Gender segregation and earnings differences in the Spanish labour market

This article analyses the effects of different types of gender segregation on the gender wage differential for the Spanish labour market. Matched employer–employee data from a sample of 226,535 workers are used. These workers are employed in 61 occupations within 26,492 establishments in 51 different industries. Workers belonging to the same industry, establishment or job share common factors which cannot be observed and these factors affect wages. If these unobservable variables are correlated with the explanatory variables, their estimated effects will be biased. For this reason, we estimate the effects of each type of gender segregation on the wage gap using a robust specification to these possible correlations. We obtain that industrial segregation by gender explains a lower part of the wage gap between men and women than previous researches found using standard regressions, while the contributions of establishment segregation and occupational segregation within each establishment are greater.     

Active labour market policy in East Germany

We investigate the effects of the most important East German active labour market programmes on the labour market outcomes of their participants. The analysis is based on a large and informative individual database derived from administrative data sources. Using matching methods, we find that over a horizon of 2.5 years after the start of the programmes, they fail to increase the employment chances of their participants in the regular labour market. However, the programmes may have other effects for their participants that may be considered important in the especially difficult situation experienced in the East German labour market.     

Job autonomy and education-skill matches of immigrant workers in Germany

This letter examines the determinants of occupational autonomy and education-skill matches of immigrant workers in Germany. Their jobs are characterized by much lower autonomy than those of comparable natives and the immigrant penalty decreases only minimally over time. In contrast to wages, the difference between immigrants from advanced and non-advanced countries is small. But immigrants from advanced countries are much more likely to have a job matching their qualification. The probability of a match does not increase over time for highly educated immigrants, but does for others. Highly educated immigrant women have an additional disadvantage. In some industries low autonomy and skill downgrading of immigrant workers are particularly common.     

Education, credentials, and immigrant earnings

Abstract.  Using 1981 to 2001 Census data, we study how the human capital of immigrants is rewarded in Canada. We distinguish between years of schooling and degrees obtained in order to estimate 'sheepskin' effects – the gain in earnings associated with receipt of a degree, controlling for years of schooling. We find that immigrant years of schooling and immigrant work experience accumulated before arrival is valued much less than Canadian experience of comparable natives. However, for immigrants the increase in earnings associated with completing educational programs is generally higher than that of comparable natives. We provide both signalling and human capital interpretations of this finding.     

Schooling,fertility and the labour market experience of married women

This paper discusses the role of formal schooling and child rearing in the determination of career path choice of women in the US. Data were collected from the adult educational component of the 1991 US National Household Education Survey. Data are available for about 12,568 respondents, of whom 6860 are female. It is established that, amongst others, expected earnings significantly affect the career path and the hours of work chosen by American women. Based on the results of the study, a number of conclusions have been drawn: 1) expectations of earnings affect women's choice of career path, including decisions such as labor market participation, the part-time work versus full-time work decision, and occupational choice; 2) the indirect and indirect effects of schooling and other variables on regime choice has been studied; the impact of schooling and fertility on women's labor supply follows an intuitively plausible pattern; 3) evidence provided here on the private rate of return to education confirms the findings of Bland that part-time workers do not receive a lower return than others; and 4) the importance of correcting for endogeneity and sample selection biases in the problem of earnings determination and career choice has been established.     

International students and labour market outcomes of US-born workers*

Do international students graduating from US colleges and universities affect labour market outcomes of similarly educated native-born workers? I address this question by exploiting a change in US visa policy that results in increases in the labour supply of master’s-level international students to the US labour market in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Estimates show that increases in their labour supply via temporary work permits in a certain field reduce employment of recently graduated native-born holders of a master’s degree but increase earnings of experienced native-born holders of a master’s degree in the same field. These findings support the hypothesis of substitution between skills of similarly educated immigrants and native-born individuals in the same age group and complementarity between skills of those in different age groups.     

Offshoring and labour market reforms in Germany: Assessment and policy implications

Starting from the diagnosis that Germany has had better economic outcomes than most advanced countries since the mid-2000s, we propose a general equilibrium model to answer the following two questions: Why is it so and is the German experience applicable to other EU countries? Whereas a large number of observers explain German competitiveness by the labour market reforms implemented from 2003 to 2005 (Hartz laws), we suggest that (i) the gains in competitiveness are essentially due to offshoring and (ii) the labour market reforms have subsequently reduced the offshoring-related unemployment by decreasing the reservation wage, creating thereby low skilled jobs in non-tradable services. These reforms have also reinforced inequality already generated by offshoring. In contrast with the traditional explanation based on the Hartz reforms, our model findings and simulations fit well with the sequence of observed facts. This experience could be extended to other EU countries, but with higher cost and lower efficiency. Finally, as the reduction in unemployment is based on the extension of non-tradable services, we suggest alternative policies that reach the same goal without increasing inequality.     

The labour market and the distribution of earnings: an empirical analysis for Italy

Using four waves of data from the Participation Labour Unemployment Survey, a database of information on the Italian labour market supply, we address the question of earnings dispersion by applying a ‘nested’ decomposition procedure of the Theil inequality measure, which combines into a unified framework the standard decompositions by population subgroups and income sources. The empirical evidence obtained points to the key role played by the self-employees in shaping labour income inequality, especially at the upper extreme of the earnings distribution, and the emergence of non-standard forms of employment as an important feature of the contemporary workplace.     

Employment instability,earnings and market structure

A model of incremental decision-making in local government is presented as an extention of that developed by davis et al. (1996) for US Congressional appropriation. This is then combined with joint supply and demand equation for local taxes and expenditure. An explicit Stone-Geary utility function derived when these fuctions are maximized subject to the supply and demand equations as constraints. Empitical results are then given for local authorities in England and Wales from 1974 to 1960. These results confirm a very important role for the bureauctic component within the overall tax-expenditure model.     

