Technological Progress, Job Creation, and Job Destruction

New technology embodied in capital equipment can be adopted either through destruction of existing jobs and the creation of new ones or by renovation, updating the job's equipment. Under the assumption that the destruction of jobs generates worker layoffs, we show that higher productivity growth induces lower unemployment when renovation costs are low, but that the response of employment to growth switches from positive to negative as the cost of updating existing technology rises above a unique critical level. The effects of idiosyncratic productivity differences and cross sector mobility on the aggregate relationship between growth and unemployment are also studied.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D92, E24, J41, J63, J64.     

Does job design make workers happy?

Using linked employer-employee data for Finland we examine associations between job design, employee well-being and job-related stress. Three key findings stand out. First, in accordance with the theory of Karasek and Karasek and Theorell, job control and supervisory support are positively correlated with employee well-being and negatively correlated with job-related stress. Second, as predicted by theory, job demands are positively correlated with job-related stress. Third, there is no association between job demands and employee well-being and, contrary to expectations, neither job control nor supervisory support alleviate the negative relationship between job demands and job-related stress. Our results confirm the importance of job design for employee well-being.     

Diversity,knowledge clusters,and job placement: Graduate economics teaching of core microeconomics

The authors present an empirical analysis of what is taught in core micro-economics at a set of top U.S. doctoral economics programs. Their aim is to evaluate the diversity across programs and assess whether there are distinct “schools of thought” in graduate economics education. Their empirical findings reveal substantial, in fact, surprising diversity in what is taught. Application of a clustering algorithm results in programs clustering into two main “schools of thought.” The authors also specify an econometric model of job placement. Their job placement results indicate that candidates are more likely to be hired at schools in the same cluster as their home program, even after controlling for other factors. The results inform debates about graduate education and the relevance of a “common core” curriculum.     

International trade,job training,and labor reallocation

A large literature studies the impact of increased import competition on workers' outcomes, however, relatively few studies examine which policies can aid workers displaced by trade. In this article, we evaluate the impact of an industrial job training program in Brazil on workers displaced from manufacturing sectors. We find that industrial training increases the probability of re-entry into the formal labor market 1 year after displacement by about 17 percentage points and is even more effective for workers displaced from sectors exposed to high import competition. This effect is mainly associated with workers switching sectors and occupations after training.     

Corporate Governance in Russia

This paper discusses a local, privately-run and federally-funded program for all individuals able to demonstrate their income is at, or below the poverty line. This free Certified Nursing Assistant training program enables successful participants to obtain appropriate employment in local hospitals. The program is complementary to job guarantee proposals promoted by a number of economists, and provides an example of how local job creation programs can incorporate job training to improve prospects for upward mobility.     

Only the smartest? Motivating job characteristics for all ability levels and their impact on job satisfaction

Using Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies data, we explore the relation between cognitive ability, proxied by an explicit test of individual numeracy level and the reported satisfaction of individuals with their job. The paper identifies a relation of individual cognitive ability on job satisfaction interacting with some characteristics of the job related to job complexity, namely job autonomy and learning opportunity in the workplace. We found that individuals with different levels of cognitive ability exhibit different levels of job satisfaction depending on how much learning and job autonomy allows their employment. Individuals with low level of cognitive ability enjoy more their job autonomy than individuals in the top of the ability distribution. The learning effect brings the most profits to the utility of workers from the middle quartiles. Finally, planning is most enjoyed at the top of the distribution. We discuss the implication of these findings from a practical perspective.     

Automation,Financialization, and Institutional Change: Challenges for Progressive Policy

Abstract:

This article argues that the issue of “technological unemployment” resulting from automation is the result of ceremonial encapsulation within the process of progressive institutional adjustment. While institutions of production have adjusted to account for new technological developments, institutions of distribution have not. As discussed here, the main cause of this lack of adjustment is a financialized economy, in which shareholder returns motivate and dominate economic decision making and activity. As a result, gains and benefits from technological advances exacerbate existing income inequality and reduces the power of labor. I discuss this issue in detail before explaining how progressive policies that divorce private wage-labor from access to the system of social provisioning may serve to smooth this process of institutional adjustment caused by the introduction of automated processes.     

