Do Employers Prefer Overqualified Graduates? A Field Experiment

We test whether employers prefer overqualified to adequately qualified job candidates. To this end, duos of fictitious applications by bachelor's and master's graduates are sent to real job openings with a bachelor's degree as a minimum requirement. For the overall sample, we find that overqualified master's graduates are 19 percent more likely to be directly invited for a job interview and 11 percent more likely to get any positive reaction. This relative advantage for overqualified workers is found to be higher for bottleneck occupations. Relative preferences also differ across employers within labor‐market segments.     

Wage Structure and Dynamics in the Electronics Industry

This study analyzes wage patterns over time among California electronics employers. While the range of wages paid is substantial, employers on average make only small departures from market wage that are not pervasive across occupations or persistent across time. Employers appear able to change employment levels without affecting wages. Internal wage relativities also appear flexible. Differences between administered wage scales and actual wages paid are used to distinguish wage policy from market outcomes.     

Employers' Search and the Efficiency of Matching

Unskilled workers in low productivity jobs typically experience higher labour turnover. This article shows how this finding is related to variation in the efficiency of the matching process across occupations. If employers find it less profitable to invest in search and screening activities when recruiting for low‐productivity jobs, matches at the lower end of the occupation distribution will be more prone to separation. The analysis of a unique sample of British hirings, containing detailed information about employers' recruitment practices, shows that more intensive recruitment leads to matches of better quality that pay higher wages, last longer and make employers more satisfied with the person taken on.     

Interest Arbitrators and Their Decision Behavior

We analyze the salary portions of a multi-state sample of police interest arbitration awards to determine what decision criteria (e.g., pay comparability, ability to pay, inflation) arbitrators' mention most frequently. Using the results, we construct measures of these criteria and assess their influence on awarded salaries. We find that arbitrated salaries are related to several of the measures and also to the employer and union salary offers. The parties' offers are also influenced by our measures, indicating that unions and employers attempt to strategically position their offers before the arbitrator.     

Sex and Interoccupational Wage Differences in Israel

An examination of the influence of the sex identification of an occupation on earnings reveals that: (1) male occupations earn more than female occupations; (2) nonsegregated occupations tend to be more similar in earnings to female than to male occupations; (3) the majority of female occupations earn below the mean for occupations at each level of education; the inverse is true for male occupations; (4) men in female occupations earn less than they do in male occupations; and (5) women in male occupations do not consistently earn more than women in female occupations at comparable levels of education. Our data indicate that they tend to gravitate toward the lower earning male occupations. These findings support the hypothesis that in Israel, as elsewhere, occupational segregation is an important factor underlying earning differentials between women and men. Wage differentials are the result not only of differences in human capital resources, but also of unequal opportunities within the occupational structure. The division of labor by sex does not cause inequality—rather it permits the perpetuation of a system of social relations in which the work women do is allocated inferior status and economic rewards. The social forces which produce and sustain this reality are worthy of further investigation.     

Highly Educated Immigrants and Native Occupational Choice

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in the United States has largely focused on how influxes of foreign‐born labor with little educational attainment have affected similarly educated native‐born workers. Fewer studies analyze the effect of immigration within the market for highly educated labor. We use O*NET data on job characteristics to assess whether native‐born workers with graduate degrees respond to an increased presence of highly educated foreign‐born workers by choosing new occupations with different skill content. We find that highly educated native and foreign‐born workers are imperfect substitutes. Immigrants with graduate degrees specialize in occupations demanding quantitative and analytical skills, whereas their native‐born counterparts specialize in occupations requiring interactive and communication skills. When the foreign‐born proportion of highly educated employment within an occupation rises, native employees with graduate degrees choose new occupations with less analytical and more communicative content.     

Large Employers and Apprenticeship Training in Britain

We consider the link between apprenticeship and large employers in Britain, in terms of the contribution of apprenticeship to intermediate skills and the contribution of large employers to the Advanced Apprenticeship (AA) programme. Evidence is taken from interviews with managers in 28 organizations. We find that apprenticeship functions to only a limited extent outside AA, and then primarily because of the ineligibility of particular categories of trainee. The use that employers make of apprenticeship varies considerably, in association with its cost‐effectiveness relative to recruitment and upgrade training within human resource management strategy, and with employers’ evaluations of the technical content of AA qualifications. The prospects for increased sponsorship of apprenticeship by large organizations are curbed by the greater appeal of recruitment and upgrade training in various contexts.     

