The prospect for gender diversity in Japanese employment

Economic growth during the second half of the twentieth century was not accompanied by an improvement in the position of women in the Japanese labour market. The peripheral position occupied by women was due, in large part, to the substantial barriers created by the internal labour market with its employment practices such as ‘lifetime’ employment, seniority promotion, and on-the-job training. In the past decade, the use of such practices has declined and the corresponding erosion of the internal labour market, coupled with a predicted skill shortage, was seen as an opportunity for women to gain a degree of equality in the workplace. Yet, the changes to the structure of the internal labour market have not been able to overcome the discriminatory work practices are that are embedded in the way work is organized. It is this contest that is explored and analysed in this paper.     

Overeducation, wages and promotions within the firm

We analyse data from personnel records of a large firm producing energy and telecommunication and test for the effect of deviations between required and attained education of workers. Required education is measured as hiring standards set by the firm. We find the usual effects of over- and undereducation in a wage regression, thus rejecting the argument that such effects are exclusively due to firm fixed effects. Distinguishing, within the firm, between a sheltered internal labour market and an exposed external labour market, we find that at the internal labour market over- and undereducation significantly affect career development, in particular at younger ages, but that such effects are mostly absent at the firm's external labour market.     

Avoiding pitfalls and realizing potentials: researching redundancy regulation in Sweden,the United Kingdom and Japan

This paper attempts to explore the theoretical and practical implications of conducting comparative research in the realm of legal science. The endeavour is based on experiences gained from engaging in such activities as part of a research project in labour law. In order to allow for a critical evaluation of ways in which to regulate redundancy, the study mentioned sets Swedish collective agreements on employment security against British redundancy pay legislation and the Japanese Employment Stabilizations Fund system. The paper discusses the pitfalls and potentials of the chosen approach and presents some tentative conclusions regarding its benefits.     

Immigration policy and market institutions in liberal market economies

This article examines how the regulatory character of market institutions shapes government responses to labour shortages, with particular reference to immigration policy. The period between the late 1990s and the late 2000s saw many advanced economies relax entry controls on select categories of foreign workers. This trend was most pronounced among states with liberal market institutions. The underlying reasons for these trends are analysed through an examination of the motivations for reform in Australia and the UK, two states that oversaw significant liberalisations of their labour immigration policies. It argues that the liberal character of key market institutions encouraged firms in these states to look to external rather than internal solutions for meeting their labour requirements. These findings suggest that perspectives from the comparative political economy scholarship, most notably the varieties of capitalism literature, may provide insights into the way that different modes of market regulation shape immigration policy preferences.     

East German labour market in transition: segmentation and increasing disparity

The employment system of the former GDR–like that of other socialist countries–could be seen as an aggregation of ‘internal labour markets’ with long term employment, internal promotion and little external mobility. Consequently the rapid integration of the East German economy into the western market economy has led to structural problems of the labour market which combined with and intensified the general effects of the sharp decrease in the demand for labour.     

Preferred work patterns of creative artists

Recent research has highlighted ways in which the labour market behaviour of artists differs from the predictions of conventional theory. This paper considers one particular aspect of artists’ labour supply, i.e. the extent to which preferred time allocations to creative work can be realised, given the multiple job-holding and other characteristics of artists’ working arrangements. It is suggested that greater financial security and the accumulation of human capital are likely to be associated with increased ability to achieve equilibrium between desired and actual labour supply to the market for creative work. These propositions are tested empirically using data from a recent survey of practising professional artists in Australia.     

Land Market Restrictions,Women's Labour Force Participation and Wages in a Rural Economy

We analyse the effects of land market restrictions on the rural labour market outcomes for women. The existing literature emphasizes two mechanisms through which land restrictions can affect economic outcomes: collateral value of land, and (in)security of property rights. Our analysis focuses on an alternative mechanism where land restrictions increase costs of migration out of villages. Testable prediction of collateral channel is that wages remain unchanged, but the effects on labour force participation are ambiguous. Insecurity of property rights in land reduces labour force participation, but leaves wages undisturbed. In contrast, if land restrictions work primarily through higher migration costs, labour force participation increases, while wages decline. For identification, we exploit a natural experiment in Sri Lanka where historical malaria played a unique role in land policy. We provide robust evidence of a positive effect of land restrictions on women's labour force participation, but a negative effect on female wages. The empirical results thus contradict a collateral or insecure property rights effect, but supports migration costs as the primary mechanism.     

