We analyze whether increased exposure to import competition from China threatens the Nordic model. We find negative employment effects for low-skilled workers, and observe that low-skilled workers ...tend to be pushed into unemployment or leave the labor force altogether. We find no evidence of wage effects. We partly expect this in a Nordic model where firms are flexible at the employment margin, while centralized wage bargaining provides less flexibility at the wage margin. The import shock is smaller, and our estimates suggest that import competition from China explains almost 10% of the reduction in the manufacturing employment share from 1996 to 2007 which is half of the effect found by Autor et al. (2013) for the US.
This paper empirically studies the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using data for more than 100 US occupations over the period 1997-2006. A model of firm behaviour based on ...separability allows derivation of the labour demand elasticity with respect to service offshoring for each occupation. Estimation is performed with quasi-maximum likelihood, to account for high degrees of censoring in the employment variable. The estimated elasticities are then related to proxies for the skill level and the degree of tradability of the occupations. Results suggest that service offshoring is skill-biased, because it increases employment in more skilled occupations relative to less skilled occupations. At a given skill level, however, service offshoring penalizes tradable occupations relative to non-tradable occupations. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers
We explore time trends in the labor force participation of veterans and non-veterans and investigate whether they are consistent with a rising role for the Department of Veterans Affairs' Disability ...Compensation (DC) program, which pays benefits to veterans with service-connected disabilities and has grown rapidly since 2000. Using 35 years of March CPS data, we find that veterans' labor force participation declined over time in a way that coincides closely with DC growth and that veterans have become more sensitive to economic shocks. Our findings suggest that DC program growth has contributed to recent declines in veterans' labor force participation.
We derive the optimal labor contract for a levered firm in an economy with perfectly competitive capital and labor markets. Employees become entrenched under this contract and so face large human ...costs of bankruptcy. The firm's optimal capital structure therefore depends on the trade-off between these human costs and the tax benefits of debt. Optimal debt levels consistent with those observed in practice emerge without relying on frictions such as moral hazard or asymmetric information. Consistent with empirical evidence, persistent idiosyncratic differences in leverage across firms also result. In addition, wages should have explanatory power for firm leverage.
We investigate the direct and long-run effects of fertility on employment in Europe, estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and ...modeling assumptions related to initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation in the error terms. We find overall large direct and long-run effects of giving birth on employment probabilities, and these effects differ considerably across countries. We find that within countries the results are sensitive to the statistical assumption made on initial conditions, the inclusion of serial correlation and the assumption of strict exogeneity of children. However, the pattern across countries is robust to these assumptions. We show that such patterns are largely consistent with prevailing institutional differences related to the flexibility of the labor markets and family policies.
THE GLOBAL DECLINE OF THE LABOR SHARE Karabarbounis, Loukas; Neiman, Brent
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2014, Letnik:
129, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the ...decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital. The lower price of investment goods explains roughly half of the observed decline in the labor share, even when we allow for other mechanisms influencing factor shares, such as increasing profits, capital-augmenting technology growth, and the changing skill composition of the labor force. We highlight the implications of this explanation for welfare and macroeconomic dynamics.
•We analyse the dynamics of labour relations in new manufacturing locations serving global production networks.•The new export-oriented apparel sector in Ethiopia has already seen both collective and ...individual resistance from workers.•There are various manifestations of formal and informal resistance from wildcat strikes, to absenteeism and high turnover.•Industrial strife reflects an interplay of sectoral pressures, factory-based grievances, and anti-government protests.
In this paper we examine the emerging politics of labour agency as new manufacturing locations are incorporated into existing global production networks, using the example of the Ethiopian apparel industry. The Ethiopian state has employed an active space-based industrial policy to attract leading apparel manufacturers into a series of new industrial parks in the country. Both investors and the Ethiopian government expected to find a large and pliant labour force willing to work for low wages. However, the new sector has already seen a wave of collective and individual resistance from workers. We ask which factors contribute to drive and constrain labour agency and shape the specific forms it takes in firms tied into leading global production networks. Drawing on a large-N quantitative survey of factory workers and in-depth qualitative interviews with managers, workers, trade union representatives and government officials, we show how the quality of industrial relations depends not just on state action and the business strategies of lead firms in production networks, but also on variegated forms of labour agency used both by organised and unorganised Ethiopian workers. We find that many industrial conflicts result from the collision of the productivity imperatives of manufacturing firms tied into demanding, but low value-added, segments of global production networks with the expectations of workers with limited prior experience in industrial jobs, but are compounded by the contradictory actions of different state agencies, a lack of formal unionisation, and the contingent interactions of factory based grievances with local political conflicts. Industrial parks emerge as spaces of particular contestation. Our findings highlight the need to adopt an understanding of labour regimes grounded in local political realities. These findings have implications for the design of industrial policies and labour market institutions aiming to support firms and workers in emerging manufacturing clusters.
This article is a revised version of the lecture Christopher A. Pissarides delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 8, 2010, when he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in ...Memory of Alfred Nobel. Although there were many attempts to derive an equilibrium wage distribution for markets with search frictions, this paper takes a different approach to labor market equilibrium, that could be better described by the term matching. The idea is that the job search underlying unemployment in the official definitions is not about looking for a good wage, but about looking for a good job match. The financial crisis of 2008 has thrown open the question of the interaction between capital and labor markets. Equilibrium matching models are built on the assumption of perfect capital markets.
We examine the impact of maternity leaves on the period mothers are away from work postbirth and the likelihood they return to their prebirth employer. We use the introduction and expansion of ...statutory job‐protected maternity leave entitlements in Canada to identify these effects. We find that modest leave entitlements of 17–18 weeks do not change the amount of time mothers spend away from work. In contrast, longer leaves do have a substantive impact on behavior, leading to more time spent at home. We also find that all entitlements we examined increase job continuity with the prebirth employer.
We analyze a large, detailed operational data set from a restaurant chain to shed new light on how workload (defined as the number of tables or diners that a server simultaneously handles) affects ...servers' performance (measured as sales and meal duration). We use an exogenous shock-the implementation of labor scheduling software-and time-lagged instrumental variables to disentangle the endogeneity between demand and supply in this setting. We show that servers strive to maximize sales and speed efforts simultaneously, depending on the relative values of sales and speed. As a result, we find that, when the overall workload is small, servers expend more and more sales efforts with the increase in workload at a cost of slower service speed. However, above a certain workload threshold, servers start to reduce their sales efforts and work more promptly with the further rise in workload. In the focal restaurant chain, we find that this saturation point is currently not reached and, counterintuitively, the chain can reduce the staffing level and achieve both significantly higher sales (an estimated 3% increase) and lower labor costs (an estimated 17% decrease).
This paper was accepted by Noah Gans, special issue on business analytics
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