The changing employment situation in some cities with living wage ordinances

More than 120 municipalities (cities, towns, and counties) have introduced living wage ordinances. These laws mandate that certain employers in their jurisdiction pay their workers wages that are above federal and state minimum levels. The opponents of these laws argue that these ordinances have adverse impacts on local labor markets. This study considers rates of growth of employment and unemployment trends in a sample of these cities before and after they introduced their living wage ordinances. It finds that while a few cities have had negative labor market experiences after introducing their living wage law these cities represent the exception rather than the rule.     

Low-Wage Labor Markets and the Power of Suggestion

The paper argues that a non-binding minimum wage may serve as a focal point which facilities tacit collusion by low-wage employers, effectively pulling down wages of the lowest-paid workers. This can explain the puzzle as to why the minimum wage does not reduce employment, as predicted by the traditional economic theory. A simple game-theoretic argument explains when collusion emerges. The hypothesis is tested using the 1990–2002 CPS data on service occupation workers. The results suggest that during this period, on average 19.3%, and as much as 31% of service occupation workers, who earned minimum wage or less, could had been affected by collusive wage-setting.     

A Moral Hazard Approach to Wage Discounts under Informal Hiring

This study discusses informal hiring in terms of a standard principal–agent model. We have developed an adverse selection model of the labour market where effort is not contractible and employers have the opportunity to use informal search channels for hiring purposes. This standard framework enables us to provide an effort‐based explanation of the wage gap associated with informal hiring. Besides the wage discount, another feature of the equilibrium is that low‐ability workers informally hired shirk.     

DO STATE EMPLOYMENT ELIGIBILITY VERIFICATION LAWS AFFECT JOB TURNOVER?

State laws requiring employers to verify workers' employment eligibility may reduce employment and earnings among unauthorized workers and make it difficult for them to switch jobs. Using data from the 2005–2014 Quarterly Workforce Indicators, we find evidence of a reduction in employment and job turnover among Hispanics as a whole in states that require all employers to verify employment eligibility. These adverse effects become larger as the share of likely unauthorized Hispanic workers falls. The drop in job turnover may be due to the laws trapping some Hispanic workers in their jobs. There is little effect on employment or job turnover among non‐Hispanic whites or blacks. There is no effect on average pay for all groups of workers. (JEL J15, J61, J68)     

Can Supply‐Side Policies Reduce Unemployment? Lessons from North America

North America offers lessons about policies that help sustain low unemployment. This article examines the effects of 'supply-side' policies, which boost the skills of the workforce and improve microeconomic incentives facing workers and employers.
Two supply-side policies were expanded after the mid-1980s. First, the United States increased earnings supplements, payable to low-income workers, to encourage adults to find and keep jobs. Second, social assistance programs limited the duration of transfer payments and linked support benefits to workers' participation in job search, occupational training, and community work experience programs. These measures increased job holding among economically disadvantaged adults. In the 1980s and 1990s the United States also maintained strong incentives for employers to create jobs for the hard-to-employ. Payroll tax and regulatory burdens on employers were kept low, and the modest legal minimum wage was allowed to fall in real terms. US experience suggests that selective supply-side policies can boost the employment rates of the hard-to-employ and help maintain a low rate of structural unemployment.     

Golden cages for showy birds: Optimal switching costs in labor contracts

Under what circumstances do workers sign contracts with high quitting penalties? Our answer points to market transparency. When the worker's performance is privately observed by the incumbent firm, alternative employers face an adverse selection problem. As a result, efficient separations can only take place through involuntary layoffs and there is no role for quitting fees. In contrast, when performance is public, quitting fees are useful devices to appropriate the surplus from workers’ reallocation. Separations are amicable and take the form of quitting after downwardly renegotiating the fees. Qualitative features of contracts are independent of the distribution of ex-post bargaining power. The impact of switching costs on total welfare and its distribution depends on the degree of market transparency and the ex-ante distribution of market power.     

