A delicate balance protects everyone's rights

Clashes between employee and employer rights spill from the workplace out into the community at large. Drug testing, negligent hiring, sexual harassment and employment at will are issues that affect the individual, the company and the community at large.     

Vying for time. Work and family

Time--there is never enough of it. There are never enough hours in the day to do everything at work and at home. Today's employees, forced to choose between work obligations and family responsibilities, often feel frazzled and guilty. Some employers recognize these conflicts and are finding ways to lighten the work/family load. They are offering a sophisticated combination of dependent-care options, flexible work hours and family-related benefits tailored to meet the needs of the employees within their specific industries. HRMagazine looks at leaders in six major industries--manufacturing, health, communications/technology, financial management, government and retail. No one can give employees that 25-hour day that everyone feels they need to juggle all their work and family obligations. But these industry leaders have provided a nurturing environment where employees can successfully balance those obligations.     

Decomposing the growth in residential land in the United States

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus changes in residential land per household. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.7% while population only grew 17.8%. At first glance, this suggest an important role for per-household increases. However, the calculations in this paper show that only 24.5% of the growth in residential land area can be attributed to state-level changes in land per household. 37.3% is due to overall population growth, 22.6% to an increase in the number of households over this period, 6% to the shift of population towards states with larger houses, and the remaining 9.6% to interactions between these changes. There are large differences across states and metropolitan areas in the relative importance of these components.     

Cross-Sectional Evolution of the U.S. City Size Distribution

We report nonparametrically estimated stochastic transition kernels for the evolution of the distribution of U.S. metropolitan area populations, for the period 1900 to 1990. These suggest a fair amount of uniformity in the patterns of mobility during the study period. The distribution of city size is predominantly characterised by persistence. Additional kernel estimates do not reveal any stark differences in intra-region mobility patterns. We characterise the nature of intra-size distribution dynamics by means of measures that do not require discretisation of the city size distribution. We employ these measures to study the degree of mobility within the U.S. city size distribution and, separately, within regional and urban subsystems. We find that different regions show different degrees of intra-distribution mobility. Second-tier cities show more mobility than top-tier cities.     

Testing for Localization Using Micro-Geographic Data

To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localization. In contrast to previous studies, our approach allows us to assess the statistical significance of departures from randomness. In addition, we treat space as continuous instead of using an arbitrary collection of geographical units. This avoids problems relating to scale and borders. We apply these tests to an exhaustive U.K. data-set. For four-digit industries, we find that (i) 52% of them are localized at a 5% confidence level, (ii) localization mostly takes place at small scales below 50 km, (iii) the degree of localization is very skewed, and (iv) industries follow broad sectoral patterns with respect to localization. Depending on the industry, smaller establishments can be the main drivers of both localization and dispersion. Three-digit sectors show similar patterns of localization at small scales as well as a tendency to localize at medium scales.     

Devolving Skills: The Case of the Apprenticeship Grant for Employers*

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the Apprenticeship Grant for Employers. Originally a national programme, aimed at incentivising employers to take on apprentices, reforms a few years into operation gave some Local Authorities negotiated flexibilities in how the scheme operated. We consider the impact of the national scheme and then use a difference-in-differences approach to test whether flexibility led to an increase in the number of apprenticeship starts in devolved areas relative to control groups. We find that flexibility had zero effect. There is suggestive evidence that this is because flexibilities were negotiated on the wrong margins.