Creating Opportunities for Women in the Renewable Energy Sector: Findings from India

This paper identifies opportunities and constraints that low-income women face in accessing livelihoods in the renewable-energy sector in India through qualitative and quantitative research conducted in collaboration with The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) and the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in 2012–13. Whereas previous research has focused on women mostly as end users of solar and biomass technologies, this research attempts also to understand women's potential as entrepreneurs, facilitators, designers, and innovators. Findings reveal that although access to technology and employment in the energy sector is limited by inadequate purchasing power and low social status, there is tremendous potential to create livelihoods for women at all levels of the energy supply chain. Broader findings indicate that women can gain optimal traction from employment in the energy sector only if there are wider socially progressive policies in place, including state intervention to create a robust social welfare infrastructure and accessible, high-quality, public services.     

Stuck in the Middle: Off-Farm Employment and Caregiving Among Middle-Aged Rural Chinese

ABSTRACT

Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) 2011–12 baseline data, this contribution explores to what extent taking care of grandchildren and frail parents influences rural middle-aged Chinese adults’ off-farm employment. The findings show that, conditional on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, taking care of grandchildren has a negative effect on rural middle-aged men's and women's off-farm job participation and hours worked. Caregiving for parents does not have the same negative effects on off-farm employment and hours worked. Furthermore, the study finds that annual earnings are also negatively affected by caregiving responsibilities, especially for women and men taking care of grandchildren.     

Reorganizing School Lunch for a More Just and Sustainable Food System in the US

Public school lunch programs in the United States are contested political terrains shaped by government agencies, civil society activists, and agri-food companies. The particular organization of these programs has consequences for public health, social justice, and ecological sustainability. This contribution draws on political economy, critical food studies, and feminist economics to analyze the US National School Lunch Program, one of the world's oldest and largest government-sponsored school lunch programs. It makes visible the social and environmental costs of the “heat-and-serve” economy, where widely used metrics consider only the speed and volume of service as productive work. This study demonstrates that such a narrow understanding of the labor of lunch devalues care and undercuts the potential for school food provisioning to promote ecological and feminist goals. Further, it proposes a “high road” alternative and outlines an agenda for reorganizing school food provisioning to maximize care in all its dimensions.     

Labor Market Effects of Spatial Licensing Requirements: Evidence from CPA Mobility

We exploit the staggered introduction of CPA Mobility provisions in the United States to study the effects of spatial licensing requirements on the labor market for accounting professionals. Specifically, we examine whether the removal of licensing‐induced geographic barriers affects CPA wages and employment levels, as well as the pricing and quality of professional services. We find that, subsequent to the adoption of CPA Mobility provisions, wages of accounting professionals decrease, whereas employment levels are unaffected. The documented wage effect stems from smaller CPA firms, is more pronounced for CPAs holding senior positions, and persists over time. We also find that service prices decline and that this effect is concentrated in local CPA firms. Moreover, we document that the increased wage and price pressure is not associated with deteriorating service quality. Collectively, our results suggest that the removal of occupational licensing barriers has sizable effects on labor supply and service prices. Our findings inform the current regulatory debate on occupational licensing.     

General existence of competitive equilibrium in the growth model with an endogenous labor–leisure choice

We prove the existence of competitive equilibrium in the canonical optimal growth model with elastic labor supply under general conditions. In this model, strong conditions to rule out corner solutions are often not well justified. We show using a separation argument that there exist Lagrange multipliers that can be viewed as a system of competitive prices. Neither Inada conditions, nor strict concavity, nor homogeneity, nor differentiability are required for existence of a competitive equilibrium. Thus, we cover important specifications used in the macroeconomics literature for which existence of a competitive equilibrium is not well understood. We give examples to illustrate the violation of the conditions used in earlier existence results but where a competitive equilibrium can be shown to exist following the approach in this paper.     

Productivity Dispersion and Measurement Error

Several reasons have been put forward to explain the high dispersion of productivity across establishments: quality of management, different input usage and market distortions, to name but a few. Although it is acknowledged that a sizable portion of productivity dispersion may also be due to measurement error, little research has been devoted to identifying how much they contribute. We outline a novel procedure for identifying the role of measurement error in explaining the empirical dispersion of productivity across establishments. The starting point of our framework is the errors-in-variable model consisting of a measurement equation and a structural equation for latent productivity. We estimate the variance of the measurement error and subsequently estimate the variance of the latent productivity variable, which is not contaminated by measurement error. Using Norwegian data on the manufacture of food products, we find that about one percent of the measured dispersion stems from measurement error.     

The Three Faces of Labor: Sustainability and the Next Wave of Automation

This article develops a model of three faces of labor from Figart, Mutari, and Power’s three faces of wages. This is integrated with sustainability models to locate the process of human and social capital formation and explore issues arising from technological change. The latest wave of automation, involving robotics and artificial intelligence, is expected to be an even greater challenge for worker well-being than globalization and immigration. The model supports a new narrative around labor that incorporates the caring economy as well as a framework for thinking about labor issues and long-term well-being.     

Marx,Sraffa, and Surplus: Observations Prompted by Garegnani (2018)

ABSTRACT

In a posthumously published article, Pierangelo Garegnani (2018. ‘On the Labour Theory of Value in Marx and in the Marxist Tradition.’) depicts Marx’s project in Capital as that of ‘developing systematically the theory of Ricardo and [the] implications of social conflict’ implied by Ricardo’s ‘surplus approach to value and distribution’. This paper argues to the contrary that Marx’s theory of surplus value and exploitation differs from (neo-)Ricardian surplus theory in fundamental ways, and modifies Garegnani’s simple Sraffian model to illustrate the distinctive implications of Marx’s theory.     

Fertility and maternal labor supply in Japan: Conflicting policy goals?

Using panel data on Japanese mothers, this paper estimates the impact of fertility on maternal labor supply using twins as an instrument for the total number of children. We find that having twins actually has a longer term positive impact on maternal labor force participation in Japan. To understand this result, we present evidence that the effects of age and cost of children can generate this finding, are particularly salient in Japan and differ in important ways between twins and non-twin families of the same size. Implications for fertility and labor supply policy in Japan are discussed.