Short-run maquiladora employment dynamics

The Ciudad Juárez maquiladora sector has grown enormously during the last three decades. To examine whether the trends underlying this remarkable performance are quantifiable, this paper analyzes the short-term time series characteristics of this portion of the metropolitan economy. The econometric methodologies employed include both univariate and transfer functions, with the latter using autoregressive integrated moving average analysis augmented by causality testing. Data are drawn for the sample period of January 1981 to December 1998. Empirical results indicate that inflation-adjusted wage rates, factories in operation, U.S. industrial performance, and the international value of the peso play important roles in determining month-to-month fluctuations in borderplex maquiladora payrolls.Financial support for this research was provided by El Paso Electric, the Fulbright Council for International Exchange of Scholars, and the Public Policy Research Center at the University of Texas at El Paso. Helpful comments were provided by Jeff Brannon, Jim Peach, and seminar participants at the University of Texas at El Paso, Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and New Mexico State University. Econometric research assistance was provided by Roberto Coronado and Roberto Tinajero.     

Union membership and employment dynamics

This note examines the behavior of a monopoly union that cares about its future membership and recognizes the dynamic dependence of membership on employment. A characterization is given both of the steady state and of the interdependent employment and membership dynamics out of that steady state.     

Heterogeneous determinants of local unemployment in Poland

We identify determinants of large disparities in local unemployment rates across Poland. Using an extensive panel data-set on the NUTS-4 level (i.e. the poviats level, or districts or counties level) we examine a wide range of determinants of local unemployment. Our research examines two groups of the determinants: one related to equilibrium theory and the other related to disequilibrium theory of local unemployment. We find that demographics, education and sectoral employment composition exert a stronger impact over rates of local unemployment than various demand factors. The impact of the determinants, while robust for outliers, is not homogeneous across Polish regions. In particular, in the most depressed local labour markets, skill improvement programmes do not appear to work and unemployment rates are relatively less responsive to investment. Our research suggests that there is no easy cure for local unemployment in Poland, but a few policies have the potential to slightly reduce existing disparities.     

Manufacturing growth and local employment multipliers in China

We study the impact of employment growth in manufacturing on job creation in the non-tradable sector for prefecture-level cities in China. Using the 2000 and 2010 Censuses of Population, we apply the shift-share approach to isolate the exogenous change of employment growth in manufacturing. For every hundred new manufacturing jobs, we find that 34 additional jobs are created in the non-tradable sector. We also show that the effect is heterogeneous along a number of dimensions. More specifically, one new job in high-technology manufacturing creates more jobs in the non-tradable sector while low-technology manufacturing employment growth has no significant multiplier effect. Among the non-tradable industries, the multiplier is the largest for wholesale, retail, and catering. Finally, the effect is also geographically heterogeneous, with the multiplier being greater for inland regions.     

The employment dynamics of less‐educated men in the United States: The role of self‐employment

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I construct a sample of working‐age males and examine the employment dynamics with a particular focus on the role of self‐employment for less‐educated men in the US. I find that men responding they had at some point been self‐employed tend to spend less time in non‐employment than other less‐educated men. The results from the dynamic multinomial logit model reveal positive aspects of self‐employment by indicating that less‐educated men who were self‐employed in the previous year were less likely to be non‐employed in the future as compared to those who were paid workers in the previous year.     

Idiosyncratic risk and aggregate employment dynamics

This paper studies how idiosyncratic productivity risk impacts aggregate employment dynamics when there is a trade-off between workers' productivity and costs of job creation and destruction. In our analysis, increasing idiosyncratic risk induces a producer to move workers out of structured jobs that are costly to create and destroy and towards less productive but more flexible unstructured positions. This substitution leaves the producer's total employment more responsive to both idiosyncratic and aggregate disturbances. If all of an industry's producers respond to heightened idiosyncratic risk in this way, then industry-wide employment can respond more to a given aggregate shock. We apply this insight to connect differences between young and old manufacturing plants' aggregate employment dynamics with their corresponding differences in idiosyncratic variability.     

The employment dynamics of different population groups over the business cycle

We examine differences in employment dynamics across population groups using Bayesian vector autoregressions. We document that groups who are particularly strongly affected by business-cycle fluctuations (males, young people, non-whites, the less educated, and workers in blue-collar occupations) also tend to be affected early in the build-up of a boom or bust. We further identify the drivers of the different cyclicalities across population groups. Supply shocks seem to be most important for the heterogeneous employment fluctuations and particularly for the early effects of recessions and booms on the most affected groups. Dynamics in sectoral activity and in hiring rates can help to understand our findings.     

Macroeconomic determinants of wealth inequality dynamics

The evolution of wealth inequality over the long run depends on income growth, inflation, and interest rates. In this paper, we examine, in a dynamic setting, the effect of these three macroeconomic variables on wealth inequality in the United States over the periods 1929–2009 and 1962–2009. The results show that these macroeconomic factors explain a significant amount of the changes in wealth inequality. The results indicate that increases in inflation and income growth contribute positively to net wealth shares of adults in the bottom 50% and middle 40% of the wealth distribution, leading to decreases in overall wealth inequality. Interestingly, the results show increases in interest rates contribute to lower wealth inequality in the U.S. although this result does not hold across all the inequality measures.     

The institutional,economic and social determinants of local government transparency

Interest in transparency is increasing worldwide. Literature on their determinants is evolving but is still in early stages. So far, it has typically focused on national governments while neglecting local governments. This paper examines the economic, social, and institutional determinants of local government transparency in Spain. We broaden the traditional fiscal focus by including corporate, social, contracting, and planning transparency indexes. Our results indicate that large municipalities and left-wing mayors report better transparency indexes; while the worst results are presented by provincial capitals, touristic cities and mayors with absolute majority. The analysis of specific transparency categories generally shows the consistent impact of these determinants.     

