Differential effects of active labour market programs for the unemployed

The differential performance of six Swedish active labour market programs for the unemployed is investigated in terms of short- and long-term employment probability and un-employment-benefit dependency. Both relative to one another and compared to more intense job search, the central finding is that the more similar to a regular job, the more effective a program is for its participants. Employment subsidies perform best by far, followed by trainee replacement and, by a long stretch, labour market training. Relief work and two types of work practice schemes appear by contrast to be mainly used to re-qualify for unemployment benefits.     

The national internal labor market encounters the local labor market: Effects on employee retention

Formal salary systems are commonplace among medium to large-sized firms and within the United States government. However, there is little evidence regarding the costs, if any, of such systems. This study analyzes the effects on retention within the United States Air Force from an inflexible wage system failing to adequately compensate personnel for local compensating wage differentials. Using location-specific Air Force personnel records, I compare the differences between military and civilian wages, by occupation, across locations to determine if local labor markets play a significant role in the stay or leave decisions for personnel. Results show that rigid wage constraints do in fact impose costs on the firm through increased turnover in locations that fail to adequately adjust wages for the cost of living and amenities.     

The early inception of labor market gender differences

This paper analyzes gender differences in jobs while in school using school-class-based samples, a setting in which education differences, “glass ceilings”, and career interruptions due to parenthood are irrelevant. I find that in this early stage of life boys already earn substantially more than girls. The earnings gap cannot be explained by differences in participation rates and hours of work, nor by gender wage gaps within job types. It is entirely due to the fact that girls work more in job types with relatively low wages, in particular babysitting. During the period considered, 1984–2001, the gender patterns of jobs while in school largely remained unchanged.     

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.     

The part-time pay penalty in a segmented labor market

This paper is the first to examine the implications of switching to PT work for women's subsequent earnings trajectories, distinguishing by their type of contract: permanent or fixed-term. Using a rich longitudinal Spanish data set from Social Security records of over 76,000 prime-aged women strongly attached to the Spanish labor market, we find that the PT/FT hourly wage differential is larger and more persistent among fixed-term contract workers, strengthening the existent evidence that these workers can be classified as secondary. The paper discusses problems arising in empirical estimation (including a problem not discussed in the literature up to now: the differential measurement error of the LHS variable by PT status), and how to address them. It concludes with policy implications relevant for Continental Europe and its dual structure of employment protection.     

The dynamics of Central European equity market comovements

This paper examines short-term and long-term comovements between developed European Union (EU) stock markets and those of three Central European (CE) countries which recently joined the EU. Dynamic cointegration and principal components methods are applied, in addition to static tests. While we find no evidence of cointegration for the period July 1995–February 2005 as a whole, dynamic tests reveal alternating period of cointegration disrupted by episodes dominated by short-term domestic factors. Principal components analysis reveals that a stable factor explains a large proportion of return variances. Ultimately, despite the decade-long process of alignment by CE countries with the EU, evidence of steadily increasing convergence of equity markets is lacking.     

Social networks and labor market transitions

We study the influence of social networks on labor market transitions. We develop the first model where social ties and job status coevolve through time. Our key assumption is that the probability of formation of a new tie is greater between two employed individuals than between an employed and an unemployed individual. We show that this assumption generally generates negative duration dependence of exit rates from unemployment. Our model has a number of novel testable implications. For instance, we show that a higher connectivity among unemployed individuals reduces duration dependence and that exit rates depend positively on the duration of the last job held by the unemployed worker.     

Informal care and labor market participation

Understanding the effect of informal care for an elderly or disabled person on labor market outcomes is important for developing policies targeted towards caregivers. However, because of omitted variables bias, simple cross-sectional relationships may provide a misleading picture of the causal impact of informal care provision on labor force status. To address this, I use panel data for the period 2001–2007, which make it possible to track the same individuals over time, and observe how their outcomes alter as their care arrangements change. While caregiving does appear to have a modest negative impact on labor force participation, this impact is only one-quarter to one-sixth as large in the panel as in the cross-section. Taking account of individual heterogeneity, the impact of caregiving on other labor force outcomes (and on life satisfaction) seems to be small or non-existent. Large estimated effects from cross-sectional regressions are most likely driven by individual heterogeneity. One possible interpretation of this result is that the impact of caregiving on labor market outcomes and life satisfaction takes several years to manifest itself. Another is that the causal effect of caregiving on labor force outcomes and life satisfaction is quite small.     

Women of color in the labor market

While the labor force participation rates of women have increased, and women work in a wider range of occupations than they did two decades ago, there remain gaps between the status of women and men, as well as between white women and women of color. Additionally, as the female labor force becomes more diverse, there are also differences among women of color in labor force participation, unemployment, and occupational status. Based on projections regarding the future structure of the labor force, it is likely that even as the status of some women of color improves, many will remain stuck in low-wage service and clerical jobs.     

Costly external finance and labor market dynamics

We study the role of agency frictions and costly external finance in cyclical labor market dynamics, with a focus on how credit-market frictions may amplify aggregate TFP shocks. The main result is that aggregate TFP shocks lead to large fluctuations of labor market quantities if the model is calibrated to the empirically observed countercyclicality of the finance premium. A financial accelerator mechanism thus amplifies labor market fluctuations by rendering rigidity in real wage dynamics. In contrast, if the finance premium is procyclical, which the model can be parameterized to accommodate, amplification is absent, and labor-market fluctuations display the Shimer (2005) puzzle.     

Instability in the labor market for researchers

R&D is both an activity which involves team effort, and with many of the features of a zero-sum game. This paper shows that these characteristics make the labor market for researchers unstable in the sense that firms have incentives to continuously change the composition of their research teams. Related results concerning the core of several cooperative games in characteristic form are also proved.     

