Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets Naidu, Suresh; Nyarko, Yaw; Wang, Shing-Yi
The Journal of political economy,
12/2016, Letnik:
124, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
By exploiting a reform in the United Arab Emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions, we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers. Our results show ...that the reform increased incumbent migrants’ earnings and firm retention. This occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits. While the outcomes of incumbents improved, the reform decreased demand for new migrants and lowered their earnings. These results are consistent with a model of monopsony in which firms face upward-sloping labor supply curves for both new recruits in source countries and incumbent migrants.
The most prominent feature of the female labor force across the past hundred years is its enormous growth. But many believe that the increase was discontinuous. Our purpose is to identify the short- ...and long-run impacts of WWII on the labor supply of women who were currently married in 1950 and 1960. Using WWII mobilization rates by state, we find a wartime impact on weeks worked and the labor force participation of married white (non-farm) women in both 1950 and 1960. The impact, moreover, was experienced almost entirely by women in the top half of the education distribution. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Despite significant structural and social change, the share of women working or seeking jobs in Turkey has declined. This paper focuses on the role of social conservatism as a constraint for women’s ...labor force participation using 2008 Demographic and Health Survey data. In analyzing labor supply model, I incorporate cultural constraints, specifically the sexual division of labor in the household and broader gender ideology into the analysis. I find that both patriarchal norms and religiosity are negatively associated with female labor force participation, and that the impact of patriarchal norms is statistically significant after controlling for endogeneity.
This book is an exploration of arguments about the economic and social effects of the regulation of labour, and whether it is likely to be helpful or harmful to development. Authored by contributors ...from a variety of fields, primarily legal as well as development studies, economics and regulatory studies, the book presents both empirical and theoretical analyses of the issues. With authors from several continents, this collection is unique in that it focuses on labour regulation in poor and middle-income countries rather than industrialised ones, therefore making it a significant contribution to the field.
Over the past 20 years, Italy has realised changes in labour legislation, leading to a decentralisation of wage bargaining and increased flexibility in labour relations. Both these factors have ...helped to curb wage growth and to enhance employment growth, but have also led to a crisis in Italian labour productivity growth. Our estimates among 3,000 firms show that firms with a high share of flexible workers, a high labour turnover and lower costs of labour (relative to capital) experienced significantly lower rates of labour productivity growth. Our findings raise doubts about the mainstream call for flexibilisation of European labour markets. We argue that the Italian shift towards a low-productive and labour-intensive growth path is problematic against the background of an ageing population.
Moderate effects of pollution on health may exert important influences on work. We exploit exogenous variation in pollution due to the closure of a large refinery in Mexico City to understand how ...pollution impacts labor supply. The closure led to a 19.7% decline in pollution, as measured by SO2, in the surrounding neighborhoods. The closure led to a 1.3h (or 3.5%) increase in work hours per week. The effects do not appear to be driven by differential labor demand shocks nor selective migration.
•We estimate the response of hours worked to changes in air pollution.•To do so, we exploit the closure of a refinery in Mexico City as a natural experiment that generates a local drop in air pollution.•A one unit (20 percent) drop in SO2 results in a 1.3 hour increase in hours worked the following week.•This implies an estimated 480 Peso (USD 126) per-worker gain from reduced absenteeism over the course of a year for those who lived near the refinery.•Using a triple difference approach, we rule out that local labor market mechanisms are driving the observed.
Conventional histories of women's labor force participation in Europe conceptualize the trends in terms of a U-shaped pattern. This contribution draws on historical research to challenge such an ...account. First, it demonstrates that the trough in participation is in part statistically manufactured by uncritical reliance on official sources that systematically undercount women workers. Second, it exploits nonstandard sources to construct alternative estimates of women's participation. Third, it analyzes the reconstructed rates to determine their congruence with neoclassical economics and modern empirical studies. Not all posited relationships time travel. Supply-side factors such as marital status and number and age of children are major determinants of modern women's decision to enter the labor force, yet appear less prominent in historical contexts. Instead, the demand for labor seems decisive. Finally, the U-shaped curve is not entirely a statistical artifact, but appears to evolve at higher levels of participation than usually suggested.
Concerns over the supply of skills in the U.S. labor force, especially education-related skills, have exploded in recent years with a series of reports not only from employer-associated organizations ...but also from independent and even government sources making similar claims. These complaints about skills are driving much of the debate around labor force and education policy, yet they have not been examined carefully. In this article, the author assesses the range of these charges as well as other evidence about skills in the labor force. Very little evidence is consistent with the complaints about a skills shortage, and a wide range of evidence suggests the complaints are not warranted. Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that overeducation remains the persistent and even growing condition of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills. The author considers three possible explanations for the employer complaints and the associated policy implications.
Once a fundamental civic right, strikes are now constrained and contested. In an unusual and thought-provoking history, Josiah Bartlett Lambert shows how the ability to strike was transformed from a ...fundamental right that made the citizenship of working people possible into a conditional and commercialized function. Arguing that the executive branch, rather than the judicial branch, was initially responsible for the shift in attitudes about the necessity for strikes and that the rise of liberalism has contributed to the erosion of strikers' rights, Lambert analyzes this transformation in relation to American political thought. His narrative begins before the Civil War and takes the reader through the permanent striker replacement issue and the alienation of workplace-based collective action from community-based collective action during the 1960s. If the Workers Took a Notion maps the connections among American political development, labor politics, and citizenship to support the claim that the right to strike ought to be a citizenship right and once was regarded as such. Lambert argues throughout that the right to strike must be protected. He challenges the current law turn in labor scholarship and takes into account the role of party alliances, administrative agencies, the military, and the rise of modern presidential powers.
Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and ...quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the unemployment rate in business cycles.
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