Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle ...class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while institutional protections for workers—such as unions and minimum-wage legislation—weakened. Together, these forces marked the end of postwar security for American workers. The composition of the labor force also changed significantly; the number of dual-earner families increased, as did the share of the workforce comprised of women, non-white, and immigrant workers. Of these groups, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants remain concentrated in the most precarious and low-quality jobs, with educational attainment being the leading indicator of who will earn the highest wages and experience the most job security and highest levels of autonomy and control over their jobs and schedules. Kalleberg demonstrates, however, that building a better safety net—increasing government responsibility for worker health care and retirement, as well as strengthening unions—can go a long way toward redressing the effects of today’s volatile labor market. There is every reason to expect that the growth of precarious jobs—which already make up a significant share of the American job market—will continue. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs deftly shows that the decline in U.S. job quality is not the result of fluctuations in the business cycle, but rather the result of economic restructuring and the disappearance of institutional protections for workers. Only government, employers and labor working together on long-term strategies—including an expanded safety net, strengthened legal protections, and better training opportunities—can help reverse this trend.
We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and "the East" (China and Eastern Europe) in the period 1988–2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed ...administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use trade flows of other high-income countries as instruments for regional import and export exposure. We find that the rise of the East in the world economy caused substantial job losses in German regions specialized in import-competing industries, both in manufacturing and beyond. Regions specialized in export-oriented industries, however, experienced even stronger employment gains and lower unemployment. In the aggregate, we estimate that this trade integration has caused some 442,000 additional jobs in the economy and contributed to retaining the manufacturing sector in Germany. This is almost exclusively driven by the rise of Eastern Europe, not by China. We also conduct an analysis at the individual worker level, and find that trade had a stabilizing overall effect on employment relationships.
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.
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.
China's remarkable economic transition and capacity for dynamic growth has stunned the world. Throughout the period of economic reform, China has been moving towards the creation of a labour market. ...The scale of this transformation is unprecedented. New economic incentives, vast labour migration, draconian retrenchment of state workers, and sharply rising wage inequality are all characteristic of this unique transition. Drawing on more than a decade of survey-based research, the authors systematically document and analyse this important transformation. They use economic and sociological theory, institutional analysis and political economy to fully explain the causes, pressures, obstacles and consequences of the move towards a labour market in China. It is argued that much progress has been made towards the creation of a labour market but that the process is far from complete. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance//toc.html
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.
This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving ...tractability. We estimate that labor markets are quite local, as the attractiveness of jobs to applicants sharply decays with distance. Also, workers are discouraged from searching in areas with strong competition from other job-seekers. However, as labor markets overlap, a local stimulus or transport improvements have modest effects on local outcomes, because ripple effects in job applications dilute their impact across a series of overlapping markets.
This paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. Using English data at the Local Authority level for 2003–2007 we find that public sector employment has no ...identifiable effect on total private sector employment. However, public sector employment does affect the sectoral composition of the private sector. Specifically, each additional public sector job creates 0.5 jobs in the non-tradable sector (construction and services) while crowding out 0.4 jobs in the tradable sector (manufacturing). When using data for a longer time period (1999–2007) we find no multiplier effect for non-tradables, stronger crowding out for tradables and, consistent with this, crowding out for total private sector employment.
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