Workplace gender segregation in standard and non-standard employment regimes in the US labour market

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of workplace gender segregation in non-standard employment in the United States. It compares segregation in standard and three non-standard work arrangements paying special attention to independent contracting – a segment of contingent employment representing novel and consequential developments in work organization. In line with the prediction that inequality is lower in more marketized sectors of the labour market, my analyses based on a representative sample of the contemporary US workforce reveal that workplace gender segregation is lower in non-standard employment. I further find that the degree of segregation corresponds to the degree of attachment to the employer and that segregation is lower in segments of the economy with higher market competition. Overall, my analyses indicate that a shift towards alternative work arrangements can reduce overall workplace segregation but does not lead to uniform desegregation across occupations, and that institutions of employment and market pressures faced by employers play significant roles in the effect of alternative work arrangements on workplace segregation.     

Free To Choose? Dimensions of Private-Sector Wage Determination, 1979–1994

Deregulation of the system of pay determination in Britain was started in 1979 with the removal of incomes policy. The objective was to give employers the freedom to determine wage increases without the restrictions of pay norms or statutory limits. Instead, companies would be able to link changes in pay to the fortunes of the individual enterprise or establishment. By the mid-1990s, had these attempts to decentralize wage negotiations changed the determinants of wage settlement outcomes in Britain? We address the influence of industrial relations institutions and labour market pressures on wage increases between 1979 and 1994 using evidence from the CBI’s Pay Databank. Despite the direction of the Conservative Government’s policy, the external institutional forces of the labour market, particularly the rate of inflation and comparability, appear to exert an enduring influence, both qualitatively and quantitatively, on pay determination.     

Hazardous Occupations Within the Job Hierarchy

Firms using hazardous technologies face strong incentives to reduce job skill and training requirements so as to minimize the level of compensating wage differentials they must pay. This note examines the outcome of this process in terms of the location of hazardous occupations within the overall structure of jobs. Using four independent sources of data for the period 1974 to 1982, hazardous Occupations are found to offer significantly less worker autonomy, less on-the-job training, poorer promotion possibilities, greater risk of temporary and permanent layoff, and lower wage levels than safe occupations.     

Computer Use,Job Tasks and the Part‐Time Pay Penalty

Using data from the UK Skills Surveys 1997–2012, we show that the part‐time pay penalty (PTPP) for women within low‐ and medium‐skilled occupations has decreased significantly. The convergence in computer use and non‐routine job tasks between part‐time and full‐time workers explains a large share of the decrease in the PTPP. This convergence took place mainly within occupations, and was not driven by changes in occupational segregation between the two groups of workers. The lower PTPP is also related to changes in the returns to job tasks. Relative changes in the importance of and returns to computer use and job tasks together explain more than 50 per cent of the decrease in the PTPP.     

Explaining the Rent–OER Inflation Divergence, 1999–2007

U.S. Rent inflation has often greatly exceeded Owners' Equivalent Rent (OER) Inflation. Why? Critics believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is making a faulty utilities adjustment to OER and that the Federal Reserve Board should focus only on Rent inflation. Both beliefs are misguided. Herein we decompose the historical Rent–OER inflation differential into its various determinants. The utilities adjustment, which is necessary, sometimes contributed, but is no smoking gun. The main culprit was an economically interesting pattern of differential rent inflation across locales within cities, one common to many cities. Surprisingly, rent control also played a role.     

Explaining Asset Mispricing Using the Resale Option and Inflation Illusion

We investigate the overconfidence theory and inflation‐illusion hypothesis of asset mispricing. Both concepts address subjective asset valuation but place the impetus on differing explanations within the standard dividend‐growth model. We find that one of the theoretical outcomes of overconfidence—asset turnover—consistently explains mispricing in U.S. housing markets. Further, we find that asset turnover subsumes expected inflation in certain specifications, suggesting that dispersion in investors' beliefs is a better explanation of asset mispricing than the investors' inability to properly discount future cash flows.     

