Did Canadian welfare reform work? The effects of new reform strategies on social assistance participation

This paper measures the extent to which declines in social assistance (SA) participation were associated with novel and aggressive reforms referred to as new reform strategies: work requirements, diversion, earning exemptions and time limits. Controlling for province‐specific benefit levels, eligibility requirements, GDP growth, labour market conditions and demographics, SA participation rates were more than one percentage point lower (equivalent to a 13% decline) in provinces with new reforms. Work requirements with strong sanctions had the sharpest negative associations. New reform strategies explain at least 10% of observed declines in SA participation, twice that of benefit levels and eligibility requirements.     

Social economy and employment – the case of Sweden

Recent research has shown growing shares of employment in the social economy (or non-profit sector) both in the European Union and in the United States. In the EU, there seems to be growing hopes that the social economy will be capable of contributing to local progress on the unemployment issue in crisis regions. This paper analyses employment in certain entrepreneurial forms, usually considered belonging to the social economy, in Sweden during the 1990s. The results show considerable regional differences of employment in the social economy, but also that its share of the labor market is very limited. The effect of social-economic organizations on employment, therefore, is probably mainly indirect in as much as they function as platforms for cooperation between firms or else as embryos for enterprises by strengthening local entrepreneurship and helping to nurture a deposit of social capital which has visible effects on private business and jobs. However, these effects need more detailed examinations.     

The effects of shocks on the Austrian unemployment rate – a structural VAR approach

Assuming full hysteresis in the Austrian labour market, a simple macroeconomic framework is used to model the effect of four structural shocks, i.e. shocks to productivity, demand, wages and labour supply. By using SVAR analysis, we derive impulse-response functions that show the effects of these shocks on unemployment. What constitutes a distinctive feature of our study is the deliberate use of overidentifying restrictions, allowing for a likelihood ratio test. The objection to SVAR methodology, that it relies on arbitrary assumptions, can thus be overcome, as invalid sets of identifying restrictions are rejected. First version received: September 2000/Final version received: March 2002 RID="*" ID="*"  I thank Juan F. Jimeno, Martin Wagner, Helmut Hofer and Bernhard B?hm for their assistance; Robert Kunst and Martin Spitzer for their discussion of an earlier version of this paper; Thomas Sparla, Michael Roos and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.     

The incentive effects of levelling the playing field – an empirical analysis of amateur golf tournaments

Levelling the playing field is an important policy instrument to guarantee an equitable competition among heterogeneous individuals. However, the incentive effects of those policies are usually not explicitly addressed in empirical studies. In this article the performance in amateur golf tournaments is analysed to gain insights into the incentive effects of those types of policies. The empirical analysis takes advantage of the fact that tournaments in amateur golf are of two distinctive types that apply different scoring rules: while one scoring rule is based on gross scores, i.e. the total number of strokes of a player, the second scoring rule is based on net scores where the total number of strokes is normalized with respect to the respective player's handicap. Performance comparisons of players who participated in both types of tournaments suggest that levelling the playing field, as in tournaments based on net score, has positive and significant performance effects.     

On the employment effects of outward FDI: the case of Spain, 1995–2011

In this article, we analyse the impact on domestic employment resulting from outward FDI performed by Spanish firms, using industry data for the period 1995–2011. Together with the effects on the total employment, we differentiate the effects according to the particular groups of countries and activities to which those FDI outflows are addressed. In addition, the impact of outward FDI on the demand for labour is also analysed separately for high and low skill levels of the labour force.     

US—Mexico employment effects of repealing the US offshore assembly provision

The [OAPs] are contributing to the actual displacement – and impending displacement in the next few years – of scores of thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled factory production workers who are in the economy' mainstream.

Nathaniel Goldfinger, AFL-CIO, 1970

We believe that the only benefits derived from the existence of [the OAP] are reached by transnational enterprises through increases in profits. This, however, cannot offset the harm done to the thousands of American's whose livelihoods have been sacrificed in the pursuit of those profits.

Mark Anderson, AFL-CIO, 1987

What my well-intentioned but misinformed colleagues fail to realise is that without provisions like [the OAP], products [assembled in Mexico] would be 100 per cent made in Asia. The loss, therefore, would equal not only the jobs used in the assembly process in Mexico, but those used to manufacture the components produced here in the United States.

