This paper contributes to the continuing debates on the mechanisms driving labor market informality in developing countries by proposing an innovative way to discriminate between segmented and ...competitive markets. An empirical analysis is applied to Egyptian paid employment in the highly dynamic context of 1998–2006.
The study is based on recent nonparametric methods applied to estimate the model with essential heterogeneity. The model is extended to decomposing the treatment effects into unobserved and observed components.
The results show triple heterogeneity of workers on the Egyptian labor market, offering support to both segmented and competitive views on informal labor.
Farmers throughout the United States report a shortage of workers. At the same time, there are proposals to strengthen the enforcement of existing immigration laws. In this paper, we develop an ...equilibrium approach to examine the impact of removing undocumented workers from the California agricultural labor market, and to infer whether there is evidence of shortages using individual-worker data. We find evidence that is consistent with a persistent shortage in some sub-sectors of the California farm labor market. Further, we conduct counter-factual policy simulations over a range of possible policy alternatives, and find that removing 50% all undocumented farm workers from the state would lead to an increase in wages of over 22%.
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.
•A city’s unemployment rate falls once the ridesharing app Uber begins operating.•This is likely driven by workers driving for Uber while frictionally unemployed.•Uber may also allow unemployed workers to commute to new job opportunities.•25th percentile Wages also increase following Uber’s arrival to a city.•The “gig economy” is complementary to more traditional employment.
Após 10 anos da política de cotas das universidades federais, a literatura ainda carece de pesquisas sobre a inserção dos egressos cotistas e não cotistas no mercado de trabalho. Diante desse ...problema, o objetivo do artigo foi comparar os ganhos no mercado de trabalho entre egressos cotistas e não cotistas dos cursos de graduação das universidades federais brasileiras. Para tanto, aplicamos um questionário eletrônico, que foi respondido por uma expressiva amostra de 11.458 egressos, de 248 cursos de graduação, de todas as áreas do conhecimento, de 18 universidades federais e das cinco regiões do Brasil. Por meio do Teste de Qui-Quadrado, comparamos o status de ocupação, o motivo de não trabalhar, o setor de atuação, o tipo de cargo/emprego, a remuneração, o porte da empresa/organização e a ocupação de cargos de chefia ou de direção entre os egressos. Os resultados sugerem que egressos cotistas obtêm altas taxas de ocupação, com uma boa inserção no mercado de trabalho, trabalhando em cargos/empregos ditos mais qualificados, em empresas/organizações de grande porte e recebendo boas remunerações. Porém, os resultados sugerem que, em geral, os ganhos ocupacionais e salariais de egressos cotistas ainda são inferiores aos de egressos não cotistas. Logo, nossos resultados sugerem que a política de cotas das universidades federais é uma importante ferramenta de inclusão socioeconômica dos estudantes cotistas, justificando sua existência, mas que ela, por si só, ainda não completamente elimina a forte desigualdade social entre as famílias brasileiras, que parece afetar diferentemente os ganhos dos profissionais no mercado de trabalho.
Using U.S. Census data for 1990 to 2000, we estimate effects of NAFTA on U.S. wages. We look for effects of the agreement by industry and by geography, measuring each industry's vulnerability to ...Mexican imports and each locality's dependence on vulnerable industries. We find evidence of both effects, dramatically lowering wage growth for blue-collar workers in the most affected industries and localities (even for service-sector workers in affected localities, whose jobs do not compete with imports). These distributional effects are much larger than aggregate welfare effects estimated by other authors.
•Regional labor markets are increasingly integrated in terms of market wages.•Shadow wages in farm self-employment remain a fraction of market wages in Vietnam.•Labor market disintegration explains ...the low value of labor time of poor workers.•Labor market policies should focus more on within-region labor market integration.
Poor workers suffer from low returns to their most abundant resource, labor. In this paper we show that labor market integration strongly affects these returns for poor workers in Vietnam. Using seven representative household surveys, it is shown that while regional labor markets have become increasingly integrated over the period 1993–2010 considering market wages of workers in wage employment, there remains a strong lack of integration considering shadow wages of workers in farm self-employment. Shadow wages have been increasing as a proportion of market wages during 1993–2010, but they remain only 22–28% of rural market wages by 2010. Using a decomposition technique, it is shown that the lack of integration between the farm self-employment segment with various segments of wage employment (regional, urban versus rural, non-farm household versus other enterprises), explains primarily the gap in returns to labor between poor and non-poor workers. These findings show that labor market integration studies should not only focus on observed market wages but also on shadow wages in order to understand the relationship between labor market integration and the returns to labor.
We document differences in human-capital deployment between diversified and focused firms. We find that diversified firms have higher labor productivity and that they redeploy labor to industries ...with better prospects in response to changing opportunities. The opportunities and incentives provided in internal labor markets in turn affect the development of workers' human capital. We find that workers more frequently transition to other industries in which their diversified firms operate and with smaller wage losses compared with workers in the open market, even when they leave their original firms. Overall, internal labor markets provide a bright side to corporate diversification.
This article studies the role of employer behavior in generating “negative duration dependence”—the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell—by sending fictitious résumés to real job postings in ...100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker’s unemployment spell, with the majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months. We explore how this effect varies with local labor market conditions and find that duration dependence is stronger when the local labor market is tighter. This result is consistent with the prediction of a broad class of screening models in which employers use the unemployment spell length as a signal of unobserved productivity and recognize that this signal is less informative in weak labor markets.
This study examines the relationship between social capital and labour market integration of new refugees in the UK using the Survey of New Refugees (SNR). Our findings suggest that length of ...residency and language competency broaden one's social networks. Contacts with religious and co-national groups bring help with employment and housing. The mere possession of networks is not enough to enhance access to employment. However, the absence of social networks does appear to have a detrimental effect on access to work. The type of social capital appears to have no significant impact on the permanency or quality of employment. Rather, language competency, pre-migration qualifications and occupations, and time in the UK are most important in accessing work. Our findings also have clear implications for both asylum and integration policy. The unequivocal importance of language ability for accessing employment points to a clear policy priority in improving competency.