A gender analysis of U.S. labor market policies for the working poor

Current anti-poverty policy proposals focus on welfare reform to the exclusion of reforming the low-wage labor market. In contrast, we compare two policy proposals aimed at low-wage labor markets: a national comparable worth policy and an increase in the minimum wage. With both policies we pay specific attention to their impact by gender. Our findings suggest that while both would reduce poverty among working women, the impact of a comparable worth policy on female poverty would be greater under most scenarios presented. It is estimated that an increase of 96 cents per hour in the national minimum wage would be necessary to equal the poverty reduction effect for women workers of a comparable worth policy which excludes small employers. Both policies decrease the incidence of povertylevel wages less among men, since roughly 60 percent of minimum wage workers are women. Additionally, not only would a national comparable worth policy improve the economic status of low-waged women workers, it would also narrow the gap between male and female poverty. While an increase in the minimum wage would also reduce this gap, comparable worth would virtually eliminate it.     

Ethnic Penalties in Unemployment and Occupational Attainment: Evidence for Britain

In spite of progress made since the 1950s and 1960s, black, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers remain disadvantaged relative to whites in terms of their labour market opportunities. In general, they experience higher rates of unemployment and tend to be under-represented in higher paid, non-manual occupations. They can therefore be said to pay an ethnic penalty in the competition for jobs although the penalties paid vary considerably between the minority groups. In this paper we examine the different employment experiences of black, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men and women in terms of their unemployment propensities and occupational attainment.We use maximum likelihood methods to show that the ethnic penalties experienced by minority workers are not fully explained by differences in human capital endowments and personal characteristics. We conclude that at least some of the disadvantage experienced by ethnic minorities in the British labour market can be attributed to discriminatory selection practices by employers.     

Search efficiency,wage dynamics and welfare

Advances in information technology have improved the job-search process in the labor market. We analyze the effects of this improvement by constructing a search-and-matching model with two sectors: a risky sector with firm-specific productivity shocks and a risk-free sector. The risky sector is characterized by a low level of commitment between employers and workers – either party can end the employment relationship. We show that a better job-search process generates more job matches in the risky sector, and this benefits workers by improving their outside options. The effect on employers is subtle: while it is easier to fill vacancies, workers become more expensive. At the same time, the ease of finding new workers makes it harder for employers to keep their wage promises to workers and increases wage volatility. Our paper contributes to the literature by offering a novel explanation for the observed rise in wage volatility.     

MINIMUM WAGE EFFECTS ON PERMANENT VERSUS TEMPORARY MINIMUM WAGE EMPLOYMENT

We estimate the effect of minimum wages on employment using the Master Files of the Canadian Labour Force Survey over the recent period 1997–2008. Particular attention is paid to the differences between permanent and temporary minimum wage workers—an important distinction not made in the existing literature. Our estimates for permanent and temporary minimum wage workers combined are at the lower end of estimates based on Canadian studies estimated over earlier time periods, suggesting that the adverse employment effects are declining over time for reasons discussed. Importantly, the adverse employment effects are substantially larger for permanent compared to temporary minimum wage workers; in fact they fall almost exclusively on permanent minimum wage workers. (JEL J30)     

Strategic vote manipulation in a simple democracy

In both the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and employee buyouts, the common and crucial phenomenon is that some workers have two sources of income, namely wages and shares of profit. We analyze that phenomenon in an economy where workers are nonunionized and wages are determined by voting. If the employers sell a certain amount of shares of the capital stock to some non-risk-loving workers, these workers vote for the lowest possible wage along with the employers. As a result, all workers become equally worse off because of the competition among workers to buy those shares.     

On the optimality of a minimum wage: New insights from optimal tax theory

We build a theoretical model to study whether a minimum wage can be welfare-improving if it is implemented in conjunction with an optimized nonlinear income tax. We consider this issue in a framework where search frictions on the labor market generate unemployment. Workers differ in productivity. The government does not observe workers' productivity but only their wages. Hence, the redistributive policy solves an adverse selection problem. We show that a minimum wage is optimal if the bargaining power of the workers is relatively low. However, if the government controls the bargaining power, then it is preferable to set a sufficiently high bargaining power.     

