Cannabis use and mental health problems

This paper investigates whether cannabis use leads to worse mental health. To do so, we account for common unobserved factors affecting mental health and cannabis consumption by modeling mental health jointly with the dynamics of cannabis use. Our main finding is that using cannabis increases the likelihood of mental health problems, with current use having a larger effect than past use. The estimates suggest a dose–response relationship between the frequency of recent cannabis use and the probability of currently experiencing a mental health problem. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heterogeneous effects of child disability on maternal labor supply: Evidence from the 2000 US Census

Previous research has documented a negative relationship between child disability and maternal labor supply. Because of data limitations, most studies in this literature use broad measures of disability, which may obscure important differences among children with limiting health conditions. This paper presents new evidence on the labor supply of women with disabled children, exploiting disability information provided by 2000 US Census. This large nationally representative sample allows us to test for differences across different types of disabling conditions. We find that accounting for this heterogeneity in conditions is important. Using a broad definition of disability results in small differences between women with and without a disabled child. When we use a more detailed classification, we find larger labor supply reductions for mothers of children with physical disabilities or limitations in their ability to care for themselves. There is less evidence that having a child with either mental or emotional limitations or a sensory impairment is negatively related to employment or weekly hours. We also test for heterogeneous effects related to child age and maternal education. We find no clear pattern with respect to age and some evidence that the relationship between child disability and maternal labor supply is stronger for less educated mothers.     

The dynamic effects of health on the labor force transitions of older workers

This paper addresses the interplay between health and labor market behavior in the later part of the working life. We use the longitudinal Health and Retirement Survey to analyze the dynamic relationship between health and alternative labor force transitions, including labor force exit, job change and application for disability insurance. Specifically, we examine how the timing of health shocks affects labor force behavior. Controlling for lagged values of health, poor contemporaneous health is strongly associated with labor force exit in general and with application for disability insurance in particular. At the same time, our evidence suggests that controlling for contemporaneous health, poor lagged health is associated with continued participation. Thus, it appears that not just poor health, but declines in health help explain retirement behavior. We conclude that modeling health in a dynamic, longitudinal framework offers important new insights into the effects of poor health on the labor force behavior of older workers.     

Accounting for labor demand effects in structural labor supply models

When assessing the effects of policy reforms on the labor market, most studies only focus on labor supply. The interaction of supply and demand is not explicitly modeled, which might lead to biased estimates of potential labor market outcomes. This paper proposes a straightforward method to remedy this shortcoming. We use information on firms' labor demand behavior and feed them into a structural labor supply model, completing the partial analysis of the labor market on the microdata level. We show the performance and relevance of our extension by introducing a pure labor supply side reform, the workfare concept, in Germany and simulating the labor market outcome of the reform. We find that demand effects offset about 25% of the positive labor supply effect of the policy reform.     

Health,economic resources and the work decisions of older men

We specify a dynamic programming model that addresses the interplay among health, financial resources, and the labor market behavior of men late in their working lives. We model health as a latent variable, for which self-reported disability status is an indicator, and allow self-reported disability to be endogenous to labor market behavior. We use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study. While we find large impacts of health on behavior, they are substantially smaller than in models that treat self-reports as exogenous. We also simulate the impacts of several potential reforms to the Social Security program.     

CHILD MENTAL HEALTH AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT: MULTIPLE OBSERVERS AND THE MEASUREMENT ERROR PROBLEM

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contain (potentially biased) assessments of each child's mental state from three observers (parent, teacher and child), together with expert (quasi‐)diagnoses, using an assumption of optimal diagnostic behaviour to adjust for reporting bias. We use three alternative restrictions to identify the effect of mental disorders on educational progress. Maternal education and mental health, family income and major adverse life events are all significant in explaining child mental health, and child mental health is found to have a large influence on educational progress. Our preferred estimate is that a one‐standard‐deviation reduction in ‘true’ latent child mental health leads to a 2‐ to 5‐month loss in educational progress. We also find a strong tendency for observers to understate the problems of older children and adolescents compared to expert diagnosis. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Applied Econometrics published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of dollar appreciation on sectoral labor market adjustments: Theory and evidence

We examine the extent to which exchange rate fluctuations affect sectoral employment and wages in the United States. We introduce a theoretical rational expectation model that decomposes movements in the exchange rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. The model demonstrates the effects of demand and supply channels on the response of the nominal wage and labor employment to changes in the exchange rate. The evidence indicates that the deflationary effect dominates on industrial nominal wage in manufacturing and transportation industries in the face of dollar appreciation. More importantly, there is evidence of a decrease in employment growth in several industries in response to dollar appreciation, which is statistically significant in construction and at the aggregate level. This evidence is consistent with a decrease in labor demand given the loss of competitiveness of U.S. products following dollar appreciation. There are negative effects of dollar appreciation on labor market conditions in the United States. Nonetheless, dollar appreciation is consistent with an increase in employment growth in the mining sector where the share of imports is the largest among U.S. industries.     