German Employers’ Inputs to Employee Skills Development

Using organizational level survey data, this article analyzes larger German private employers’ inputs to employee skills development, to test the theory that unions and employers’ associations raise employer incentives for training. Large German employers maintained their overall contribution between 1995 and 1999. Indicative data for 2004 suggest that this has continued, yet neither membership of employers’ associations nor high union densities influenced it.     

雇主视角下的高级技工短缺问题探析

针对我国高级技工短缺问题,从雇主视角出发,构建＂委托—代理＂模型对专业技能培养的投资行为进行数理推导,并在此基础上对雇佣双方的行动策略作单次动态博弈与重复动态博弈分析。结果表明由于存在技工离职的风险,企业会选择放弃对高级技工培养进行投资。为此,建议企业实施有利于雇佣双方在技能培养中采取合作行为的管理措施,为培养高级技工创造良好的博弈环境。     

Youth Apprenticeship in Britain: Lessons for the United States

Britain's effort to introduce youth apprenticeships over the past decade offers important general lessons about the role of employers in school-to-work initiatives. In particular, the incentives facing employers work against efforts to provide skills training. Alternative arrangements for such programs are suggested that create incentives for employers to improve the skills of youth apprentices.     

A large-scale field experiment on occupational gender segregation and hiring discrimination

We analyze the relationship between occupational gender composition and gender discrimination in recruitment and investigate whether there is hiring discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations. We do this with a large-scale field experiment where we submitted more than 12,000 job applications for 12 occupations in Australia, varying the gender of the applicants. Men received around 50% more callbacks than women in male-dominated occupations, while they received over 40% fewer callbacks in female-dominated occupations.     

The Effect of Computer Use on Work Discretion and Work Intensity: Evidence from Europe

This article studies changes in computer use and work discretion and intensity in the EU-15 between 1995 and 2015. We document that while the proportion of workers using computers has increased from 40 per cent to more than 60 per cent, there remain significant differences between countries even within the same occupations. Several countries have seen a significant increase in computer use even in low-skilled occupations generally assumed to be less affected by technology. Overall, the great increase in computer use between 1995 and 2015 coincided with a period of modest deterioration of job quality in the EU-15 as a whole, as work discretion declined for most occupational and educational groups, while work intensity increased slightly for most of them. Our OLS results exploiting variation within country-occupation cells point to a sizeable positive effect of computer use on work discretion, but to no effect on work intensity. Our instrumental variable estimates point to an even more benign effect of computer use on job quality as measured by work discretion and work intensity. Hence, the results suggest that the (moderate) deterioration in the quality of work observed in the EU-15 between 1995 and 2015 has occurred despite the spread of computers, rather than because of them.     

Off the Waterfront: The Long‐Run Impact of Technological Change on Dockworkers

We investigate how individual workers and local labour markets adjust over a long time period to a discrete and plausibly exogenous technological shock, namely the introduction of containerization in the UK port industry. This technology, which was introduced rapidly between the mid‐1960s and the late‐1970s, had dramatic consequences for specific occupations within the port industry. Using longitudinal micro‐census data, we follow dockworkers over a 40‐year period and examine the long‐run consequences of containerization for patterns of employment, migration and mortality. The results show that the job guarantees negotiated by the unions protected dockworkers' employment until the guarantees were removed in 1989. A matched comparison of workers in comparable unskilled occupations reveals that, even after job guarantees were removed, dockworkers did not fare worse than the comparison group in terms of their labour market outcomes. Our results suggest that job guarantees provided a safety net which reduced the cost to workers of sudden technological change.     

A behavioural measure of information work

Information work is defined from a behavioural perspective, as the manipulation of information, when performed by workers. A set of activities characterizing information work are identified, drawing on Blooms Taxonomy as the reference source. Using this measure, the 1977 Dictionary of Occupation Titles was content analysed to identify those occupations which could be behaviourally classified as information work. 40% of all occupations were determined to be informational in work behaviour. These occupations were found across all sectors, although they were concentrated in the service sector. Many occupations, old and new, have taken on an informational character.