Hon. Jim Kolbe, 1987

The employment effects of the Offshore Assembly Provision (OAP) are highly controversial. Organized labour strongly opposes the provision because they believe it shifts assembly jobs offshore. In constrast, US business contends that in order to compete with imports, domestic components must be assembled abroad. Thus, the OAP preserves jobs in components industries. Mexico favours the provision, believing that it is an important cause of the growth in assembly employment in its northers border region. In this paper, we contribute to the debate over the OAP by supplying estimates of its employment effects in the United States and Mexico for disaggregate industries. We find the claims of both proponents and opponents of the OAP to be greatly exaggerated.     

Beggar-thyself or beggar-thy-neighbour? The welfare effects of monetary policy

This paper examines whether monetary expansion is a beggar-thyself or beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Obstfeld and Rogoff (1995) show that monetary expansion under producer currency pricing increases domestic and foreign overall welfare, in cases where the cross-country substitutability is high. If the cross-country substitutability is low, then monetary expansion is a beggar-thyself policy that reduces domestic welfare and increases foreign welfare (Corsetti & Pesenti 2001; Tille 2001). In this paper, we will show that regardless of whether the cross-country substitutability is high or low, monetary expansion is always a beggar-thyself policy in the short run.     

Mandate-based welfare policies and the effect on real wage – The case of Taiwan

This study estimates the relationship between statutory welfare programs and workers’ compensation. Employing monthly macroeconomic data from 1982 to 2016 and wage rates in several private industrial sectors in Taiwan, the relationships between pay variations and policy interventions are explored after controlling for the economic growth rate, labor productivity, and time fixed effects. The seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) were adopted in the panel analyses. The findings of this study suggest that social welfare policies have negative effects on employees’ wage rates. The magnitudes of the effects are directly linked to the burden borne by the employers. National Health Insurance has the greatest negative effects on workers’ pay in all selected industrial sectors. The statutory welfare benefits explain approximately 23% of the pay deviation from the trend predicted by the models. A non-payroll-based financing method could be considered in the future to alleviate this impact.     

Forecasts of the managed futures market – an empirical analysis

Alternative investments, including managed futures, are primarily intended for institutional investors and for very wealthy individual investors. It therefore seems logical to assume, that the increase of wealth on a global scale can be a factor impacting the value of transactions in individual segments of the alternative-investment market. The purpose of this article is to indicate the factors affecting growth of managed futures transactions. Another research goal is to answer the question: Does the increase of wealth on a global scale affect the value of the managed futures transactions? The article will also present short-term forecasts of the transactions on the managed futures market for the years 2015–2017. The forecasts which will be constructed are meant to present possible scenarios of the market’s further development. Evolution of the alternative investment segment leads to development of those categories, which fulfil the expectations of market participants and meet the requirement and expiration of the remaining investments which do not attract investors and are no longer accepted by them.     

After work shopping? Employment effects of a deregulation of shop opening hours in the German retail sector

This study investigates the impact of a deregulation of shop opening laws on employment in the German retail sector. Exploiting the gradual change in the opening times of shops across states and using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, difference-in-differences estimates indicate an average increase in the employment probability, driven by a rise in the likelihood of working marginal part-time hours. Workers in small firms are likely to experience a reduction of their propensity to work. For individuals facing high family-related, supply-side constraints, the change in shop opening hours has opposing effects on employment — positive on lower and negative on upper parts of the hours distribution. Overall, the deregulation is estimated to have raised the likelihood of working fewer hours than desired by the workers.     

Liberalizing the energy markets of Western Europe – a computable equilibrium model approach

Using a computable equilibrium model, the short-run effects of a radical liberalization of the West European natural gas and electricity markets are examined. In each model country, oil, gas, coal and electricity are produced, traded and consumed. There are world markets for oil and coal, and well-integrated competitive markets for gas and electricity in Western Europe. Gas and electricity are transported and traded across markets under the assumption of ideal third-party access regimes for transportation and limited capacities in the transportation networks. It is found that relative to the data year 1996, radical liberalization reduces the average end-user price of natural gas by around 20%, and the average end-user price of electricity by around 50%. The supply of electricity increases by around 20%, mainly due to increased coal power production. After such liberalization, coal power emerges with the largest market share of electricity production in Western Europe.     

