The role of radical innovations for the economy has received increasing attention by German policy-makers. This paper investigates how (un-)related variety and external linkages influence these ...innovations in German labour market regions. Evidence is found that related and unrelated knowledge capabilities both support the emergence of radical innovations, although strong related capabilities are especially important. External linkages have an inverted u-shape relation to radically new ideas and can act as substitute for missing unrelated competences in a region. The results shed new light on the emergence of radical innovations and thus have interesting scientific and practical implications.
Job choice in academia Janger, Jürgen; Nowotny, Klaus
Research policy,
10/2016, Volume:
45, Issue:
8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The asymmetric international mobility of talented scientists is well documented, yet there is little evidence about the reasons why scientists choose particular jobs. Building on an extended human ...capital model of science, we unify a dispersed literature relevant for job choice to formulate hypotheses which we test in a unique international quasi-experiment among more than 10,000 researchers. We find that attractive jobs satisfy researchers’ “taste for science” and increase their expected scientific productivity, responding to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. In particular, while salaries, research funding and working with stimulating peers matter, we provide unique estimates of the importance of organisational and institutional factors: early stage researchers are willing to trade off a substantial amount of salary for early independence and tenure perspectives; later stage researchers favour jobs which make it easy to take up new lines of research. Research-only positions are considered as less attractive than jobs with a moderate amount of teaching. Our findings have important implications for the organisational design of research universities and the competitiveness of European science in light of the brain drain of highly talented scientists towards the U.S.
A survey of three refugee groups (ex-Yugoslavs, black Africans and people from the Middle East) in Western Australia indicates that the recent humanitarian arrivals are concentrated in labour market ...niches such as cleaning services, care of the aged, meat processing, taxi driving, security and building. Apart from the building industry, these employment niches are situated in the ‘secondary labour market’ comprising low-status and low-paid jobs that locals avoid. This article identifies several interrelated mechanisms through which the recent Australian refugee intake has been relegated to undesirable jobs: non-recognition of qualifications as a systemic barrier, discrimination on the basis of race and cultural difference by employers, ‘ethnic-path integration’ and the lack of mainstream social networks that could assist in the job search, and the recent ‘regional sponsored migration scheme’ through which the government tries to address the shortage of low-skilled labour in depopulating country areas. The data show massive loss of occupational status among our respondents and confirm the existence of the segmented labour market, where racially and culturally visible migrants are allocated the bottom jobs regardless of their ‘human capital’. Changes in the nature of the segmented labour market in the increasingly mobile global workforce are analysed. Some of these insights are drawn from two other research projects on Bosnian and Afghan refugees in Australia undertaken by the authors.
Most analyses of sexual orientation and earnings find that gay men face a wage gap, whereas lesbian women earn higher wages than similar heterosexual women. However, analyses rarely consider bisexual ...men and women as a unique group separate from other sexual minorities. I argue that such binary views of sexual orientation—treating sexual minorities as a homogenous non-heterosexual group—have obscured understandings of the impact of sexual orientation on labor market outcomes. Specifically, I predict that unequal outcomes for gay men and lesbian women are partly due to the influence of family arrangements and their effects on earnings. In contrast, I argue that bisexual men and women should be the most disadvantaged in the labor market, due to particularly disadvantaging stereotypes, perceptions of choice to their sexual orientation, and prejudicial treatment. Using data from the General Social Survey (N = 13,554) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 14,714), I show that family arrangements explain some of the observed earnings differentials for gay men and lesbian women. Bisexual men and women, in contrast, face wage penalties that are not explained by human capital differences or occupational characteristics. Perceptions of prejudicial treatment partially explain the observed wage gaps.
Motives: Little is known about the occupational mobility of Poles. In the literature, only the impact of socio-demographic factors on occupational mobility has been investigated. Occupational ...mobility may be influenced by educational attainment and the type of acquired qualifications, but these considerations have not been studied to date.Aim: The article examines occupational mobility, namely changes in occupation in a person’s professional history, as well as declared willingness (readiness) to change occupation within 12 months. The presented results of empirical research are based on a unique set of data collected during a CAWI survey performed on a sample of 16,119 Poles aged 18-65. An event history analysis and a logit model were used to analyse occupational mobility and its determinants.Results: The event history analysis revealed that Poles often change their learnt occupation. The results of the logit model indicate that the occupational mobility of Poles is influenced not only by demographic factors, but also by the acquired qualifications. Occupational mobility differed among respondents who acquired their qualifications at university, in a secondary school, or through vocational training. University graduates were characterized by the highest occupational mobility. Occupation mobility was influenced not only by educational attainment, but also by the type of acquired qualifications. Occupational mobility was highest among services and humanities graduates, and lowest among education and health graduates. Moreover, we found no evidence of significant spatial differences in occupational mobility in Poland.