The impact of job security on job satisfaction in economic contractions versus expansions

Job security, often measured using the perceived risk of job loss in the near future, is a significant determinant of job satisfaction. We posit that the impact job security has on job satisfaction is not only a function of how likely it is that a worker loses a job but also how likely it is that a worker could find another. The effect this has on worker job satisfaction then is different depending on whether perceived job loss occurs (or not) when job openings are scarce or when job openings are plentiful. We use difference-in-differences analysis of the 1997 and 2008 waves from the National Study of the Changing Workforce to show that three measures of job security increase private sector worker job satisfaction, and reduce worker incentives to quit, more when job openings are relatively scarce (during contractions) than when job openings are relatively plentiful (during expansions). We find that our results are strongest among less-educated workers.     

员工工作满意度、工作行为与组织承诺关系述评

员工工作满意度与组织承诺是研究员工工作行为的理论基础。根据已有的研究提出假设:员工工作满意度与员工组织公民行为正相关,与离职行为负相关;组织承诺与员工组织公民行为及角色内行为正相关,与离职行为负相关;员工工作满意度与组织承诺正相关;组织承诺在员工工作满意度对员工工作行为的影响中起着中介作用。     

Youth labour market integration in Spain: Search time, job duration and skill mismatch

In recent years young workers in Spain have had great difficulties in finding and maintaining a job. Furthermore, the early histories of new entrants into the Spanish labour market has typically involved young workers accepting jobs for which the required level of education is lower that the attained level. Using the ad hoc module of the Labour Force Survey (2nd quarter, 2000), in this paper I analyse the transition from school to work for a sample of Spanish youths who left education for the first time after 1990. I allow the search period after completing education, the duration of the first significant job, and the probability of being over-educated in that job to be correlated in a system of simultaneous equations which is estimated by maximum likelihood. The results suggest that over-educated workers experience shorter durations in their first significant job. I do not find a direct effect of search time on employment duration. However, there are unobserved factors that increase the first unemployed job search period after completing education, and that also increase the subsequent employment duration.JEL Classification: C34, J64The data set has been provided by professor Alfonso Alba-Ramírez. I am also grateful to Juan José Dolado, Marcel Jansen, Ricardo Mora, José Ignacio Garía, Juan Francisco Jimeno and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Heterogeneity, Job Creation and Unemployment Volatility

In this paper, I explore the impact of match‐specific heterogeneity at the job creation margin on business cycle fluctuations. I show that this form of heterogeneity alone does not help to amplify labor market volatility, either under full or under asymmetric information. First, I show analytically that, under full information, heterogeneity has no first‐order effect on the response of unemployment and job creation to productivity, and actually tends to dampen the response of market tightness. Then, in a series of calibrations, I show that with both full and asymmetric information, the model delivers labor market volatilities close to the representative‐agent, full‐information benchmark.     

职位定价中的决策困境与策略选择

职位定价的两种方法——职位评估与市场定价之间经常地存在不一致和冲突,因而企业薪酬决策中面临着两难选择的决策困境和潜在风险。分析了市场定价与职位评估这两种方法的理论基础和冲突的根源,比较了两种方法对不同职位定价所产生的薪酬效应,在此基础上提出了解决职位定价决策困境的基本思路,认为应该在薪酬决策之前进行战略分析和价值链分析,并针对不同的职位采取不同的策略。     

工作要求与员工出勤主义行为的关系：工作不安全感和心理资本的作用

基于工作要求-资源理论模型和资源保存理论,通过问卷调查的方式,探讨了在中国背景下企业员工工作要求对出勤主义行为的影响,并提出了一个被调节的中介模型。研究结果表明:工作要求与工作不安全感及出勤主义行为呈显著正相关;工作不安全感在工作要求与出勤主义行为之间起部分中介作用;同时,心理资本能够缓冲工作要求对工作不安全感的消极影响,从而有效消除或限制了企业员工的出勤主义行为。     

Trade liberalization,the exchange rate and job flows in Brazil

Brazil underwent a large trade liberalization process in the 1990s. Over the period, manufacturing employment decreased significantly, generating public debate on the need to revert liberalization. This paper aims to identify the actual effect of trade liberalization on employment, separating it from exchange rate movements using a gross job flow approach. Our novel dataset covers all sectors and formally registered enterprises, and we use new sector specific exchange rate data. Our estimates suggest that greater openness reduce jobs through increased job destruction, with no effect on job creation, but the exchange rate matters also. Depreciations expand the number of jobs in manufacturing by increasing creation, with no effect on destruction.     

