with coworkers, which is a serious impediment that tends to hamper work performance and compromise mental health.

Minimum wage policies are widely implemented in developing countries, but their consequences remain uncertain. This study empirically investigates the impact of the minimum wage on monthly income inequality and its spillover effects in Turkey between 2004 and 2022, utilizing comprehensive micro data. We aim to shed light on the impact of national minimum wage policies by examining their diverse influences on the wage structure within the country. Our findings reveal that the minimum wage significantly reduces income disparities, particularly among formal workers at the lower and upper end of the wage distribution. While wage gaps below the median wage decline, those above it experience a slower growth rate, ultimately leading to wage convergence. Notably, this effect is more pronounced during macroeconomic instability from 2016 to 2022, compared with the relatively stable period of 2004–15. Moreover, the outcomes differ depending on individual attributes like gender, age, education, and other relevant factors. Furthermore, we observe tentative evidence of a lighthouse effect to some degree: the minimum wage seems to exert an equalizing influence on the wage structure of workers in the informal sector beyond a certain percentile.

Using long-term Finnish register data on labor market outcomes, we examine how personality traits predict the sorting of individuals into public and private sector employment. Our findings suggest that personality-based sectoral sorting primarily occurs during the selection of educational fields. Once education and occupation are controlled for, public sector employment is negatively related to self-confidence among males and extraversion among females. We also find that pecuniary incentives and shifts between the sectors may partly explain these relationships. Overall, our empirical results, combined with values that we use as theoretical mechanisms, suggest that values may serve as mediators explaining our results.