Since the 1980s, most advanced economies have massively ‘flexibilized’ their labour markets by reducing the protection against layoffs and introducing temporary and flexible contracts. Concurrently, ...a well-established economic stylized fact – the stability of the wage share of income – has been challenged as empirical evidence reveals a substantial decline in labour share across numerous countries. In this study, we aim to empirically investigate the causal link between these two phenomena by examining the impact of changes in the regulation of fixed-term contracts, as measured by variation over time in the temporary contracts EPL index, on the functional distribution of income. We employ Jordà’s local projection method for a panel of 18 advanced countries over the period 1985–2019 and show that reforms that deregulate fixed-term contracts consistently reduce the wage share.
•The wage share has declined in many countries in recent decades.•The study investigates the impact of fixed-term contract protection reforms on functional income distribution.•Local projections are applied to EPL variations for a sample of 18 advanced economies over the period 1985–2019.•A nonlinear analysis is conducted to explore the effects of flexibilization and tightening reforms.•The results indicate that deregulating fixed-term contracts leads to a significant reduction in the wage share.
We analyse the impact of internal migration in China on natives׳ labour market outcomes. We find evidence of a large positive correlation of the city share of migrants with natives׳ wages. Using ...different sets of control variables and instruments suggests that the effect is causal. The large total migrant impact (+10% when one moves from the first to the third quartile of the migrant variable distribution) arises from gains due to complementarity with natives in the production function (+6.4%), and from gains due to agglomeration economies (+3.3%). Finally, we find some evidence of a stronger effect for skilled natives than for unskilled, as expected from theory. Overall, our findings support large nominal wage gains that can be expected from further migration and urbanisation in China.
Types of Temporary Employment Ojala, Satu; Nätti, Jouko; Lipiäinen, Liudmila
Social indicators research,
07/2018, Volume:
138, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This study aimed to find out how heterogeneous temporary employment is reflected in later labour market attachment. Using data from Finnish Quality of Work Life Surveys in 1990, 1997 and 2003 merged ...with an 8-year register follow-up, we compared permanent workers with three categories of temporary employees: substitutes, common fixed-term (e.g. project workers), and periphery (seasonal, on-call, temporary agency and employment subsidy) workers. First, we applied sequence analysis to identify the main activities at the end of each follow-up year for all employees with permanent and temporary contracts. On this basis, we formed six typical employment sequence clusters. Second, we performed multinomial logistic regression to find out whether there are statistically significant differences between temporary and permanent employees in terms of how they are divided between the sequence clusters. Four in five permanent employees were in stable employment over the following 8 years, compared to only two in five temporary periphery workers. The corresponding proportion for substitute workers was 70% and for common fixed-term workers 64%. Compared to permanent workers, those in common fixed-term or periphery temporary employment were more likely to become unemployed, whereas substitute workers were not. Our major finding is that periphery employment clearly increases the risk of being edged out of the labour market through retirement, especially on disability pension.
This article investigates the fiscal and welfare trade-offs involved in designing a pension system when workers can avoid contributing by working informally. Using a life-cycle model of labor supply ...and saving decisions, I structurally estimate preferences and earnings opportunities in the formal and informal sectors using data on Chilean households. I find limited support for formal jobs rationing. Instead, mandatory pension contributions significantly encourage informality. Policy experiments show that Chile could lower minimum pension spending by 23%—while guaranteeing the same income to retirees—if the minimum pension's implicit tax rate was increased to 60%.
Using a representative sample of Chinese urban employees, we empirically study the impact of the utilization of informal job search through social networks on wage. We find a premium of initial wage ...associated with job referral, but the wage premium diminishes over tenure. We also find that the effect of job referral on initial wage reduces when human capital plays a more important role, or the recruitment process and the economic system are more market-oriented. Our findings are consistent with the learning theory that job referral can reduce information asymmetry between employees and employers at the beginning they meet, but the informational advantage diminishes over time as the employers know non-referred workers gradually.
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