This paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. Using English data at the Local Authority level for 2003–2007 we find that public sector employment has no ...identifiable effect on total private sector employment. However, public sector employment does affect the sectoral composition of the private sector. Specifically, each additional public sector job creates 0.5 jobs in the non-tradable sector (construction and services) while crowding out 0.4 jobs in the tradable sector (manufacturing). When using data for a longer time period (1999–2007) we find no multiplier effect for non-tradables, stronger crowding out for tradables and, consistent with this, crowding out for total private sector employment.
We develop a dynamic trade model with spatially distinct labor markets facing varying exposure to international trade. The model captures the role of labor mobility frictions, goods mobility ...frictions, geographic factors, and input-output linkages in determining equilibrium allocations. We show how to solve the equilibrium of the model and take the model to the data without assuming that the economy is at a steady state and without estimating productivities, migration frictions, or trade costs, which can be difficult to identify. We calibrate the model to 22 sectors, 38 countries, and 50 U.S. states. We study how the rise in China's trade for the period 2000 to 2007 impacted U.S. households across more than a thousand U.S. labor markets distinguished by sector and state. We find that the China trade shock resulted in a reduction of about 0.55 million U.S. manufacturing jobs, about 16% of the observed decline in manufacturing employment from 2000 to 2007. The U.S. gains in the aggregate, but due to trade and migration frictions, the welfare and employment effects vary across U.S. labor markets. Estimated transition costs to the new long-run equilibrium are also heterogeneous and reflect the importance of accounting for labor dynamics.
This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving ...tractability. We estimate that labor markets are quite local, as the attractiveness of jobs to applicants sharply decays with distance. Also, workers are discouraged from searching in areas with strong competition from other job-seekers. However, as labor markets overlap, a local stimulus or transport improvements have modest effects on local outcomes, because ripple effects in job applications dilute their impact across a series of overlapping markets.
This article explores the development of concepts related to the 'quality of employment' in the academic literature in terms of their definition, methodological progress and ongoing policy debates. ...Over time, these concepts have evolved from simple studies of job satisfaction towards more comprehensive measures of job and employment quality, including the International Labour Organization's concept of 'Decent Work' launched in 1999. This article compares the parallel development of quality of employment measures in the European Union with the ILO's Decent Work agenda and concludes that the former has advanced much further due to more consistent efforts to generate internationally comparable data on labour markets, which permit detailed measurements and international comparisons. In contrast, Decent Work remains a very broadly defined concept, which is impossible to measure across countries. We conclude by proposing three important differences between these two scenarios that have lead to such diverging paths: the lack of availability of internationally comparable data, the control over the research agenda by partisan social actors, and a prematurely mandated definition of Decent Work that is extremely vague and all-encompassing.
Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich ...countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college and non-college educated. The growth of immigration has been driven by immigrants from nonrich countries. The economic impact of immigration on receiving economies needs to be understood by analyzing the specific skills brought by immigrants. The complementarity and substitutability between immigrants and natives in employment, and the response of receiving economies in terms of specialization and technological choices, are important when considering the general equilibrium effects of immigration. In the United States, a balanced composition of immigrants between college and noncollege educated, together with the adjustment of demand and technology, imply that general equilibrium effects on relative and absolute wages have been small.
Informality Revisited Maloney, William F
World development,
07/2004, Letnik:
32, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The paper draws on recent evidence––economic, sociological and anthropological––from Latin America to forward a view of the informal sector in developing countries primarily as an unregulated ...microentrepreneurial sector and not as a disadvantaged residual of segmented labor markets. It offers alternative explanations for many of the characteristics of the sector customarily regarded as evidence of its inferiority.
Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and both markets and marketplaces come in many varieties. Market design seeks to understand what marketplaces must accomplish to enable different ...kinds of markets. Marketplaces can have varying degrees of success, and there can be marketplace failures. I’ll discuss labor markets like the market for new economists, and also markets for new lawyers and doctors that have suffered from the unraveling of appointment dates to well before employment begins. Markets work best if they enjoy social support, but some markets are repugnant in the sense that some people think they should be banned, even though others want to participate in them. Laws banning such markets often contribute to the design of illegal black markets, and this raises new issues for market designers. I’ll briefly discuss markets and black markets for narcotics, marijuana, sex, and surrogacy, and the design of markets for kidney transplants, in the face of widespread laws against (and broader repugnance for) compensating organ donors. I conclude with open questions and engineering challenges.
We develop an equilibrium wage-posting model with heterogeneous firms that decide to locate in the formal or the informal sector and workers who search randomly on and off the job. We estimate the ...model on Brazilian labor force survey data. In equilibrium, firms of equal productivity locate in different sectors, a fact observed in the data. Wages are characterized by compensating differentials. We show that tightening enforcement does not increase unemployment and increases wages, total output, and welfare by enabling better allocation of workers to higher productivity jobs and improving competition in the formal labor market.
The Syrian Conflict generated forced immigration from northern Syria to southeastern Turkey. Arrival of refugees resembles a natural experiment, which offers good opportunities to study the economic ...impact of immigration. I study three main outcomes: labor markets, consumer prices, and housing rents. I document moderate employment losses among native informal workers, which suggests that they are partly substituted by refugees. Prices of the items produced in informal labor intensive sectors declined due to labor cost advantages generated by refugee inflows. Finally, refugee inflows increased the rents of higher quality housing units, while there is no effect on lower quality units.
The past several decades have seen widespread reform of labor markets across advanced industrial countries, but most of the existing research on job security, wage bargaining, and social protection ...is based on the experience of the United States and Western Europe. In Inequality in the Workplace , Jiyeoun Song focuses on South Korea and Japan, which have advanced labor market reform and confronted the rapid rise of a split in labor markets between protected regular workers and underprotected and underpaid nonregular workers. The two countries have implemented very different strategies in response to the pressure to increase labor market flexibility during economic downturns. Japanese policy makers, Song finds, have relaxed the rules and regulations governing employment and working conditions for part-time, temporary, and fixed-term contract employees while retaining extensive protections for full-time permanent workers. In Korea, by contrast, politicians have weakened employment protections for all categories of workers.
In her comprehensive survey of the politics of labor market reform in East Asia, Song argues that institutional features of the labor market shape the national trajectory of reform. More specifically, she shows how the institutional characteristics of the employment protection system and industrial relations, including the size and strength of labor unions, determine the choice between liberalization for the nonregular workforce and liberalization for all as well as the degree of labor market inequality in the process of reform.
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