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.
My focus is on the degree to which increasing inequality in the high-income countries, particularly in the United States, is likely to limit economic mobility for the next generation of young adults. ...I discuss the underlying drivers of opportunity that generate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. The goal is to explain why America differs from other countries, how intergenerational mobility will change in an era of higher inequality, and how the process is different for the top 1 percent. I begin by presenting evidence that countries with more inequality at one point in time also experience less earnings mobility across the generations, a relationship that has been called “The Great Gatsby Curve.” The interaction between families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child's opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background—but they do so in different ways across national contexts. Both cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers are all configured most likely to lower, or at least not raise, the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for the next generation of Americans coming of age in a more polarized labor market. This trend will likely continue unless there are changes in public policy that promote the human capital of children in a way that offers relatively greater benefits to the relatively disadvantaged.
•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.
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.
This paper provides a meta‐analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies. The analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of ...causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi‐experimental studies, providing 654 estimates published between January 1990 and December 2017. We distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis; at 6, 12, 24, and 36 months after program start. After correcting for publication bias and country‐specific macroeconomic characteristics, subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short‐term impacts, which gradually turn positive in the longer run. Schemes with enhanced services including job‐search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short‐term effects, and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start.
An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous ...technical advance raise the possibility of limited or even perverse impact. We study a natural policy experiment: the exclusion of almost half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States to improve farm labor market conditions. With novel labor market data we measure state-level exposure to exclusion, and model the absent changes in technology or crop mix. We fail to reject zero labor market impact, inconsistent with this model.
This paper provides evidence that exposure to illegal labor markets during childhood leads to the formation of industry‐specific human capital at an early age, putting children on a criminal life ...path. Using the timing of U.S. antidrug policies, I show that when the return to illegal activities increases in coca suitable areas in Peru, parents increase the use of child labor for coca farming, putting children on a criminal life path. Using administrative records, I show that affected children are about 30% more likely to be incarcerated for violent and drug‐related crimes as adults. No effect in criminality is found for individuals that grow up working in places where the coca produced goes primarily to the legal sector, suggesting that it is the accumulation of human capital specific to the illegal industry that fosters criminal careers. However, the rollout of a conditional cash transfer program that encourages schooling mitigates the effects of exposure to illegal industries, providing further evidence on the mechanisms.
THE TAXATION OF SUPERSTARS Scheuer, Florian; Werning, Iván
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
How are optimal taxes affected by superstar phenomena? To answer this question, we extend the Mirrlees model to incorporate an assignment problem in the labor market that generates superstar effects. ...Perhaps surprisingly, rather than providing a rationale for higher taxes, we show that superstar effects provide a force for lower marginal taxes conditional on the observed distribution of earnings. Superstar effects make the earnings schedule convex, which increases the responsiveness of individual earnings to tax changes. We show that various common elasticity measures must be adjusted upward in optimal tax formulas. Finally, we study a comparative static that does not keep the observed earnings distribution fixed: when superstar technologies are introduced, inequality increases but we obtain a neutrality result, finding optimal taxes unaltered.
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