LOCAL LABOR MARKETS AND NATURAL RESOURCES: A SYNTHESIS OF THE LITERATURE

A primary way that natural resources affect a locality is through the demand for labor, with greater extraction requiring more workers. Shifts in labor demand can be measured through changes in employment and earnings, the main labor market outcomes, or through changes in the population and income, more generally. These changes may spillover into the nonresource economy, leading to greater overall effects or possibly crowd out; be spread unequally across the population, thereby altering the distribution of income and the poverty rate; or influence educational attainment, as people choose between additional schooling and work. In this review, the literature linking natural resources to local labor markets is synthesized by organizing existing studies according to their resource measurement and the outcomes that they consider. This synthesis provides an accessible guide to a literature that has boomed in recent years. It also identifies promising avenues for future research and lays a foundation to further generalize the evidence through an eventual meta‐analysis.     

Credit market constraints and labor market decisions

In this paper, we examine whether imperfections in credit markets spill over to other markets, particularly the labor market. We take the case of Italy, a country that experienced changes in the mortgage market brought about by the 1992 European unification and other institutional shifts. These events make Italy a good laboratory to study the effects of financial markets on the labor market. Using household data from the Bank of Italy between 1989 and 1993, we estimate the relationship between female participation and mortgage use. We find a significant impact of mortgages on women's participation in the labor market.     

Cannabis,cocaine and jobs

This paper uses a dataset collected among inhabitants of Amsterdam, to study the employment effects of the use of cannabis and cocaine. For females no negative effects of drug use on the employment rate are found. For males there is a negative correlation between past cannabis and cocaine use and employment. However, after correcting for the effect of unobserved personal characteristics there is no negative effect of cannabis use or cocaine use on the employment status of males. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Persistent Advantage or Disadvantage?: Evidence in Support of the Intergenerational Drag Hypothesis

By utilizing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and a measure of occupational prestige (OCCSCORE) as a labor market outcome, the authors examine variations in the degree of labor market discrimination faced by several ethnic and racial groups in the United States between 1880 and 1990. Results demonstrate that the sharpest decline in labor market discrimination against blacks occurred between 1960 and 1980. For black males the extent of labor market discrimination was greater in all census years in IPUMS after 1880 until 1970, evidence contradicting the conventional expectation that market-based discrimination will decline progressively over time by dint of competitive pressure. Finally, after replicating George Borjas' "ethnic capital" exercise, the authors pool the 1880, 1900, and 1910 data to determine the relative magnitude of a group's gains and losses in occupational prestige due to group advantage or disadvantage in human capital endowments and due to favorable or unfavorable treatment (nepotism or discrimination) of those endowments in the labor market. The authors then examine statistically whether the group human capital advantage or disadvantage and group exposure to nepotism or discrimination at the turn of the century affects labor market outcomes for their descendants today. Results indicate strong effects of the past on present labor market outcomes. Hence, the essence of the study is the statistical demonstration that there are significant and detectable effects on current generations of the labor market experiences of their racial/ethnic ancestors.     

THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL EFFECTS OF RELIGION ON SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A REVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE

Religion plays a fundamental role in most people's lives with profound implications for socioeconomic development. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the causal mechanisms between religion and development discussed and tested in the economics literature, and reviews quantitative empirical evidence on the actual effects of religion on economic and social dimensions of development. We start by disaggregating the concept of religion into four religious dimensions and propose a framework to conceptualize causal mechanisms. Numerous mechanisms are possible but only a few uncontested findings exist. Religion is ambivalent vis‐à‐vis development: although religious ideas can foster certain forms of human capital acquisition and labor market participation, scholars have found a negative relationship between religious dimensions and both income and gender equality as well as innovation activities. Religious identity is also a source of labor market discrimination and has ambivalent effects on economic growth and social cohesion. Methodological challenges refer to the availability of fine‐grained data, especially for developing countries, the use of concepts and definitions, and the lack of causal inference.     

Does taxation on harmful products influence population health? Evidence from Africa using the dynamic panel system GMM approach

Products such as tobacco and alcohol are known to be deleterious to human health. Tobacco use for instance, causes over eight million deaths annually worldwide. This has necessitated the imposition of taxes on such harmful products aimed at reducing their demand and hence ensure enhanced population health. However, while the effects of such taxes on deaths related to the consumption of these products have been given much attention, very little attention has been given to how these taxes enhance overall population health beyond these related deaths. Using tobacco tax as a proxy for taxation on harmful products and life expectancy as a proxy for overall population health, this study, examines the effect of taxing harmful products on population health in 38 African countries from 2008–2018. The system Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) regression is employed as the empirical estimation technique. The findings of the study show that, taxing harmful products enhances population health both in the short-run and long-run periods. The implication is that, governments, especially those in Africa, can use taxation on harmful products to improve population health even beyond deaths related to the consumption of these products.

