Labour-England最新文献

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.

This study examines joint retirement in Finland. Employing a regression discontinuity design, the study leverages the exogenous variation provided by the eligibility age for earnings-related pensions. The analysis yields three key findings. First, reaching the eligibility age has a significant effect on an individual's retirement. Second, male spouses' retirement at the age of 63 has a spillover effect on their female spouses. Third, disaggregated analyses show that older spouses in low-income households delay their retirement, older male (female) spouses with female (male) primary earners postpone their retirement, and younger female spouses with male primary earners expedite their retirement.

This study aims to estimate the causal impact of detrimental working conditions on the self-reported disabilities in France. Using a retrospective lifelong panel, we implement a mixed econometric strategy that relies on difference-in-differences and matching methods to take into account for selection biases as well as unobserved heterogeneity. Deleterious effects from exposure on disability are found, depending on the nature and magnitude of the strains. These results provide insights into the debate on legal retirement age postponement and justify policies being enacted early in individuals' careers, but also schemes that are more focused on psychosocial risk factors.

The routine task intensity of occupations is a concept frequently used to analyse the impact of technological change on employment. However, existing studies disagree on whether it can explain the observed job polarization in advanced economies. This article first shows that these seemingly contradictory results can be explained by the different routine task measurements used in these studies. Subsequently, the validity of these measurements is discussed. Preliminary results suggest that all measurements have conceptual weaknesses but that some appear more valid than others. Job polarization may therefore be explained by occupations' routine task intensity, but only to a limited extent.

This paper explores the long-term consequences of career arduousness and career instability for both physical and mental health in the European context. One of its strengths is to link what happens during the entire career and the health status at an older age. The paper finds a positive link between career arduousness (i.e. the sum of job demands individuals have been exposed to during their entire career) and late-life mental and physical ill health, but also evidence that career instability (i.e. career gaps, job insecurity, displacements, unemployment spells) could matter as much as arduousness per se. And this has implications for pension policy inter alia.