Indeterminacy with environmental and labor dynamics

We study the joint dynamics of labor reallocation and environmental change when workers have rational expectations and incur migration costs. We emphasize the relation between parameter values and the area of state space in which indeterminacy of equilibria can occur. Unlike the one-dimensional model in which the wage differential adjusts instantaneously, here the measure of the region of indeterminacy is not monotonic in the cost of adjustment.     

Do employers avoid hiring workers from poor neighborhoods? Experimental evidence from the real labor market*

We investigate whether employers avoid hiring workers who live in neighborhoods with low socio-economic status and/or with long commuting times. In a large-scale field experiment in the Swedish labor market, we sent more than 4,000 fictitious résumés, with randomly assigned information about the applicants' residential locations, to firms with advertised vacancies. Our findings show that commuting time has a negative effect on the likelihood of being contacted by an employer, while the socio-economic status of a neighborhood does not appear to be important. These results offer guidance for policymakers who are responsible for reversing segregation patterns.     

A Distortive Wage Tax and a Countervailing Commuting Subsidy

Within a second-best duocentric urban economics framework where labor income taxation distorts workplace choices on account of commuting costs, this paper studies a commuting subsidy, which distorts land use. It is shown that a commuting subsidy increases welfare if and only if it shifts labor supply from less to more productive business districts.     

The Choice of Technology and Rural-Urban Migration in Economic Development

This paper studies a general equilibrium model of rural-urban migration in which manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose increasing returns technologies to maximize profits. Urban residents incur commuting costs to work in the Central Business District. Surprisingly a change in the size of the population or an increase in the exogenously given wage rate will not affect a manufacturing firm’s choice of technology. This helps to explain why firms in developing countries may not adopt labor intensive technologies even under abundant labor supply. An increase in the number of manufacturing firms increases both the employment rate and the level of employment in the manufacturing sector. However, manufacturing firms choose less advanced technologies. Capital accumulation leads manufacturing firms to choose more advanced technologies, but may not increase employment in the manufacturing sector.     

The supply of skills in the labor force and aggregate output volatility

The cyclical volatility of US gross domestic product suddenly declined during the early 1980s and remained low for over 20 years. I develop a labor search model with worker heterogeneity and match-specific costs to show how an increase in the supply of high-skill workers can contribute to a decrease in aggregate output volatility. In the model, firms react to changes in the distribution of skills by creating jobs designed specifically for high-skill workers. The new worker–firm matches are more profitable and less likely to break apart due to productivity shocks. Aggregate output volatility falls because the labor market stabilizes on the extensive margin. In a simple calibration exercise, the labor market based mechanism generates a substantial portion of the observed changes in output volatility.     

Making Labor Flexible: The Recomposition of Tijuana's Maquiladora Female Labor Force

This article revisits the debate over the benefits of export-oriented manufacturing employment for women by taking up Linda Lim's (1990) critique that such research is often biased in its methods and conclusions. Using a sample of 198 women workers from the 1993 Labor Trajectories Survey, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis to test whether the social and demographic characteristics of the female maquiladora labor force influence their position in the labor market. I find that maquiladoras in Tijuana, Mexico, employ married women, women with children, and women with low levels of education who constitute a low-wage sector of the labor force with few other employment alternatives. In the drive to keep production costs low, multinational manufacturers have tapped into this low-wage labor force, thereby taking advantage of women's labor market disadvantages and making a labor force willing to accept more "flexible" terms of employment.     

Immigration Policy,Self‐selection,and the Quality of Immigrants*

This paper investigates the effects of immigration quotas on the average quality of immigrants by developing a human capital migration model where efficiency in migration depends on skills and emigration rates are higher among skilled workers. Studying the joint determination of the domestic level of wages and immigrants' self‐selection, we find a negative relationship between the wage level and the percentage of educated workers among immigrants, which results in a nonstandard downward‐sloping labor supply. In our framework, a higher quota increases the skill mix of immigrants through its negative effect on wages and raises aggregate national income.     

Labor Mobility, Trade, and Social Capital

Labor market integration raises welfare in the absence of distortions. This paper examines labor and goods market integration in a general‐equilibrium model with social capital. The findings are: (i) labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare, and raises it if the goods and labor skills are sufficiently different; (ii) compared to Pareto optimum, labor mobility (social capital) is excessively large (depleted); (iii) trade is superior to labor market integration if trading costs are no higher than private migration costs, otherwise the outcome is ambiguous; and (iv) the creation of new institutions in response to labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare.     

风雅的养成——园林画中的古代女性教育

园林作为居住空间的特殊品类,是传统社会重要的女性教育空间,在园林画中多有体现。以传世的园林绘画为考察对象,结合文献史料,从女性的自然常识教育、劳动技能教育和文化艺术教育3个方面探讨园林空间对于古代女性健康成长与人格完善的作用。可以发现,园林空间在古代女性教育中占有特殊地位,它是女性认识自然世界的窗口、学习生活技能的场所,以及提高文化和艺术造诣的环境。     

Optimal urban land use and zoning

The paper studies the optimal distribution of business and residential land in a circular city. Once the optimum is characterized, we analyze the effect of changes in commuting costs and externality parameters. We also propose policies like labor subsidies, land taxes and zoning restrictions that can implement the efficient allocation as an equilibrium, or close the gap between the optimal and equilibrium allocations. The results show that business land is more concentrated at the center of the city in the optimum and that higher commuting costs increase the difference between optimal and equilibrium allocations.     

