Career Paths,Unemployment, and the Efficiency of the Labor Market: Should Youth Employment Be Subsidized?

This paper studies the implications of learning‐by‐doing on youth unemployment and market efficiency when workers benefiting from this kind of training experience search (while on the job) for a higher skill job. Firms with low‐skill jobs suffer from a poaching behavior by firms with high‐skill jobs, causing a shortage of low‐skill jobs and excessive youth unemployment. An optimal policy, consisting of taxing the output of high‐skill jobs and subsidizing the output of low‐skill jobs, restores market efficiency and reduces youth unemployment.     

Do Lower Caseloads Improve the Performance of Public Employment Services? New Evidence from German Employment Offices

The caseworker‐to‐clients ratio is an important, but understudied, policy parameter that affects both the quality and cost of public employment services that help job seekers find employment. We exploit a large‐scale pilot by Germany's employment agency, which hired 490 additional caseworkers in 14 of its 779 offices. We find that lowering caseloads caused a decrease in the rate and duration of local unemployment as well as a higher re‐employment rate. Disentangling the mechanisms that contributed to this improvement, we find that offices with lowered caseloads increased monitoring and imposed more sanctions but also intensified search efforts and registered additional vacancies.     

The Ethnic Employment and Income Gap in Sweden: Is Skill or Labor Market Discrimination the Explanation?*

This study uses a cognitive test score, the Swedish Military Enlistment test taken at age 18, to identify whether the ethnic employment and income gap in Sweden is caused by a pre‐market skill gap and/or ethnic discrimination. The employment gap and income gap are estimated for males born in Sweden with different ethnic backgrounds: their parents were born in Sweden or in southern Europe or outside Europe. Controlling for the cognitive test score does not affect the ethnic employment gap, and for incomes the ethnic income gap almost disappears.     

Is Racial Exclusion Gendered? The Role of Residential Segregation in the Employment Status of Black Women and Men in the US

This paper explores one angle of the race/gender/class intersection by examining the effect of residential segregation on black women and men's employment status in the US. Do the exclusionary mechanisms embedded in racially-based residential segregation affect black women and men's economic outcomes similarly, or are their employment outcomes differentiated by their different gender statuses? This paper lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the role residential segregation may play in shaping black men and women's labor market outcomes, outlining key mechanisms that link residential segregation to labor market inequality, highlighting the ways in which many of these mechanisms are gendered as well as racialized. This paper also offers an analytic design to test the hypotheses developed in this exploration.     

Does bank efficiency matter? Market value relevance of bank efficiency in Australia

The stochastic frontier analysis is employed to investigate efficiency of publicly listed Australian banks over the period 1985 to 2008. The results suggest that technical, cost and profit efficiency of Australian banks have improved over time. Large banks have attained a higher level of cost efficiency but a lower level of technical efficiency compared to small banks. No substantial difference between the two groups is found in terms of profit efficiency. A panel regression of bank stock return on bank efficiency suggests that an improvement in technical, cost or profit efficiency contributes to the market value of a bank. Thus, the shareholder wealth maximization goal is aligned with the goal of maximizing bank efficiency in the Australian context.     

Does Off-Farm Wage Employment Make Women in Rural Senegal Happy?

This paper investigates the impact of wage employment on women’s well-being in the Senegalese horticultural export industry. It uses a subjective well-being approach, based on self-reported happiness, to capture income and non-income aspects of employment. The study uses original survey data from 2013 for the Saint-Louis region in Senegal and an instrumental variable approach, supported by information from focus group discussions. It finds that women’s employment improves subjective well-being for the poorest women, but not for women whose household income is above the poverty threshold. Women’s employment improves women’s happiness through an income effect, as it leads to higher income levels and improved living standards, but the non-income effects reduce women’s happiness. This negative effect is related to a higher workload and low job satisfaction due to unfulfilled expectations. The positive income effect outweighs these negative non-income effects for poor women but not for relatively wealthier women.     

Does Labor Market Status Influence Self-Assessed Health?