The myths and realities of structural change in the UK labour market

Recent discussion of developments within the UK labour market has highlighted the growth of more 'flexible' types of employment: part-time work, temporary jobs, and self-employment. The structure of employment has also been shifting – away from manufacturing and manual employment and towards the service sector and non-manual employment. In this article, Peter Robinson argues that these are not new developments and in some respects the pace of structural change in the labour market has slowed down. Together with evidence that the labour market is now adapting successfully to earlier structural changes, this bodes well for the prospect of further gradual reductions in unemployment.     

Social networks,employment and worker discouragement: Evidence from South Africa

Social networks are increasingly being recognized as having an important influence on labour market outcomes, since they facilitate the exchange of job related information. Access to information about job opportunities as well as perceptions about the buoyancy of the labour market depend critically on the social structures and the social networks to which labour market participants belong. In this paper, we examine the impact of information externalities generated through network membership on labour market status. Using Census data from South Africa, a country characterized by high levels of unemployment and worker discouragement, we adopt an econometric approach that aims to minimise the problems of omitted variable bias that have plagued many previous studies of the impact of social networks. Our results suggest that social networks may enhance employment probabilities by an additional 3–12%, and that failure to adequately control for omitted variables would lead to substantial over-estimates of the network co-efficient. In contrast, the impact of social networks on reducing worker discouragement is much smaller, at between 1 and 2%.     

An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile

An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile. Spatial Economic Analysis. Labour market areas (LMAs) are argued to represent a more appropriate policy framework than administrative units for the analysis of spatial labour market activity. This article develops LMAs for Chile by applying an evolutionary computation approach. This innovative approach defines LMAs through an optimization process by maximization of internal cohesion, subject to restrictions of minimum levels of self-containment and population. To evaluate the appropriateness of the LMAs, comparative analyses are performed between alternative delimitations based on different parameter configurations of the proposed method versus administrative boundaries and the most widely used method for official LMA delimitation, the travel-to-work areas method.     

Vocational training and the labour market in liberal and coordinated economies

In recent decades, the differences between the education and training systems in the liberal and coordinated market economies have increased. It is not possible to understand such different developments by focusing exclusively on the internal dynamics of vocational and general education systems. Vocational education and training (VET), and particularly apprenticeship systems rather than school‐based VET, are deeply embedded in the different national production, labour market, industrial relations and status systems. In order to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of VET, we examine recent developments in general and vocational training and its links to the labour and product market in five contrasting countries, namely, Denmark, Canada, Germany, Korea and the USA. In particular, differences in industrial relations, welfare states, income distribution and product markets are the main reason for the persistent high level of diversity in vocational training systems. The difference can perhaps be summarized as follows: in the coordinated market economies, the modernisation of vocational training is seen as a contribution to innovation in the economy, while in liberal market economies, it is seen as a siding into which weaker pupils can conveniently be shunted.     

The determination of wages of newly hired employees: Survey evidence on internal versus external factors

This paper reports findings on the relative importance of internal versus external factors in the setting of wages of newly hired workers. The evidence, from a rich firm-level survey on wage and price-setting procedures in 15 European Union countries, suggests that external labour market conditions are less important than internal pay structures in determining hiring pay, with internal pay structures binding even more often when there is labour market slack. When explaining their choice firms allude to fairness considerations and the need to prevent a potential negative impact on effort. Cross-country differences are found to depend on institutional factors: countries in which collective agreements are more prevalent and collective agreement coverage is higher report more often internal pay structures as the main determinant of hiring pay. Within-country differences are found to depend on firm and workforce characteristics: there is a strong association between the use of external factors in hiring pay, on the one hand, and skills (positive) and tenure (negative) on the other.     

Can media and text analytics provide insights into labour market conditions in China?

The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic given their small cyclical movement and their only partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to Mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017. We use a supervised machine learning approach by training a support vector machine classification model. The information content and the forecast ability of our LMCI are tested against official labour market activity measures in wage and credit growth estimations. Surprisingly, one of our findings is that the much-maligned official labour market indicators do contain information. However, their information content is not robust and, in many cases, our LMCI can provide forecasts that are significantly superior. Moreover, regional disaggregation of the LMCI illustrates that labour conditions in the export-oriented coastal region are sensitive to export growth, while those in inland regions are not. This suggests that text analytics can, indeed, be used to extract useful labour market information from Chinese newspaper articles.     

The impact of M&A experience on strategic HRM practices and organisational effectiveness: evidence from Greek firms

Experience with mergers and acquisitions makes companies develop practices that enable them to handle the process more effectively. This study examines the practices that successful companies, with acquisition experience, adopt when managing their personnel. We examine strategic Human Resource (HR) practices that differentiate top-performing from non-top performing companies, using the 1999 Cranet data. Increased HR involvement in strategic decisions, formalisation of HR practices, building organisational capability through training and development activities, line management devolvement and internal labour market opportunities are the main strategic HR practices adopted by successful companies.     