The labor market impact of immigration in Western Germany in the 1990s

In this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in Western Germany. Using administrative data for the period 1987-2001 and a labor-market equilibrium model, we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels. Instead, it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages. These asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets. In a simple counter-factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage-bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller.     

Fairness and the employment contract: North American regions versus Germany

Substantial evidence shows that North Americans are generallymore accepting of the market than Europeans and attribute marketoutcomes to a larger degree to effort or skill. Thus, NorthAmericans might be more accepting of layoffs and pay cuts thanGermans, and Germans might be more sensitive to the proceduresand conditions under which pay cuts and layoffs occur. The empiricalresults from our quasi-experiment are largely in line with thesehypotheses. The results may help to explain and be explainedby the different labour market institutions in the differentregions.     

Modeling male and female employment policy in Greece from local data

The article analyzes the population shares of employed, unemployed and other men and women by utilizing the 2001 Greek Census data collected at the municipal level. It departs from other studies on the subject by (a) considering not one but all economic activities simultaneously, (b) trying to ameliorate through space the common, yet often overlooked, regression misspecification problem, and (c) resorting to the use of fresh spatial arguments, as opposed to conventional regional or sub-regional regressors. In particular, the demographic, educational, and other conventional, available independent variables are supplemented with territorial arguments constructed from the inter-municipal functional linkages and the patterns of the residuals. By isolating the effects of the spatial and non-spatial factors driving economic activity, the article brings to light sub-regional and cross-regional patterns that might otherwise go undetected, and provides a better understanding of the internal heterogeneity of the country. This facilitates the formulation of (i) better-targeted employment and unemployment policy interventions aiming to treat disparities at the local and micro-regional level, alongside (ii) broader, nation-wide interventions.     

Decentralisation of active labour market policy: The case of Swedish local employment service committees

Decentralisation of decision-making in labour market policy may increase efficiency, since local authorities have first-hand knowledge about local labour market problems. However, decentralisation may also be associated with fiscal externalities generating misallocation. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a Swedish pilot programme in 1996, which strengthened the role of the local authorities in labour market policy in certain regions. Our econometric findings do not indicate any increase in geographical lock-in of the unemployed, but decentralisation seems to spur local initiatives in the form of projects organised by the municipalities and increase targeting on outsiders in the labour market. The latter result is consistent with the hypothesis that municipalities used their increasing influence in order to improve municipal budgets at the expense of the central government.     

Distribution dynamics of regional GDP per employee in unified Germany

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the two-component distributions were clearly separated and bimodal, corresponding to the East and West German districts, respectively, in the following years they started to merge showing only one mode. Still, using the recently developed EM-test for homogeneity in normal mixtures, the hypothesis of just a single normal component for the whole distribution is clearly rejected for all years. A Posterior analysis shows that about a third of the East German districts were assigned to the richer component in 2006, thus catching up to levels of the West. The growth rate of a mover district is about 1% point higher than the growth rate of a non-mover district which had the same initial level of GDP per employee.     

Persistence of initial debt in the long-term employment dynamics of new firms

Abstract.  This paper investigates whether a firm's future growth is independent of its initial debt structure. The non-parametric test consists of determining whether the conditional size distribution for firms surviving through early years of life depends upon debt-to-asset ratio at birth. Initially, I test for initial size dependence in the growth process by applying Pakes and Ericson (1998) procedure. I then test the hypothesis that initial debt-to-asset ratios are irrelevant to growth of ten-year old manufacturing firms. I reject the null of independence, and find evidence of a non-monotonic relationship between age ten conditional size and the initial debt-to-asset ratio.     

Networks in labor markets: Wage and employment dynamics and inequality

We present a model of labor markets that accounts for the social network through which agents hear about jobs. We show that both wages and employment are positively associated (a strong form of correlation) across time and agents. We also analyze the decisions of agents regarding staying in the labor market or dropping out. If there are costs to staying in the labor market, then networks of agents that start with a worse wage status will have higher drop-out rates and there will be a persistent differences in wages between groups according to the starting states of their networks.     

Uncertainty and employment dynamics in the euro area and the US

In this paper we investigate the local and foreign effects of uncertainty shocks on unemployment in two large economic regions, the United States (US) and the euro area (EA). We deploy a Bayesian Markov-switching structural vector autoregressive model identified via heteroscedasticity. Two alternative specifications are considered with the shocks of interest being labelled as “US (or EA) demand uncertainty” and “US (or EA) financial market uncertainty”. We reach similar conclusions using both specifications: (i) US shocks have an effect on both the local and foreign labour markets while euro area shocks are much less influential; (ii) the US labour market tends to react and absorb shocks more quickly than the labour market in the euro area does. As economic theory predicts, the reaction to uncertainty shocks points to possible market imperfections that are region specific.     

Long run determinants and short run dynamics of inflation in Tunisia

The essential idea of this study is to analyse the origins of inflation at short and long runs in Tunisia relying on annual data during the period 1962 to 2003. We also suggest a model that has a structure determined by monetary and structural factors, and estimated by Johansen's cointegration technique. The empirical results show that inflation is explained by mixed factors: monetary ones such as money supply, the interest rate and the real effective exchange rate; and structural ones like the nominal average annual wage rate, the import prices and the real output. The analysis aims at pointing out the long run determinants of inflation and studying its short run dynamics.