This study examines whether individuals’ self-assessed health is related to their previous standing in the labor market and their self-assessed health at that time. We find that, once self-assessed health in the past is controlled for, none of the specified reasons behind individuals’ labor market status at that time, including the inability to find work, have a statistically significant adverse impact on current assessment of physical or mental health. We do find, however, that women obtaining a job in the past period will currently perceive that their physical health is improved, and that previously unemployed men with a job to return to in the current period also experienced perceptions of better health in the current period. We present evidence that these perceptions share a common factor with other health indicators such as sick days and quasi-objective measures of physical and mental health.     

The New Division of Labor in the Globalized Economy: Women’s Challenges and Opportunities

The way in which the new international division of labor (NIDL) in the globalized economy affects gender inequalities has not been sufficiently explored yet. The body of literature on commodity chains that has attempted to assess the welfare effects of the NIDL, especially in less developed countries, has paid sparse attention to gender issues. Globalization has entailed the deverticalization of commodity supply chains and the emergence of highly concentrated financial groups and transnational companies linked to a network of firms operating as affiliates and suppliers, namely the global commodity chains. The NIDL could worsen gender inequality, due to the particular organizational strategies in global commodity chains that privilege power, instead of trust and market exchange, as the major form of governance and means for resource allocation. Because women represent the poorest swathe of the world’s population, they suffer the most from the growing wealth inequality and the concentration of power produced by the NIDL. Moreover, because of the traditional sexual division of labor and because of their low status in society, women are the most harshly exploited subjects in the system. The general conclusion of the paper is that in the NIDL the main means of resource allocation are not competitive markets, as often suggested by the GCV literature and mainstream economics, but are instead power relations that ultimately stem from the patriarchal culture of violence and domination.     

The New Division of Labor in the Globalized Economy: Women’s Challenges and Opportunities

The way in which the new international division of labor (NIDL) in the globalized economy affects gender inequalities has not been sufficiently explored yet. The body of literature on commodity chains that has attempted to assess the welfare effects of the NIDL, especially in less developed countries, has paid sparse attention to gender issues. Globalization has entailed the deverticalization of commodity supply chains and the emergence of highly concentrated financial groups and transnational companies linked to a network of firms operating as affiliates and suppliers, namely the global commodity chains. The NIDL could worsen gender inequality, due to the particular organizational strategies in global commodity chains that privilege power, instead of trust and market exchange, as the major form of governance and means for resource allocation. Because women represent the poorest swathe of the world’s population, they suffer the most from the growing wealth inequality and the concentration of power produced by the NIDL. Moreover, because of the traditional sexual division of labor and because of their low status in society, women are the most harshly exploited subjects in the system. The general conclusion of the paper is that in the NIDL the main means of resource allocation are not competitive markets, as often suggested by the GCV literature and mainstream economics, but are instead power relations that ultimately stem from the patriarchal culture of violence and domination.     

The Welfare State versus the Common Labor Market: Which to Dismantle?

Migration by low-income workers limits the ability of a countryto redistribute income, since more generous income supplementsattract additional workers into the country, reducing wagesand raising the cost of the program. This article studies therole of immigration controls, which allow the government toraise the real incomes of existing immigrants without causingadditional immigration. Paradoxically, immigration controlsmay lead to higher equilibrium levels of immigration in a commonlabor market, and those low-income individuals left behind inthe source countries may be better off. Simply stated, a hostcountry benefits more from immigrants when they are not impoverished,and immigration controls enable the country to eliminate impoverishment.Thus, the country is willing to increase the number of immigrantsthat it allows within its borders. After obtaining this insightfrom the basic model, the article discusses some extensionsand qualifications.     

Will the skill-premium in the Netherlands rise in the next decades?

While the skill-premium has been rising sharply in the US and the UK for 20 years, the Dutch skill-premium decreased for much of that period and only started to rise in the early 90s. In this article, we investigate whether the Dutch skill-premium will rise in the next decades. To answer this question, we forecast the skill-premium using the Katz and Murphy (1992 Katz, L and Murphy, K. 1992. Changes in relative wages, 1963–1987: supply and demand factors. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107: 35–78. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the Krusell et al. (2000 Krusell, P, Ohanian, L, Ríos-Rull, J-V and Violante, G. 2000. Capital-skill complementarity and inequality: a macroeconomic analysis. Econometrica, 68: 1029–53. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) models. The Katz and Murphy model (KM) explains demand shifts by skill-biased technological change in unobservable variables captured by a time trend. In contrast, the Krusell et al. model (KORV) explains demand shifts by (observable) changes in the capital stock under a capital-skill complementarity technology. The results show that while the KM model predicts that the skill-premium will have increased by 30% in 2020, based on realistic predictions of the stock of capital, the KORV model predicts that the skill-premium will remain between ?5 and +5% of its 1996 level.     