Unemployment insurance, moral hazard, and economic growth

It is important but difficult to distinguish between desirable and undesirable effects of unemployment insurance (UI) that are observationally equivalent when designing optimal UI schemes. For example, a UI-induced rise in the wage rate caused by workers taking more time to match their skills with job vacancies is desirable. However, another view of the same observation is that UI causes permanently higher involuntary unemployment by raising the reservation wage. This paper avoids this problem by regarding the trade-off between the UI replacement rates and unemployment as an intermediate relationship that matters only as far as it impacts economic growth. An empirical analysis of UI replacement rates, unemployment rates, and growth rates using annual panel data finds UI replacement rates are associated with higher unemployment. However, no significant relationship is found between UI-related unemployment and the real growth rate of gross domestic product.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fiftieth International Atlantic Economic Conference, October 15–18, 2000, Charleston, South Carolina. Financial support from the Scottish Economic Society and the University of Stirling is gratefully acknowledged. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development generously provided access to their database on benefit entitlements and gross replacement rates. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for constructive comments.     

UNEMPLOYMENT POLICIES IN AN ECONOMY WITH ADVERSE SELECTION

This paper studies the effects of unemployment policies in a simple static general equilibrium model with adverse selection in the labour market. Firms offer a contract that induces the self‐selection of workers. In equilibrium, all unskilled workers are screened out and some skilled workers are rationed out. It is shown that the provision of unemployment insurance raises involuntary unemployment by encouraging adverse selection, while unemployment assistance – or subsidy to unemployment – reduces involuntary unemployment. A simple efficiency wage model is also presented to show that either of the two policies reduces employment by taxing effort and subsidizing shirking. The key is whether the social role of unemployment is a sorting device or a worker discipline device.     

ADVERSE SELECTION,LEARNING, AND COMPETITIVE SEARCH

I develop a model that allows for an analysis of the effects of time on adverse selection in the presence of search frictions. I find that, as a firm takes longer to adjust a worker's contract in response to learning about his type, inefficient overwork during the time before wage adjustment (probation) decreases. This provides a rationale for an optimal (minimum) probation period of about one month in the baseline scenario. Optimal probation duration varies with the degree of search frictions, the cost of effort, the relative productivity of different types of workers, and minimum wage regulations.     

Minimum wages and youth unemployment

This paper constructs a labor search model to explore the effects of minimum wages on youth unemployment. To capture the gradual decline in unemployment for young workers as they age, the standard search model is extended so that workers gain experience when employed. Experienced workers have higher average productivity and lower job finding and separation rates that match wage and worker flow data. In this environment, minimum wages can have large effects on unemployment because they interact with a worker's ability to gain job experience. The increase in minimum wages between 2007 and 2009 can account for a 0.8 percentage point increase in the steady state unemployment rate and a 2.8 percentage point increase in unemployment for 15–24 year old workers in the model parameterized to simulate outcomes of high school educated workers. Minimum wages can also help explain the high rates of youth unemployment in France compared to the United States.     

The gift of being chosen

We report evidence from an experiment where an employer selects one of two workers to perform a task for a fixed compensation. Workers differ in their ability. The employer’s payoff depends on the worker’s ability and on a non-contractible effort that the worker exerts once employed. We find that selected workers exert an effort higher than the minimum enforceable one. When the employers can send a free-text form message to the selected worker, workers with low ability exert significantly higher effort than the workers with high ability. The difference in effort overcompensates the difference in ability.     

Gender,Low-Paid Status,and Time Poverty in Urban China

ABSTRACT

Using synthetic data from the 2008 China Time Use Survey (CTUS) and the 2008 China Household Income Project (CHIP), this study estimates time-poverty rates and compares the profiles of time-poor men and women workers in urban China. In line with previous research, time poverty is defined as a lack of enough time for rest and leisure. Three time-poverty measures are adopted. By all three measures, women paid workers and low-paid workers account for a disproportionate share of the time poor. Regression analysis further shows that, other things being equal, workers who are women, low-paid, married, and who live with children or the elderly in counties with higher overtime rates and lower minimum wage standards are more likely to be time poor. Simulations indicate that enforcing working time regulations and raising minimum wage standards could be effective for reducing time poverty.     

Pareto-improving firing costs?

We examine self-enforcing contracts between risk-averse workers and risk-neutral firms (the ‘invisible handshake’) in a labor market with search frictions. Employers promise as much wage-smoothing as they can, consistent with incentive conditions that ensure they will not renege during low-profitability times. Equilibrium is inefficient if these incentive constraints bind, with risky wages for workers and a risk premium that employers must pay. Mandatory firing costs can help, by making it easier for employers to promise credibly not to cut wages in low-profitability periods. We show that firing costs are more likely to be Pareto-improving if they are not severance payments.