Revenue Recycling and the Welfare Effects of Road Pricing

This paper explores the interactions between taxes on work-related traffic congestion and pre-existing distortionary taxes in the labor market. A congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation. The resulting welfare loss in the labor market can easily exceed the Pigouvian welfare gain from internalizing the congestion externality. However, if congestion tax revenues are used to reduce labor taxes, the net impact on labor supply is positive, and this can raise the overall welfare gain from the congestion tax by around 100 percent. Nonetheless the optimal congestion tax still equals the Pigouvian tax.
JEL classification R 41; H 21; H 23     

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment,by Carrie N. Baker

This paper examines some of the effects of East and West German family policy on women's economic position by analyzing intrahousehold bargaining power, defined here as based on co-resident partners' relative fall-back positions, which in turn depend on the individuals' access to income in the event that the partnership ends. East German policy sought to integrate women into the labor force through programs such as free public child care and liberal maternity leave. West Germany based its family policy on the assumption of a stark gender division of labor, with one lifetime breadwinner per family and a second parent who temporarily leaves the labor force to raise children. On the basis of her findings and analysis, the author argues that while East German institutions increased women's bargaining power, gender-specific policies interfered with women's ability to use this power to bring about changes in the household division of labor. West German family policy did not assign gender roles, but it offered women less bargaining power with which to negotiate. The author maintains that society's refusal to address women's greater child-rearing costs is not based on an assessment of such costs and the costs of redistributive government programs, but on the assumption that women should absorb the risks and burdens of reproduction.     

Agglomeration,city size and crime

This paper analyzes the relationship between crime and agglomeration where the land, labor, product, and crime markets are endogenously determined. Our main theoretical findings are the following: (i) better accessibility to jobs decreases crime in the short run but may increase crime in the long run; (ii) the per-capita crime rate increases with city size; (iii) when allowing for endogenous policing, lower commuting costs make the impact of police on crime more efficient.     

Worker Personality: Another Skill Bias beyond Education in the Digital Age

We present empirical evidence suggesting that technological progress in the digital age will be biased not only with respect to skills acquired through education but additionally with respect to non‐cognitive skills (personality). We measure the direction of technological change by estimated future digitalization probabilities of occupations, and non‐cognitive skills by the Big Five personality traits from four German worker surveys. Even though we control for education and work experience, we find that workers who are more open to experience, emotionally more stable and less agreeable will tend to be less susceptible to digitalization. We also find that future technological progress may not continue to hollow out the middle class as much as it did in the recent past. These results suggest that education and labor market policies should put more emphasis on children's and workers’ personalities to strengthen their labor market resilience in the digital age.     

Stress that Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox*

People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to standard economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals' utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium with panel data, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well‐being. This result is robust with regard to a number of alternative explanations. We mention several possibilities of an extended model of human behavior able to explain this “commuting paradox”.     

Creation of jobs and firm-sponsored training in a matching model of unemployment

We offer a search and matching model with firms that create job vacancies and are willing to sponsor general skills training. The spillover of skilled labor between firms has the dual effect of increasing job vacancies and enhancing firms’ incentives for free riding. The former effect is combined with a reduction in search costs to cause a positive feedback between the supply of skilled labor and the creation of job vacancies, suggesting that firms encourage each other. On the other hand, with the latter effect, search costs are reduced, inducing firms to take a free ride on each other’s investments, thereby decreasing the supply of skilled labor and the creation of job vacancies. A reduction in search costs can lead to different results depending on which of the two mechanisms is actualized. Additionally, our analysis allows for “labor poachers,” or firms absorbing skilled labor in the market, to consider direct competition between training firms and poaching firms.      

Schooling, Training, Growth and Minimum Wages

We examine how the long-run growth performance of an economy is affected by a labor market distortion. In our model, growth occurs through skill formation, and skills are generated through schooling and training of unskilled workers. We analyze how a minimum wage legislation affects long-run growth. In general, the effects are ambiguous. The reason is that while a minimum wage discourages training, it also encourages schooling. The net effect then depends on whether training or schooling dominates the long-run increases in labor productivity.
JEL classification : I 20, J 31, O 40     

Injured system

Workers' compensation laws, designed to protect workers who incur job-related injuries and illnesses, are provoking outcries because of the rising costs of medical care.     

Relative Pay of Domestic Eldercare Workers in Shanghai,China

Domestic services represent a growing sector of the economy in many high- and upper-middle income countries. Demand for domestic workers for eldercare is especially high as a result of the rapid aging of the population in these countries. However, domestic eldercare employment is characterized as a low-pay, low-status occupation worldwide. This article examines the relative pay of domestic eldercare workers in urban China and its underlying determinants. The estimates show that when holding observable individual characteristics constant, domestic eldercare workers earn 28 percent less than other types of workers in the service sector in Shanghai. The analysis attributes the low wages of eldercare workers to the fact that domestic paid work is culturally devalued, eldercare is performed by workers from the most marginalized segments of Shanghai's labor force, and the users of eldercare are relatively poor among the users of domestic services.     

Recent developments in China's labor market: Labor shortage,rising wages and their implications

China's abundant supply of cheap labor has played an important role in its remarkable economic and social development. Recently, however, China has experienced a labor shortage and rising wages, implying that the country's long‐lasting competitive advantage based on its “unlimited” labor supply and low costs is vanishing. We find that structural demographic changes, regional economic growth disparities and the household registration system may have caused the labor shortage. Furthermore, China's continued low wages, relatively low labor share of gross national income, declining proportion of household consumption to GDP , and productivity improvements as well as increasing unit labor costs can be used to explain the recent wage increases. The dramatic development of its labor market signals that China is entering a new stage of economic development. The country's prior successful model of economic development needs to be adjusted to adapt to the new situation in its labor market to achieve sustainable economic development.