Modeling the welfare effects of net neutrality regulation: A Comment on Economides and Tåg

In a recent article in Information Economics and Policy Economides and Tåg (2012), analyze a theoretical model of two-sided markets designed to assess the welfare effects of net neutrality. According to the model, the only unambiguous beneficiaries of net neutrality regulation are content providers. Consumers are unambiguously worse off under net neutrality, while the effect on platform operators is ambiguous. In the aggregate, net neutrality may be either surplus-enhancing or surplus-reducing, because the gains to content providers (and possibly platform operators) may or may not outweigh the losses to consumers (and possibly platform operators), depending on whether certain parameter restrictions are satisfied. However, these restrictions are difficult to interpret, given that the structural parameters lack real-world analogs. In this Comment, I demonstrate that the assumptions underlying the authors’ surplus-enhancing result imply a straightforward and testable hypothesis. Specifically, I show that the ratio of aggregate content provider profits to aggregate platform operator profits must be strictly less than 0.4 under net neutrality for the surplus-enhancing result to hold. For many parameter values, the upper bound to the profit ratio is significantly lower. Finally, I provide a brief empirical assessment of the relative profitability of content providers and ISPs. The balance of the empirical evidence reviewed provides little basis for assuming that the relative profitability constraint implied by the model is satisfied in practice.     

The welfare effects of import “subquotas” on heterogeneous product categories

In spite of its importance to policy makers, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the welfare effects of one aspect of trade policy-how to implement an import quota that applies to a heterogeneous product category. The government can impose a simple quota that applies indiscriminately to all goods within the product category or it can divide the quota among them with subquotas. In this paper, we analyze the welfare effects of subquotas. Under certain simplifying assumptions we find that a system of subquotas nearly always exists that provides greater welfare than a simple quota for a large country that retains quota rights or for a large or small country that gives quota rights away to foreigners. However, subquotas cannot increase the welfare of a small country that retains quota rights. The difference lies in the effect of imports on the home country's terms of trade.The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the US International Trade Commission. The authors are grateful for helpful comments on an earlier draft by anonymous referees.     

Assessing structural changes in the Malaysian economy: I–O approach

This study attempts to re-investigate the production structure change for the Malaysian economy through changes in the A and (I − A)^− 1 matrices over the period 1980–2005, when the planners formulated and implemented nine plans so far. Five input–output tables were published by the Department of Statistics in Malaysia for the period under study. A structural change method was carried out to analyze and assess the changes in economic efficiency. This comparative study focuses on changes in the economic structure with different levels of development over time (1980–2005). The change in the economic structure is decomposed into two initial components (technology and total output). In accordance with the results, there appear to be similarities over time in the national structure of production patterns of intermediate use of commodities. Also, the results clearly indicate a rather remarkable degree of commonality in the patterns of growth processes, with more significant differences among sectors than between tables. However, the changes within sectors, and the Malaysian table as a whole, seem to result from changes in the level of the efficiency. Technical relationship seems to have remained relatively unchanged. It is clear that the economy has not moved fast enough forward, and does not seem to be geared by, the type of exports that may sustain a dynamic industrial development, based on external markets. New evidence is revealed in this study: the efficiency degree between demand and supply side for the Malaysian economy still remain weak and changeable over the period of study.     

The effects of workplace learning in higher education on employment and match quality: is there an early-career trade-off?

We investigate whether the choice for a higher education program with a substantial workplace learning component entails an early-career trade-off between on the one hand higher employment chances and better initial matches (when opting for a program with workplace learning) and on the other hand a lower risk of bad match persistence (when opting for a program without workplace learning). To this end, we rely on longitudinal data of Belgian graduates that track their careers up until the age of 29. We model the program choice, the transition to a good match and the preceding transition to a bad match simultaneously. To account for non-random selection into programs and into bad matches, the Timing of Events method is combined with an exclusion restriction. After accounting for observed and unobserved heterogeneity, we do not find evidence for a trade-off. This result contributes to the debate about the efficiency of vocationalizing tertiary education programs through the implementation of workplace learning.     

Evaluating the participation of an ethnic minority group in informal employment: a product of exit or exclusion?

This paper critically evaluates competing explanations for the participation of ethnic minority groups in informal employment. These interpret their participation either through a structuralist lens arising out of ‘exclusion’ from formal employment or through a neo-liberal and/or post-structuralist lens driven by voluntary ‘exit’ from formal institutions. To evaluate critically these competing explanations, this paper reports a survey of the experiences of Pakistani immigrants in informal employment in Sheffield, including fifty face-to-face interviews and two focus groups. The findings highlight informal employment amongst this Pakistani ethnic minority group is neither universally driven by exclusion nor exit. Instead, some participate mostly due to exclusion, others mostly for exit rationales and some for a combination of the two, with different mixtures across different groups and types of informal employment. The outcome is a call for greater appreciation of the multifarious character of undeclared work and a move beyond simplistic explanations and policy responses.