Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market ...phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from globalization. In this book, William Milberg and Deborah Winkler propose an institutional theory of trade and development starting with the growth of global value chains - international networks of production that have restructured the global economy and its governance over the past twenty-five years. They find that offshoring leads to greater economic insecurity in industrialized countries that lack institutions supporting workers. They also find that offshoring allows firms to reduce domestic investment and focus on finance and short-run stock movements.
Who suffers during recessions? Hoynes, Hilary Williamson; Miller, Douglas Lee; Schaller, Jessamyn
The Journal of economic perspectives,
07/2012, Letnik:
26, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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In this paper, we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of ...differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the cyclical sensitivity during the Great Recession to that in the early 1980s recession. We present raw tabulations and estimate a state panel data model that leverages variation across U.S. states in the timing and severity of business cycles. We find that the impacts of the Great Recession are not uniform across demographic groups and have been felt most strongly for men, black and Hispanic workers, youth, and low-education workers. These dramatic differences in the cyclicality across demographic groups are remarkably stable across three decades of time and throughout recessionary periods and expansionary periods. For the 2007 recession, these differences are largely explained by differences in exposure to cycles across industry-occupation employment. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Using a sample of 97 countries spanning the period 1980?2008, we estimate that financial crises have a large negative impact on unemployment in the short term, but that this effect rapidly disappears ...in the medium term in countries with flexible labor market institutions, whereas the impact of financial crises is less pronounced but more persistent in countries with more rigid labor market institutions. These effects are even larger for youth unemployment in the short term and long-term unemployment in the medium term. Conversely, large upfront, or gradual but significant, comprehensive labor market policies have a positive impact on unemployment, albeit only in the medium term.
Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities' attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial ...cues in job applications, a practice known as "résumé whitening." Interviews with racial minority university students reveal that while some minority job seekers reject this practice, others view it as essential and use a variety of whitening techniques. Building on the qualitative findings, we conduct a lab study to examine how racial minority job seekers change their résumés in response to different job postings. Results show that when targeting an employer that presents itself as valuing diversity, minority job applicants engage in relatively little résumé whitening and thus submit more racially transparent résumés. Yet our audit study of how employers respond to whitened and unwhitened résumés shows that organizational diversity statements are not actually associated with reduced discrimination against unwhitened résumés. Taken together, these findings suggest a paradox: minorities may be particularly likely to experience disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity employers. These findings illuminate the role of racial concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and point to an important interplay between the self-presentation of employers and the self-presentation of job seekers in shaping economic inequality.
Online labor markets allow rapid recruitment of large numbers of workers for very low pay. Although online workers are often used as research participants, there is little evidence that they are ...motivated to make costly choices to forgo wealth or leisure that are often central to addressing accounting research questions. Thus, we investigate the validity of using online workers as a proxy for non-experts when accounting research designs use more demanding tasks than these workers typically complete. Three experiments examine the costly choices of online workers relative to student research participants. We find that online workers are at least as willing as students to make costly choices, even at significantly lower wages. We also find that online workers are sensitive to performance-based wages, which are just as effective in inducing high effort as high fixed wages. We discuss implications of our results for conducting accounting research with online workers.
Precarious Asia Kalleberg, Arne L; Hewison, Kevin; Shin, Kwang-Yeong
12/2021
eBook
Precarious Asia assesses the role of global and
domestic factors in shaping precarious work and its outcomes in
Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia as they represent a range of
Asian political ...democracies and capitalist economies: Japan and
South Korea are now developed and mature economies, while Indonesia
remains a lower-middle income country.
With their established backgrounds in Asian studies, comparative
political economy, social stratification and inequality, and the
sociology of work, the authors yield compelling insights into the
extent and consequences of precarious work, examining the dynamics
underlying its rise. By linking macrostructural policies to both
the mesostructure of labor relations and the microstructure of
outcomes experienced by individual workers, they reveal the
interplay of forces that generate precarious work, and in doing so,
synthesize historical and institutional analyses with the political
economy of capitalism and class relations. This book reveals how
precarious work ultimately contributes to increasingly high levels
of inequality and condemns segments of the population to chronic
poverty and many more to livelihood and income vulnerability.
Despite improvements in labor market performance over the past decade, owing in part to past reforms, Italy's employment and productivity outcomes continue to lag behind those of its European peers. ...This paper reviews Italy's institutional landscape and labor market trends from a cross-country perspective, and discusses possible avenues for further reform. The policy discussion draws on international reform experience and on simulations based on a calibrated labor market matching model. A key lesson is that the details of reform design, and the sequencing of reforms, matter greatly for labor market outcomes and for the fiscal costs associated with these reforms.
We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in US local labour markets between 1980 and 2007. Labour markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese ...import competition experience significant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labour markets susceptible to computerisation due to specialisation in routine task-intensive activities instead experience occupational polarisation within manufacturing and non-manufacturing but do not experience a net employment decline. Trade impacts rise in the 2000s as imports accelerate, while the effect of technology appears to shift from automation of production activities in manufacturing towards computerisation of information-processing tasks in non-manufacturing.
In this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in Western Germany. Using administrative data for the period 1987–2001 and a labor-market equilibrium model, we find ...that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels. Instead, it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages. These asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets. In a simple counter-factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage-bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller.
This paper provides new evidence on the impact of access to finance on poverty. It highlights an important channel through which access affects poverty—the labor market. The paper exploits the ...opening of Banco Azteca in Mexico, a unique "natural experiment" in which over 800 bank branches opened almost simultaneously in preexisting Elektra stores. Importantly, the bank has focused on previously underserved low-income clients. Our key finding is a sizeable effect of access to finance on labor market activity and income levels, especially among low-income individuals and those located in areas with lower preexisting bank penetration.
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