The earnings of Canadian immigrant and native-born males

This paper examines the economic attainment of Canadian immigrants. Although foreign-born males initially earn less than the native-born, their earnings rise more rapidly with Canadian labour market experience, and after 14years their earnings equal and exceed those of the native population. It is also shown that the use of Mincer's identity leads to biased results when estimating the earnings of the immigrant population.     

Regulatory reform and labour earnings in Portuguese banking

This study examines changes in union contracts and wage structure during and after the introduction of regulatory reforms (deregulation and privatisation) in the Portuguese banking sector. The main finding is that, despite a relative wage erosion detected in the contract data, banking workers were able to enjoy an increasing wage premium in the period 1985–2000, probably reflecting the increasing profitability of the industry and the rise in labour productivity. The evidence also shows that some specific groups benefited relatively more than others: the least skilled and educated workforce and male workers gained more from the regulatory reforms. However, this unequal sharing of the wage premium did not raise wage inequality across ownership groups in the industry. I thank Mark Stewart, Odd Rune Straume, Ian Walker and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments. I am indebted to the Ministério do Trabalho e da Solidariedade for allowing the availability of data from Quadros de Pessoal. Financial support was provided by the Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia under the grant BD/SFRH/2000/1291.     

Offshoring, labour market institutions and the elasticity of labour demand

This paper analyses the evolution of the elasticity of labour demand and the possible role of offshoring therein using industry-level data for a large number of OECD countries. The first main finding is that the wage elasticity of labour demand has increased substantially since 1980, although some of this increase may reflect a trend increase in the speed of adjustment rather than an increase in the long-run wage elasticity. The evidence on the potential contribution of offshoring to raising labour demand elasticity is mixed. No association is found between increases in offshoring and demand elasticity during the second half of the 1990s, but there is a significant cross-sectional association between higher average offshoring intensity during this period and higher demand elasticity. We also find some evidence that strict employment protection legislation weakens the cross-sectional association between offshoring and higher labour demand elasticity, suggesting that the relationship between offshoring and the labour demand elasticity may depend on the national institutional environment.     

Career length: Effects of curvature of earnings profiles,earnings shocks,taxes, and social security

The same high labor supply elasticity that characterizes a representative family model with indivisible labor and employment lotteries also emerges without lotteries when self-insuring individuals choose interior solutions for their career lengths. Off corners, the more elastic is an earnings profile to accumulated working time, the longer is a workerʼs career. Negative (positive) unanticipated earnings shocks reduce (increase) the career length of a worker holding positive assets, while the effects are the opposite for a worker with negative assets. By inducing a worker to retire at an official retirement age, government provided social security can attenuate responses of career lengths to earnings profile slopes, earnings shocks, and taxes.     

Comparing earnings profiles in urban areas of an LDC: rural-to-urban migrants vs. native workers

"We use Tanzanian data to test a recently proposed hypothesis that rural-to-urban migrants have an incentive to supply greater work effort than native urban workers, because of the migrants' positive probability of returning to the low-wage rural areas. We treat the choice between public- and private-sector employment as endogenous and, for theoretical and empirical reasons, distinguish migrants with access to rural land from those without access. Our results show that migrants in both sectors face lower initial wage offers than native urban workers. But, the wage gap is eliminated within a decade or less, and thereafter, migrants surpass the wage offers of native workers."     

Identification, screening and stereotyping in labour market discrimination

According to social-psychological research, feelings of uncertainty in decision-making evoke two opposite responses: (i) reduction of uncertainty by information search, leading to less stereotyping of people, and hence less discrimination; (ii) social identification with an ingroup, inducing more reliance on stereotypic perceptions and prejudices, and hence more discrimination against an outgroup. We integrate both responses in a microeconomic model of hiring and pay decisions by an employer. Increasing competition in the product market makes the employer feel more uncertain about his profits, but also raises the opportunity cost of screening expenditures. This elicits substitution of ingroup identification for screening expenditures, and hence enhances discrimination.     

Fiscal adjustments,labour market flexibility and unemployment

Using a panel of 17 countries for 1978–2009, we find that tax-driven consolidations increase unemployment by 0.25 percentage points. Labour market flexibility mitigates this: a one-point rise in the flexibility index reduces youth (long-term) unemployment by 0.6–0.7 (1.8–2.2) percentage points.     

The labour market effects of offshoring of small and medium-sized firms: micro-level evidence for Germany

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the economic powerhouse of many OECD countries (perhaps most prominently so in Germany). Yet, the labour market dynamics caused by the internationalization of their production activities are largely unexplored. We use survey-based micro-level data for Germany to explore the employment effects of offshoring of SMEs, relying on propensity score matching and difference-in-difference analysis. We find evidence for a downsizing effect in the immediate aftermath of offshoring whereas, initially, job creation is not spurred. In the medium run, we find evidence for a slowing down of employment dynamics of offshoring firms (that tend to belong to the better performing SMEs in Germany) relative to non-offshoring firms. Even though our results do not point to a net employment loss in the medium run, our evidence suggests that offshoring may lead to less jobs being created. This conclusion cannot be confirmed for large companies.     

Ocupational segregation,labour force participation and the relative earnings of men and women

A model of the labour market is developed in which particiaption rates of men and women,wages rates of men and women and occupational segregation are determined simultaneously. The model is estimated using cross-sectional data from Australia. The most important empirical results are that (a) particiaption rates,wage rates and occupational segregation should be viewed as being simultaneously determined,(b) differences in male and female labour-force attactment and human capital attainment are important determinants of the gender composition of occupations and (c)there is little direct evidence in this study to support discrimination-based theories of occupational segregation.