Labour Economics最新文献

Fluctuations in house prices generate substantial heterogeneity in the price of purchase of similar dwellings depending on the time of purchase. These differences in the price of purchase have large effects on income-net-of-housing-costs. We document these effects using the large house price fluctuations during the recent housing boom-bust in Spain. Households can mitigate these impacts through changing labour supply. Men work more subsequent to paying higher house prices at purchase , whereas the correlation of house prices and labour supply for women is driven by selection: households where women work more, buy more expensive houses.

This paper assesses the impact of the Employment Protection Programme (EPP) on employment outcomes in Brazil. The EPP was a work-sharing programme with a reduced work schedule that featured wage subsidies. It was created to preserve jobs during a recession that started in 2014. Using administrative data of the programme, the results of this study show that establishments that participate in the programme present higher employment levels than non-participant establishments during and after the programme. Furthermore, the effect of the EPP on employment increases over time. These findings suggest that the programme was an effective tool to sustain employment levels.

We investigate the impact of working for a temporary help agency (THA) compared to being directly hired on the employment transitions of low-skilled male temporary workers aged 20 to 45. Using data from Spanish administrative records, we employ competing risk discrete-time duration models to analyze multiple temporary employment spells. Our analysis reveals the importance of accounting for short-duration dependence and workers’ unobserved heterogeneity. We find that, across all durations, agency workers are more likely to transition either to unemployment or to a new THA contract than their direct-hire counterparts. Transitions to permanent positions, although infrequent in our sample, are also more likely for agency workers. Our qualitative findings hold when unobserved heterogeneity is not controlled for. However, this model underestimates the effect of agency contracts on the risk of entering unemployment and overestimates the impact on the probability of re-entering THA. This suggests that positive self-selection plays a relevant role in explaining the higher persistence of THA employment, but not the associated higher risk of unemployment.

Exploiting an exogenous change in information disclosure on one of the largest online labor platforms worldwide, we assess how the provision of more information on the employers’ willingness to pay (WTP) and the required experience level of workers affects the gender gap in bidding behavior. We find that female workers make lower wage proposals than male workers if the employers’ WTP for a project, as given by its budget, is disclosed in addition to the (exogenously enforced) experience level of workers that employers deem necessary for the job, i.e., low, intermediate, or high. In addition, we do not find robust empirical support for the hypothesis that female workers’ under-confidence in their skills increases the gender gap in bidding behavior. Finally, we find a statistically significant gender wage gap of 16.8 %, which is reduced to 1.5 % when we control for employer, worker, and project characteristics. Once we include workers’ wage proposals in our agreed-upon wage regressions, the gender wage gap virtually disappears (0.2 %) and is statistically insignificant. This suggests that gender differences in wage expectations pertain to gender differences in wages.

We study how large shocks impact individuals’ skilling decisions using data from a large, government-sponsored, online learning platform in Saudi Arabia. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a massive increase in online skilling, and demand shifted towards courses that offered skills, such as telework, likely to be immediately valuable during the pandemic. Consistent with a model where individuals trade off reskilling costs with their expectations of future labor market conditions and their duration of work, we find that shifts into telework courses were largest for older workers. In contrast, younger workers increased enrollments in courses related to new skills, such as general, occupation-specific, and computer-related skills. Using national administrative employment data, we provide descriptive evidence that these investments in skills in early 2020 helped users maintain employment over the course of the pandemic.

We study subjective unemployment expectations and their influence on economic behavior. We utilize a longitudinal data set combining survey elicited subjective unemployment expectations with administrative data on income, savings, and unemployment insurance. Our findings indicate that subjective expectations hold valuable predictive information about subsequent unemployment experiences. We find that individuals tend to overestimate their risk of unemployment. Moreover, higher unemployment expectations lead to a greater likelihood of enrolling in unemployment insurance and accumulation of liquid savings.

We examine how shocks to parents’ careers affect the children’s educational choices and career outcomes. Using Finnish administrative data, we find that a father’s job loss decreases the likelihood of a child choosing the father’s study field. Children of displaced fathers have lower earnings and are more likely to choose study fields with lower predicted earnings; however, we find no effects on the outcomes measured before study choices are made, such as school grades, inactivity and juvenile delinquency. The results suggest that labor market shocks can carry over to the next generation through children’s career choices.

Standard labor market models have mainly focused on human capital theory, which emphasizes the role of education, experience, and individuals’ different skill levels in determining occupational choice. The recent literature, however, has shown that noncognitive (“soft”) skills are also strong predictors for vocational behavior. Economics provides little guidance on the effects of noncognitive skills on occupational choice. In applied psychology, personality/temperament traits and economic preferences refer to the characteristics explaining how individuals may act differently in similar situations related to occupational choice. We utilize the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 (n = 4,731 to 5,882) to explore the value of incorporating temperament traits and economic preferences in occupational choice. We explore whether temperament traits contribute to occupational choice, using data from the NFBC1966 for the years 2004 to 2012, inclusive. Occupational groups are chosen to be distinct with respect to the requisite skills, education levels, and tasks. The novelty of our data allows us to determine whether temperament traits and economic preferences have significant impacts on occupational choice, while controlling for other variables related to the human capital approach. We find that temperament traits and economic preferences are important contributors of vocational behavior. Our analysis highlights that it is important to jointly explore the effects of the human capital model, noncognitive traits and other nonpecuniary factors in analyzing occupational choices among individuals. We reveal distinct temperament traits for different occupations. To our knowledge, there exists no evidence about how individuals’ temperament traits, economic preferences, and the human capital approach jointly are sorted into occupational choices. In addition, the novelty of our data allows us to include education, among other factors, to control our findings. We find significant differences across occupations regarding temperament traits.

This paper examines the relationship between house prices and fertility rates during the global fertility transition. We establish an analytical framework that considers the complementary nature of children and housing, leading to the hypothesis of a negative effect of house prices on fertility when they are highly complementary. We utilize a newly published house prices dataset spanning 1870 to 2012, covering multiple countries, and employ fixed effect and dynamic panel estimations to address identification challenges including unobserved heterogeneity and dynamic effects. Results show that surging house prices discourage fertility, with a ten percent increase in real house prices associated with a reduction of 0.01 to 0.03 births per woman. These effects are comparable to the impact of increased female education. Our findings offer insights into the evolving patterns of global fertility trends, underscoring the role of increased housing costs in shaping demographic changes.

This paper investigates the effect of a mandatory activation program on crime. Although the effects of ALMPs on labor market outcomes are often assessed, theorized effects on crime are seldom analyzed. We exploit age-based policy variation and estimate a regression discontinuity model, using individual-level administrative data on the entire Dutch population around a 27-year-old age threshold. The results show a 12% reduction in crime among non-natives, a relatively vulnerable group. Our findings suggest that crime is mainly reduced on weekdays, which points towards incapacitation as the underlying causal mechanism. Due to program participation, individuals have less time to commit crime.