This study examined the influence of psychological capital on job search among displaced employees. On the basis of a sample of 179 retrenched professionals, managers, executives, and technicians, we ...found that psychological capital (self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) was positively related with displaced employees' level of perceived employability, a coping resource. Perceived employability was positively related with problem-focused and symptom-focused coping strategies. Whereas problem-focused coping was positively related with preparatory and active job search, symptom-focused coping strategy was not. The relationship between psychological capital and preparatory and active job search was mediated by perceived employability and problem-focused coping. Implications of our findings are discussed.
Despite an increasingly large body of research that focuses on the potential demand for autonomous vehicles (AVs), risk preference is an understudied factor. Given that AV technology and how it will ...interact with the evolving mobility system are highly risky, this lack of research on risk preference is a critical gap in current understanding. By using a stated preference survey of 1142 individuals from Singapore, this study achieves three objectives. First, it develops one measure of psychometric risk preference and operationalizes prospect theory to create two economic risk preference parameters. Second, it examines how these psychometric and economic risk preferences are associated with socioeconomic variables. Third, it analyzes how risk preference influences the mode choice of AVs. The study finds that risk preference parameters are significantly associated with socioeconomic variables: the elderly, poor, females, and unemployed Singaporeans appear more risk-averse and tend to overestimate small probabilities of losses. Furthermore, all three risk preference parameters contribute to the prediction of AV adoption. These modeling results have policy implications at both the aggregate and disaggregate levels. At the aggregate level, people misperceive probabilities, are overall risk-averse, and hence under-consume AVs relative to the social optimum. At the disaggregate level, the elderly, poor, female, and unemployed are more risk-averse and thus are less likely to adopt AVs. These results suggest that it might be valuable for governments to implement policies to encourage technology adoption, particularly for disadvantaged social groups, although caution remains due to uncertainty in the long-term effects of AVs. Individualized risk preference parameters could also inform how to design regulations, safety standards, and liability allocations of AVs since many regulations are essentially mechanisms for risk allocation. One limitation of the paper is that risk preference is measured and modeled only as individual-specific but not alternative-specific variables. Future studies should examine the relationship between the multiple components of risk preference and the multiple risky aspects of AVs.
That the long-term unemployed fare worse in the labor market than do the short-term unemployed is well-known, but why? One potential explanation is that the long-term unemployed are “bad apples” who ...had poorer prospects from the outset of their spells (heterogeneity). Another is that these bad outcomes are a consequence of their extended unemployment (state dependence). The authors use Current Population Survey data on unemployed individuals linked to unemployment insurance wage records for the same people to distinguish between these explanations. The rich work history information contained in the wage records allows the authors to control for individual heterogeneity that could affect post-unemployment labor market outcomes. Even with these controls in place, they find that unemployment duration has a strongly negative effect on the likelihood of subsequent employment. The results are robust to accounting for differences in the labor market conditions experienced by the long-term and short-term unemployed.
The study of college students’ job search and influencing factors has been an important topic in college students’ career development. The degree of satisfaction with the results of a college ...student’s perceived job search directly affects the sustainability of his or her future career. Although the importance of core self-evaluation in the job search process has been confirmed by a large body of literature, very little literature has focused on the mechanism of action between core self-evaluation and job search outcomes. Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze the impact of core self-evaluation on job search outcomes through a chain mediation model and to discuss the role of career exploration and career adaptability in this relationship. Two waves of survey data were utilized to test the research hypotheses on a sample of 310 college students facing employment in different regions of China. The results indicated that core self-evaluation positively impacted job search outcomes. In addition, career exploration and career adaptability moderated the relationship between core self-evaluation and job search outcomes, respectively. More importantly, core self-evaluation could also influence job search outcomes through the chain-mediating effects of career exploration and career adaptability.