     

Emotion work and psychological well-being: A review of the literature and some conceptual considerations

In this article, the state of the art of research on emotion work (emotional labor) is summarized with an emphasis on its effects on well-being. It starts with a definition of what emotional labor or emotion work is. Aspects of emotion work, such as automatic emotion regulation, surface acting, and deep acting, are discussed from an action theory point of view. Empirical studies so far show that emotion work has both positive and negative effects on health. Negative effects were found for emotional dissonance. Concepts related to the frequency of emotion expression and the requirement to be sensitive to the emotions of others had both positive and negative effects. Control and social support moderate relations between emotion work variables and burnout and job satisfaction. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that the cooccurrence of emotion work and organizational problems leads to high levels of burnout.     

Europeanization or globalization? Transnational wage bargaining and the distribution of activity in European labor markets

This paper investigates the impact of globalization on labor markets, in terms of wage inflation and the distribution of activity across regions. Specifically, we study the effects of aggregation in the labor markets on the distribution of employment and inflation pressures, where there are differences in market structures and transmission mechanisms underpinned by relatively immobile labor. To demonstrate these ideas, we take the European experience as a “laboratory” to show what can be expected from globalization in the labor markets in practice. Using models of wage leadership vs. locational competition, we examine the extent and strength of aggregation effects on labor market costs using a sample of data from 1983 to 2007 which covers the period of the creation of the Euro. We find that the aggregation effect has decreased significantly since the start of EMU, improving the trade-off between inflation and unemployment. At the same time, while Germany played an important role in the run-up to EMU in terms of wage leader, its role has now decreased and been replaced by globalization forces. This implies increased locational competition in terms of wage formation. We demonstrate this with the emerging role of the US as the benchmark for wage setting in Europe.     

DESIRABILITY AND SEQUENCE OF LIBERALIZATION AND STRUCTURAL REFORM POLICIES IN A MODEL WITH INFORMAL SECTOR

The paper develops a three-sector general equilibrium model with informal sector and examines the welfare effects of liberalization and structural reform in the presence of labor and capital market distortions. It attempts to determine a credible sequence of reforms that may be the most welfare-enhancing, since implementation of reforms in all the markets at a single stage may be neither feasible nor optimal. Foreign capital is welfare-improving only in the presence of labor market distortion, while welfare deteriorates if the capital market is distorted. While tariff and capital market reforms may be welfare-enhancing in the absence of labor market distortion, labor market reform may intensify the formal-informal wage gap and have a worsening effect on welfare in the presence of tariff distortion and capital market imperfection. One of the plausible sequences of reforms may be to initially undertake tariff reform followed by capital and labor market reforms, respectively.     

An analysis of firm and market volatility

In this paper, using time series data for the period 2 January 1998 to 31 December 2008 for 560 firms listed on the NYSE, we examine whether firm volatility is related to market volatility. The main contribution of this paper is that we develop an analytical framework motivating the firm-market volatility relationship. We present three new findings on volatility. First, we discover significant evidence of common volatility; for 12 out of 14 sectors, market volatility has a statistically significant effect on firm volatility for at least 50 percent of firms. Second, we discover significant evidence of size effects: for small-sized firms, there is weak evidence of commonality in volatility, while for large-sized firms there is high evidence (for as much as 75 percent of firms) of commonality in volatility. Third, we find that market volatility predicts firm volatility for firms belonging to five of the 14 sectors.     

The precious bane

Are natural resources harmful to growth? We address this question using a two-sector, endogenous growth model in which human capital is the engine of growth. By increasing the rewards to unskilled labor, natural resources make schooling more expensive. As long as the intertemporal elasticity of consumption substitution is not too high, this slows down human capital accumulation and growth. The presence of production spillovers from human capital, however, implies that a planner could react to a resource boom by increasing human capital accumulation even though the decentralized solution yields the exact opposite. The paper also shows that as the production complementarity between natural resources and unskilled labor declines, the growth effects of natural resources become increasingly sensitive to whether or not there is free trade in goods. The empirical evidence lends support to the main channel – natural resources to human capital to growth – that is suggested in the paper.     

Why are the unemployed in worse health? The causal effect of unemployment on health

We analyse the effect of unemployment on health using information from the German Socio-Economic Panel of the years 1991-2008. To establish a causal effect we rely on fixed-effects methods and plant closures as exogenous entries into unemployment. Although unemployment is negatively correlated with health, we do not find a negative effect of unemployment due to plant closure on health across several health measures (health satisfaction, mental health, and hospital visits). For this subgroup of the unemployed, unemployment does not seem to be harmful and selection effects of ill individuals into unemployment are likely to contribute to the observed overall correlation between poor health and unemployment.     

TRADE LIBERALIZATION,LABOR DEMAND SHIFTS AND EARNINGS INEQUALITY IN SINGAPORE

This article investigates the relative wage between skilled and low skilled labor in a small open economy with traditionally few labor market rigidities. It looks at the role of relative skills demand and supply in determining skills premium and explores the extent to which trade liberalization affects the skills wage gap. Indications are that greater openness is linked to higher labor demand elasticity and/or technological progress. The evidence also suggests that rapid acceleration in labor demand for skills and trade liberalization has widened the wage gap between skilled and low skilled labor. This result persists regardless of industry type.