工作特征在变革型领导与工作满意度相关关系中的中介作用

员工对工作特征的评价不仅依赖于客观的工作特征,而且还会受到领导的"意义管理"的影响,通过结构方程模型,我们可以验证工作特征在变革型领导与工作满意度之间的中介作用。在客观的工作特征没有发生变化的情况下,企业领导应该通过展现变革型领导力来影响下属员工对工作特征的评价,进而提高他们的工作满意度。     

Preference for job diversity,mixed part-time jobs and voluntary unemployment

This article introduces job diversity preference into Hoteling's location model to explain individuals' displeasure with work. The mixed part-time jobs (MPJ) can be regarded as more diversified products firms can offer at a higher cost. Individuals pay the product (jobs) with their productivity. We intend to explain: (a) Why some individuals prefer not to work in only single full-time jobs (SFJ) cases; (b) Why allowing free MPJ can be a good idea; (c) How MPJ wage floor and ceilings can block or hinder the effect of the MPJ market. (d) What the government can do to improve employment and social welfare. Bringing Hoteling's model into the labour market to demonstrate individuals' preferences on job diversity is the major innovation of this article.     

Youth labor market expectations and job matching in sub-Saharan Africa: evidence from school-to-work transition surveys

In this paper, we investigate the factors that influence youth labour market expectations and outcomes. We also perform a job matching exercise to understand youth labour market dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results show that youth education is an influential factor of youth employment expectations and employment, ceteris paribus. Higher educational attainments have a great impact on expecting and securing better jobs, particularly in the technical and professional fields. Youth with low educational attainments, particularly primary education and lower, have a higher tendency to expect to be employed in occupations with low job complexity. Our results indicate a severe job-skill mismatch in all occupational categories, both before and after the youth’s transition into the labour market. Using education as the only selection criterion, we found that less than 10 per cent of employment expectations match with skills required while 55 per cent and 34 per cent are under or over-educated for the jobs expected, respectively. Over and under education is a notable feature in youth labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. About 47 per cent of employed youth in the sample are overqualified for their respective jobs while 28 per cent are under qualified.     

JOB REALLOCATION, EMPLOYMENT CHANGE AND AVERAGE JOB TENURE: THEORY AND WORKPLACE EVIDENCE FROM AUSTRALIA

We explore determinants of job reallocation, employment change and average job tenure in this paper. A model which associates technological advances with the process of economic growth is modified and analysed. The features of this model allow for the possibility of asymmetric behaviour when looking at the net change in employment. Workplace data from Australia (AWIRS95) are used to test the predictions generated from the model for both employment change and average job tenure. Results are presented that provide clear evidence as to the nature of workplaces in which net employment growth is concentrated. We find that employment growth is asymmetrically related to expected changes in demand for the output of the workplace. We also find that employment is lower for workplaces that are larger, older, have greater union density, offer higher relative earnings, or are operating in a more competitive environment. The impacts on average tenure are as expected from the model and from these changes in employment. Overall there is a substantial degree of agreement between the predictions of the model and our empirical results.     

Changes in Job Structure and Rising Wage Inequality in Urban China, 1995-2007

We use household surveys from 1995, 2002, and 2007 to examine how changes in job structure contributed to China’s rising urban wage inequality, considering three job characteristics: occupation, industry, and firm ownership. The explanatory power of job structure for wage inequality increased between 1995 and 2007. Both the change in relative number of jobs (composition effect) and the change in between-job and within-job wage gaps (price effect) contributed to rising wage inequality. Price effect was the major contributor, whereas composition effect played a larger role in the 1995–2002 period than in the 2002–2007 period, and at the lower-half distribution. Between-job inequality played a major role in the first period, and within-job inequality played a major role in the second period. Our results suggest that both technological change and institutional features influence job structure and wage inequality.     

Are women really that happy at work? Australian evidence on the ‘contented female’

This article investigates the apparent paradox of females possessing higher levels of job satisfaction compared to their male counterparts despite possessing worse employment outcomes. Postulating that the female workforce is heterogeneous by age, education and the presence of children, we create four groups; the aggregated, young and childless, young with children and the educated. The article finds statistical evidence of significant gender differences, though not uniformly so. Econometric results, however, paint a muddier picture, indicating that statistical results alone should not be used to categorically report incidences of gender differences in job satisfaction. Sample-selection bias results also evince sub-group heterogeneity and require further study. The determinants of job satisfaction vary between measures and sub-groups, though not necessarily so across gender. In sum, the article finds that the paradox does exhibit itself for the aggregated and young and childless sub-groups, but is largely absent for the young with children group. As well, there is a clear bifurcation in job satisfaction between genders for the educated sub-group. This suggests that employed females should not be viewed as a monolithic bloc in the labour force.