We construct and estimate an equilibrium search model with on-the-job-search. Firms make take-it-or-leave-it wage offers to workers conditional on their characteristics and they can respond to the ...outside job offers received by their employees. Unobserved worker productive heterogeneity is introduced in the form of cross-worker differences in a "competence" parameter. On the other side of the market, firms also are heterogeneous with respect to their marginal productivity of labor. The model delivers a theory of steady-state wage dispersion driven by heterogenous worker abilities and firm productivities, as well as by matching frictions. The structural model is estimated using matched employer and employee French panel data. The exogenous distributions of worker and firm heterogeneity components are nonparametrically estimated. We use this structural estimation to provide a decomposition of cross-employee wage variance. We find that the share of the cross-sectional wage variance that is explained by person effects varies across skill groups. Specifically, this share lies close to 40% for high-skilled white collars, and quickly decreases to 0% as the observed skill level decreases. The contribution of market imperfections to wage dispersion is typically around 50%.
We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers ...characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present evidence supporting three predictions of this model by analyzing bunching at kinks using Danish tax records. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable income elasticities. Second, kinks that apply to a larger group of workers generate larger elasticities. Third, the distribution of job offers is tailored to match workers' aggregate tax preferences in equilibrium. Our results suggest that macro elasticities may be substantially larger than the estimates obtained using standard microeconometric methods.
This paper studies the extent to which working couples can insure one another against cyclical fluctuations in the labor market and examines the implications of joint household decision-making for ...cyclical fluctuations in the unemployment rate. For this purpose, I provide a dynamic life-cycle model of households that make joint savings and job search decisions in the presence of aggregate shocks. I show that two key mechanisms are at play. The first is the added-worker effect, which leads to counter-cyclical search intensity because workers increase search intensity when their spouse becomes unemployed. The second is the comparative advantage effect, according to which couples' job search efforts are coordinated based on the relative returns to search of each spouse. I estimate the model using data from the US Current Population Survey, and find that joint household decision-making contributes to the counter-cyclicality of women’s unemployment rate, but not for men. Moreover, joint household decision-making lowers the welfare costs of cyclicality.
This article provides a new account of American job seekers' individualized understandings of their labor-market difficulties, and more broadly, of how structural conditions shape subjective ...responses. Unemployed white-collar workers in the U.S. tend to interpret their labor market difficulties as reflecting flaws in themselves, while Israelis tend to perceive flaws in the hiring system. These different responses have profound individual and societal implications. Drawing on in-depth interviews with unemployed job seekers and participant observations at support groups in the U.S. and Israel, this article shows how different labor market institutions give rise to distinct job search games, which I call the chemistry game in the U.S. and the specs game in Israel. Challenging the broad cultural explanations of the unemployment experience in the existing literature, this article shows how subjective responses to unemployment are generated by the search experiences associated with institutionally rooted job search games.
This study examines the impacts of reemployment bonuses, that is, the incentive payments to unemployment insurance (UI) recipients who find a job within a specified period, using Korean data. A sharp ...discontinuity in treatment assignment at age 55 identifies the effect of increased reemployment bonuses on unemployment duration and on subsequent job duration. The results indicate that increases in the reemployment bonus boost the job-finding hazards of UI claimants early in their unemployment spells during the bonus qualification period and significantly shorten the duration of UI spells by 0.16 to 0.42 months (0.68 to 1.82 weeks). In addition, employment stability is not significantly affected by an increased bonus, which implies no negative influence of the bonus on subsequent job match quality. The simulated estimates show that the increase in tax revenue and the decrease in UI benefit payment caused by the behavioral response of UI recipients are large enough to offset the increased cost of the reemployment bonus.
•This study examines the impacts of reemployment bonuses on job search.•The increases in the reemployment bonus shorten the duration of UI spells.•The increased reemployment bonuses do not increase the government spending per claimant.
We study optimal employment contracts for present-biased employees if firms cannot commit to long-term contracts. Assuming that an employee's effort increases his chances to obtain a future benefit, ...we show that individuals who are naive about their present bias will actually be better off than sophisticated or time-consistent individuals. Moreover, firms might benefit from being ignorant about the extent of an employee's naiveté. Our results also indicate that naive employees might be harmed by policies such as employment protection or a minimum wage, whereas sophisticated employees are better off.
PDF
