Labour Economics最新文献

This paper analyzes the role of works councils as gatekeepers safeguarding employee's interests in the adoption of management practices to monitor employee performance and provide feedback. We first introduce a formal model predicting that (i) the introduction of such management practices leads to a stronger increase (or weaker decrease) in job satisfaction when a works council is in place, (ii) that this effect should be larger the lower the prior level of employee participation and (iii) that works councils increase the likelihood of the implementation of these practices at the level of individual employees. We provide evidence in line with these hypotheses, using linked-employer-employee panel data from Germany. We indeed find that the adoption of formal performance appraisals and feedback interviews is associated with a significantly larger increase in job satisfaction when there is a works council. This pattern is driven by establishments without collective bargaining agreements. The evidence also suggests that works councils indeed facilitate the implementation of such management practices, as codetermined firms have a higher likelihood that a practice implemented on the firm level is actually applied by middle management.

This paper examines the impact of the emergence of the “gig economy” on the broader labor market by exploiting the staggered introduction of the ridesharing service Uber to American Cities between 2013 and 2018. Using difference-in-differences methods, Callaway and Sant’Anna’s doubly robust difference-in-differences estimator, Chaisemartin and D’Haultoeuille’s time-corrected Wald estimator, and Abadie et al’s synthetic control method, I estimate that Uber’s arrival to a city resulted in decline in the unemployment rate by between a fifth and a half of a percentage point. This suggests that Uber allowed many workers to supplement their earnings during periods of unemployment, framing the ridesharing service as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, traditional employment. I also find some evidence that Uber had a very small positive effect on wages at the lower end of the wage distribution, suggesting that Uber may have altered worker search behavior or affected bargaining power.

This paper explores the impact of a super early retirement incentive that allowed men to retire as early as 44 years old in Turkey in 1992. Relying on a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, I find that taking up the incentives significantly reduced the labor force participation of middle-aged men in Turkey. Analysis by education categories suggests that the incentives had an impact on both the skilled and unskilled labor force. I find that the policy-induced take-up of pension benefit receipt significantly increased the probability of moving into informal employment contracts. Findings suggest that the probability of informal wage employment increased for low-skilled individuals while the probability of informal self-employment probability increased for high-skilled individuals. Among low-skilled workers, the incentives seem to have relaxed credit constraints.

We investigate how the allocation of workload across university courses affects students’ outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences design, we provide novel evidence that reducing the number of courses in a degree, while keeping the total course work unchanged, strongly reduces students’ performance and increases first-year dropout rates. We show procrastination accounts for these effects, suggesting that students struggle to adjust their study time to handle the intensified courses. We also show that the adverse impacts on dropouts are significantly stronger for students from less affluent families, indicating that the reform likely increases inequality. On the other hand, post-reform graduates exhibit better labor market outcomes. The discussion on potential mechanisms suggests that the reform enhanced the skills of the graduates who successfully navigated the unified exams.

In response to the COVID-19 related school closures and with the aim of strengthening education system resilience, numerous countries have implemented focused remedial programs during both the academic year and summer breaks. This study examines the persistence of learning deficits and the efficacy of summer schools in the Flemish region of Belgium, one year after the COVID-19-related school closures. Utilizing a seven-year panel dataset of standardized test scores in primary education, we identify between-cohorts learning deficits compared to 2019 levels in all subjects but social science. Our analysis reveals that, although summer schools targeted at vulnerable students have effectively mitigated further learning deficits in these schools, disparities in educational attainment persist. A quantile analysis suggests that mathematics test scores of the best-performing students within a school have significantly declined. This paper contributes to the understanding of education impacts stemming from educational disruptions, highlighting the role of remedial interventions in mitigating these effects.

This paper uses Swedish administrative data to examine the impact of grandparenthood on retirement behaviour. For causal identification, I exploit conditionally random variation in the births of first grandchildren using an event study design. The results show a significant increase in the retirement probability for grandmothers and grandfathers when the first grandchild is born, with no significant differences between them. The effects of the arrival of the grandchild on retirement increase over time after the grandchild is born. The incremental effects are larger among grandparents in the upper half of the earnings distribution than among their counterparts. The findings suggest that grandparenthood makes grandfathers and grandmothers less elastic to financial incentives and other regulations that also promote longer working lives in a country with generous family policies, such as Sweden.

This study estimates the impacts of an employment non-discrimination act (ENDA) for sexual minorities in Brazil. We contribute new evidence on ENDA impacts for sexual minorities in a distinct context from the current literature. Additionally, this is one of few studies to document labor market gaps by sexual orientation in Latin America. In this paper, we first present evidence of labor market gaps in employment, formal sector employment, hours worked, income and hourly earnings for lesbian and gay individuals in Brazil. For the same groups, we then estimate the impact of Brazilian legislation forbidding employment discrimination based on sexual orientation on these same labor market outcomes. Regarding initial pre-policy labor market gaps, conditioning on individual and work-related controls, we see that lesbian women experience wage premiums compared to straight women, while gay men experience wage penalties compared to straight men. We then estimate robust evidence that the implementation of employment protections increased income for gay men. For lesbian women, we estimate evidence of post-policy reductions in employment, but higher income and hourly earnings for those still working. Focusing on a Latin American country, we find many impacts consistent with the more recent existing evidence on ENDAs for sexual minorities.

We study the effects of local labor market conditions during early pregnancy on birth and later outcomes. Using a longitudinal survey of newborns in Japan, we find that improvements in employment opportunities increase the probability of low birth weight and premature birth. We also examine the effects of gender-specific labor market conditions. An increase in labor demand for women has a large negative effect on gestational age, especially for mothers who gave birth at relatively young ages. However, we find little evidence of a lasting negative effect of an increase in labor demand during early pregnancy on serious health conditions or developmental delays in early childhood. Using prefecture-level panel data, we confirm that the negative effect on infant birth weight is not driven by selective fertility and mortality.

We estimate the effect of genetic variants that are associated with differences in cognitive and non-cognitive skills on labor market and education outcomes by linking genetic data from individuals in the Swedish Twin Registry to government registry data. Genes are fixed over the life cycle and genetic differences between full siblings are random, making it possible to establish the causal effects of within-family genetic variation. We show that polygenic indices associated with cognitive skills and personality traits significantly affect income, occupation, and educational attainment. By comparing estimates that use only within-family variation to OLS estimates with and without socioeconomic controls, our results also provide indications of the degree of (residual) confounding, which can be useful for research conducted in datasets that do not contain sibling pairs. Overall, our results indicate that education and labor market outcomes are partially the result of a genetic lottery.

This study examines the impacts of caregiving by grandparents on children's academic performance in China. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS 2010 and 2014), we find evidence that grandparents appear to have an adverse effect on the test scores of their school-age grandchildren, and the negative effect is concentrated on grandparents with lower educational attainment and on boys. We further examine the mechanisms of this negative effect. Our results suggest that parenting styles play an important role in the success of grandchildren and the common parenting styles of grandparents in China compromise childhood development. Given that grandparents taking care of grandchild is prevalent nowadays and its negative effect on children's academic performance is worrisome, our results have important policy implication: parenting training could help to mitigate the negative effects of non-parental caregivers.