Structural change accounting with labor market distortions

This paper quantifies the relative importance of sectoral productivity and labor market distortions for structural change in the U.S., India, Mexico and Brazil between 1960 and 2005. I use census data to compute human capital by sector and infer labor market distortions as sectoral gaps in wage per unit of human capital. I incorporate these distortions into a model of structural change, and calibrate the model to reproduce the time paths of sectoral shares of labor and value added for each country. Counterfactuals reveal that (1) TFP growth in agriculture drives most of the decline in its share of labor; (2) the role of labor market distortions is limited.     

Housing tenure and labor market impacts: The search goes on

We develop two search-theoretic models emphasizing firm entry to examine the Oswald hypothesis, the idea that homeownership is linked to inferior labor market outcomes, and compare their predictions to three extant theories. The five models have surprisingly different predictions about the labor market at both the aggregate and micro levels. Using a suitable instrumental variable strategy, we estimate both micro and aggregate level regression models of wages and unemployment and compare the estimates to those predictions. We find that while homeowners are less likely to be unemployed, they also have lower wages, all else equal, compared to renters. In addition, higher regional homeownership rates are associated with a greater probability of individual worker unemployment and higher wages. The outcome of a horserace between our new search-theoretic models is mixed—the wage-posting model predicts observed unemployment impacts while a bargaining variant does a better job explaining observed wages and aggregate labor market outcomes. Overall, we conclude that firm behavior is important for understanding the labor market impacts of homeownership. Because this is the case, regional homeownership rates are not good instruments for individual tenure choice in empirical work. And while individual homeowners may have inferior labor market outcomes as compared to renters, from the viewpoint of society, higher homeownership rates may result in greater job creation and overall production, among other benefits.     

The financing of apprenticeship training in the light of labor market regulations

In this paper we analyze the training behavior of firms in Germany and Switzerland — two countries with a comparable apprenticeship system but strong differences in the regulation of their respective labor markets. We make use of two representative firm-level surveys on the provision of apprenticeship training to analyze differences in the costs and benefits of training and the firm's training decision. Our results suggest that firms are more likely to make a substantial (short-term) net investment in apprenticeship training in the presence of strong employment protection laws.     

Determinants of European stock market integration

We analyse the determinants of stock market integration among EU member states for the period 1999–2007. First, we apply bivariate DCC-MGARCH models to extract dynamic conditional correlations between European stock markets, which are then explained by interest rate spreads, exchange rate risk, market capitalisation, and business cycle synchronisation in a pooled OLS model. By grouping the countries into euro area countries, “old” EU member states outside the euro area, and new EU member states, we also evaluate the impact of euro introduction and the European unification process on stock market integration. We find a significant trend toward more stock market integration, which is enhanced by the size of relative and absolute market capitalisation and hindered by foreign exchange risk between old member states and the euro area. Interest rate spreads and business cycle synchronisation are also significant factors in explaining equity market integration.     

The long-term labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy

This paper studies the labor market experiences of white-male college graduates as a function of economic conditions at time of college graduation. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth whose respondents graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. I estimate the effects of both national and state economic conditions at time of college graduation on labor market outcomes for the first two decades of a career. Because timing and location of college graduation could potentially be affected by economic conditions, I also instrument for the college unemployment rate using year of birth (state of residence at an early age for the state analysis). I find large, negative wage effects of graduating in a worse economy which persist for the entire period studied. I also find that cohorts who graduate in worse national economies are in lower-level occupations, have slightly higher tenure and higher educational attainment, while labor supply is unaffected. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative and persistent.     

Subsidizing low-skilled jobs in a dual labor market

We introduce a matching model that allows for classical and frictional unemployment. The labor market is dual featuring low-skilled and high-skilled workers and simple and complex jobs. Simple jobs pay a minimum wage, while wages in the complex jobs are determined by Nash bargaining. Opportunities for low-skilled workers are limited to simple jobs; while high-skilled unemployed can apply for both types of jobs, and thereby can accept to be downgraded. We analyze the outcomes of simple job subsidy policies assuming that government budget is balanced through taxes on occupied workers. We first give conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a steady-state equilibrium and we then analyze the effects of different fiscal instruments. We show that in this set-up, increasing simple job subsidies does not necessarily reduce low-skilled unemployment or unemployment spells. By introducing heterogeneous skills and possible downgrading of the high-skilled workers, we show that the effectiveness of such policies in reducing the classical unemployment is decreasing. In fact, any additional classical unemployed re-entering the job market is accompanied by an increasing number of high-skilled workers downgrading to low-skilled jobs. We calibrate the model on French labor market data. It is found that for five low-skilled workers leaving classical unemployment, two high-skilled workers are downgraded.     

The cyclicality of effective wages within employer-employee matches in a rigid labor market

This study analyzes real wage cyclicality for male full-time workers within employer-employee matches in Germany over the period 1984-2004. Five different wage measures are compared: the standard hourly wage rate; hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus pay; the effective wage, which takes into account unpaid overtime; and monthly earnings, with and without additional pay. None of the hourly wage measures exhibits cyclicality except for the group of salaried workers with unpaid overtime. Their effective wages show a strongly procyclical reaction to changes in unemployment. Despite acyclical wage rates, salaried workers without unpaid overtime experienced procyclical earnings movements if they had income from extra pay. Monthly earnings were also procyclical for hourly paid workers with overtime pay. These findings suggest that cyclical earnings movements are generated by variable pay components, such as bonuses and overtime pay, and by flexible working hours. The degree of earnings procyclicality revealed for the German labor market is comparable to the United States.