Labour Economics最新文献

The 1990s and 2000s saw a dramatic expansion in global goods trade. China rapidly emerged as the world's leading exporter while manufacturing employment in many high-income countries plummeted. Guided by textbook models that assumed frictionless labour markets and balanced trade, economists long maintained the view that trade had only modest labour market impacts and was not an important contributor to rising inequalities in high-income countries. We review recent evidence on the impacts of rapidly rising import competition from China on a broad range of outcomes in high-income countries. Import competition led to employment and wage losses that were heavily concentrated among the employees of exposed industries and individuals residing in local labour markets where such industries clustered, while consumer gains from lower goods prices were much more evenly distributed in the population. The disruptive effects of trade were particularly salient in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom where a rapid growth of imports did not coincide with a commensurate expansion of own exports. Local labour markets facing greater import competition also experienced deteriorations in terms of health outcomes, crime, and family structures, and they became more likely to support far right politicians. We discuss several policy options to support the losers from globalisation.

This study examines jobseekers’ preferences for a variety of job attributes. It is based on a choice experiment involving 1852 clients of the Flemish Public Employment Service (PES). Respondents value flexibility (e.g., remote work and schedule flexibility), job security and social impact of the job, and require significant compensation for longer commute times. A majority (70%) would need very substantial wage increase beyond their acceptable baseline wage to compensate for less flexibility, job security or social impact. These findings enhance our understanding of labour supply decisions and can inform the design of salary packages and HR policies.

We structurally estimate an equilibrium search model using German administrative data and use the model for counterfactual analyses of a uniform minimum wage. The model with worker and firm heterogeneity does not restrict the sign of employment effects a priori; it allows for different job offer arrival rates for the employed and the unemployed and lets firms optimally choose their recruiting intensity. We find that unemployment is a non-monotonic function of the minimum wage level. Effects differ strongly by labor market segment defined by region, skill, and permanent worker ability.

This study examines how retirement options for husbands and wives impact their labour supply decisions using a regression discontinuity design. In the context of German pension reforms, which have tightened early retirement possibilities, we find that coordination in retirement decisions between spouses was more prevalent and symmetrical before the reforms, but less so after. This sheds light on the role of early retirement possibilities in shaping couples’ reactions to one spouse’s retirement age.

We study the effect of Protestantism on human capital acquisition using novel data on 234 counties and 2,478 towns in the Korean peninsula in 1930. First, we show that towns with a larger number of native Protestant churches have higher literacy rates throughout colonial Korea. To establish causality, we employ hand-collected data on the exposure to foreign Protestant missionaries as an instrumental variable for the number of native Protestant churches. Furthermore, we study the differential success of different missionary societies, using a spatial RDD that exploits the Comity Agreement of 1909 which geographically divided Korea between missionary societies. We show that Presbyterians, who put more emphasis on empowering local churches, were more successful at attracting members, and fostering literacy, than the Methodists with their more hierarchical structure.

Job training programs can be an effective policy for improving productivity and labor market outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. We report medium- and long-term impacts of a job training program for vulnerable workers in Chile on labor market and skill outcomes using experimental and administrative data. We estimate intention-to-treat effects, accounting for potential non-compliance by training providers in the assignment process, as well as local average treatment effects due to noncompliance with the assigned treatment status. Overall, the program shows limited effectiveness. While we find some positive impacts on labor income, the program fails to improve most labor outcomes. A detailed investigation of heterogenous effects by course-type, training provider and course quality, and gender reveals that the positive income effects are more likely to be realized for males and participants in courses that were offered by high-quality providers. Evidence on mechanisms indicates that the program's limited impact on labor outcomes could, at least partly, be due to its limited effect on workers’ skills.

We study the evolution of the gender wage gap among young adults in Britain between 1972 and 2015 using data from four British cohorts born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1989/90 on early life factors, human capital, family formation and job characteristics. We account for non-random selection of men and women into the labour market and compare the gender wage gap among graduates and non-graduates. The raw and covariate-adjusted gender wage gaps at the mean decline over the period among non-graduates, but they rise among young graduates. The gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrows over time for lower wages. Allowing for positive selection into employment increases the size of the gender wage gap in earlier cohorts, but selection is not apparent in the two most recent cohorts. Thus the rate of convergence in the wages of young men and women is understated when estimates do not account for positive selection in earlier cohorts. Differences in traditional human capital variables explain only a very small component of the gender wage gaps among young people in all four cohorts, but occupational gender segregation plays an important role in the later cohorts.