Intersectoral labour reallocations and unemployment in Italy

The Italian labour market, like most European labour markets and unlike the US, shows a greater cyclical sensitivity of the service sector with respect to manufacturing and firing costs higher than hiring costs. This accounts for the negative relationship between sectoral employment shifts and Italian unemployment in the post-war period and, correspondingly, for the pro-cyclical pattern of the Lilien index, in contrast with the US experience.By applying the Lilien index to the Italian context, this paper analyses the relative importance of sectoral regional and national factors in the explanation of changes in industrial structure, and their impact on unemployment. The econometric exercise illustrates that, given the structural features of the Italian labour market, the decline in intersectoral and interregional labour reallocations has significantly contributed to the increase of unemployment in Italy. New hires, the pull of new sectors, sectoral shifts and regional mobility can keep unemployment down, while at the same time maintaining some of the structural features of the “European model” (high employment security and stability).     

Internal labour flexibility from a resource-based view approach: definition and proposal of a measurement scale

The dynamic nature of current competitive environments has motivated managers to identify sources of flexibility based on the organisation's human resources. In this regard, internal labour flexibility emerges as a valid strategy to counteract environmental changes, based on the adaptability of the organisation's current workforce to face non-routine circumstances and events that require creativity and initiative. However, despite recent interest in the notion of internal labour flexibility, there is no commonly accepted definition of this term. Currently, there are several competing definitions of the construct, along with a variety of operationalisations. Some integration of these approaches is needed to ensure that our knowledge of internal labour flexibility grows cumulatively. In this study, we have sought to address some of these limitations by theoretically conceptualising and empirically validating a scale to measure internal labour flexibility from the resource-based view (RBV). The application of structural equation modelling to a sample of 226 Spanish firms confirmed the suggested dimensionality of the internal labour flexibility scale, which distinguishes between employees' intrinsic flexibility, skill malleability, behavioural malleability and relational flexibility. Tests of reliability and validity confirmed the appropriateness of this measurement scale.     

对农民工社会保障问题的思考

在科学发展下努力建设社会主义和谐社会的今天,农民工日益成为我国劳动力市场的一大主力军,一个发展国民经济不可或缺的部分,但农民工群体存在的问题特别是社会保障问题很不尽人意,正视农民工社会保障问题并积极探讨解决对策势在必行。文中从我国农民工社会保障的必要性和现状分析,提出了一些建设性对策。     

Patterns of employment relationships: the association between compensation policy and contractual arrangements

Firms respond differently to labour market regulations and develop an employment relationship accordingly. We use linked employer–employee data to examine the relationship between compensation policies and contractual arrangements in large-sized firms in Portugal. In this country, the wages are regulated through minimum wage and collective agreement, while employment is protected by stringent employment legislation. The empirical analysis starts with a fuzzy clustering to identify typical compensation policies. Three major segments emerge from this analysis: Competitive, Internal Labour Markets and Incentive. The first segment comprises low-wage firms, which are highly responsive to market conditions. The other two reveal properties of internal labour markets, although the incentive-based firms reinforce the use of discretionary power to differentiate the workforce. Subsequently, we estimate a regression model to examine how the compensation policy interacts with contractual arrangement. Empirical evidence confirms the segmentation predictions, i.e. low, flexible wages and flexible contracts prevail in the same firms. Furthermore, vulnerable categories like young workers and female workers are over-represented in Competitive firms, while high-wages are associated with incentive devices benefiting white-collar employees. Apparently, firms foster inequality among segments of workers and often penalise or favour the same category of workers.     

基于内部市场化的煤矿协同安全管理

将内部市场化管理模式引入煤矿安全管理,并基于企业内部市场链对煤矿安全管理流程进行重组再造,建立适合煤矿经营特点的煤矿安全管理流程,通过综合运用市场机制(经济杠杆)和内部安全管控(行政管理)机制,探索煤矿安全管理新模式,进一步促进煤矿持续安全与和谐发展。     

Wages,employment, labour turnover and the accessibility of local labour markets

In this paper, we extend a dynamic efficiency wage model to the case of multiple local labour markets that interact through migration. Firms are concerned about turnover costs. The quitting behaviour of workers is a function of local labour market conditions, non-wage income and the costs and benefits of migration to other local labour markets. A synthetic micro sample of 20,302 observations from the 1986, 1991 and 1996 New Zealand Censuses of Population and Dwellings provides evidence supporting the theory. Across subgroups, the wages of workers with relatively inelastic local labour supply and/or lower geographical mobility are relatively more responsive to changes in the local employment rate. The evidence is consistent with the notion that local employers engage in monopsonistic competition with respect to the employment of such workers.