Analyzing the Current Situation of Employment Quality in China

The current situation of employment quality in China allows no optimist during the period of economic transition. The disequilibrium is the most stressing characteristic in China＇s employment quality. The disequilibrium of this kind of level of the employment quality not only reflects among the areas where the economic development levels are different, but also reflects more differences of the employment quality due to the differences of the worker＇s identity in the labor market. At present, the problems of employment quality in China are mainly reflected in the labor contracts, working time, labor remuneration, job stability, safety in production, job hygiene, social security, and the respects of basic human rights and participating in the democratic management by the laborers, etc. During the economic transition period, the work relation fields in China appear some special colonies, such as the farmer＇s colony, the colony of ownership transformed enterprises, the colony of flexible persons who obtain employment themselves, whose employment quality demonstrates the questions of some peculiar ones and need special concern.     

Do Macroeconomic Structures and Policies Shape the Employment Intensity of Growth Differently for Women and Men?

Since all macroeconomic policies are enacted within a certain set of distributive relations and institutional structures, the employment intensity of growth is likely to vary for men and women depending on the nature and context of output growth. I examine the gendered nature of this growth-employment nexus by analyzing the differential impacts that macroeconomic policies and structures have on growth’s employment intensity by gender for eighty countries in the period from 1990 to 2012. Such an understanding is of particular relevance to policymakers concerned with the linkages between growth and human development, as the question of whether the benefits of economic growth are broadly shared is one that centers on the capacity of economies to generate high-quality employment. Although education levels and non-agricultural sectors are associated with more employment intensive growth for men and women, policies supporting reductions in non-wage care work, prioritizing public expenditures on education, and promoting secondary school enrollment for girls are especially linked with growth that is more employment intensive for women. The results I obtain here illuminate broad trends through a very wide lens and should be applied in conjunction with more intimate knowledge of how cultural, technological, legal, political, and economic activities uniquely affect one another in particular countries.     

The Hunger of Old Women in Rural Tanzania: Can Subjective Data Improve Poverty Measurement?

On average, women in Tanzania are slightly less likely than men to say that they are “always/often without enough food to eat”—but this masks a much higher rate of self‐reported food deprivation among elderly rural women. Official Tanzanian poverty statistics are, however, based on a methodology which presumes equal sharing per equivalent adult within the household. This paper combines subjective and objective micro‐data from Tanzania's 2007 Household Budget Survey and 2007 Views of the People Survey. By imputing individual consumption based on the relative probability of self‐reported food deprivation, it provides an example of the possible importance of one type of intra‐household inequality—i.e., the hunger of old women—for poverty measurement. Implications include the complexity of gendered intra‐household inequality and the importance of “technical” poverty measurement choices for public policy priorities, such as old age pensions.     

Optimal Taxation and Monopsonistic Labor Market: Does Monopsony Justify the Minimum Wage?

Does monopsony on the labor market in itself justify the implementation of a minimum wage when it would not be used in a competitive economy? This issue is studied in a model of optimal taxation. We find that there is no room for the minimum wage when there are a continuum of skills with no isolated mass point at the bottom of the wage distribution. Accordingly, in the empirically relevant situation, where there is a continuum of wages at the bottom of the distribution, the minimum wage is not helpful.     

Is This the Market of a Lifetime?

Years of harboring a gloom-and-doom outlook gave Jeremy Grantham,chairman of Boston-based as- set manager GMO,the reputation of be- ing a pcrma-bcar.Talk to him now, though,and the 70-year-old is almost     

Development of the Slovenian Labour Market in 1996–2006 and the Main Challenges of Labour Market Policy

The labour market situation in Slovenia has improved in the last ten years, but some labour market problems persist. This article presents the labour market reforms carried out in the last ten years, which could be considered as partial. In order to make the labour market more flexible and to increase the job intensity of GDP growth, labour market reforms should be more comprehensive. The article identifies the main challenges of labour market policy and draws attention to some current and potential labour market problems in Slovenia.