Download or read book Essays on economic fluctuations growth and the labor market performance written by Coralia Azucena Quintero Rojas and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cette thèse s'intéresse aux fluctuations économiques, au chômage et à la croissance économique. Ces dernières décennies, la plupart des pays européens ont connu un ralentissement de leur croissance économique ainsi qu'un taux de chômage élevé et persistant. Cette évolution, dite de long terme, a été accompagnée d'une série de fluctuations économiques de court terme. Dans ce contexte, cette thèse analyse le fonctionnement du marché du travail et son incidence sur la performance des économies développées. Plus précisément, nous analysons les effets de court et de long terme de certaines distorsions jugées représentatives du marché du travail des pays européens, tels que la fiscalité, les systèmes d'indemnisation du chômage et les mécanismes de fixation du salaire. Le premier chapitre présente le modèle canonique de cycle réel dans un contexte international. Il s'agit de déterminer un ensemble d'hypothèses visant à pallier aux défaillances du modèle original dans l'explication des fluctuations du marché du travail. L'incorporation de ces hypothèses dans ce cadre théorique fait l'objet de la première partie du chapitre 2. Même si ces amendements du cadre canonique conduisent à une meilleure compréhension des déterminants des fluctuations économiques et de leur synchronisation entre pays, les faits concernant la dynamique des heures et du salaire ne sont pas expliqués. Ceci justifie le développement d'une modélisation alternative du marché du travail, présenté dans la deuxième partie de ce chapitre. Au centre de ce modèle prennent place le chômage et les liens économiques entre pays. Ce cadre est étendu au chapitre 3 pour intégrer la fiscalité, ce qui nous permet de rendre compte de la plupart des faits de court terme. Finalement, les chapitres 4 et 5 s'intéressent à la problématique liée à la croissance économique ainsi qu'à l'évolution tendancielle du temps du travail d'équilibre. En tenant compte des rigidités présentes sur le marché du travail, nous fournissons une explication des phénomènes de long terme.

Download or read book Growth Unemployment Distribution and Government written by V. Borooah and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996-08-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to set out in a comprehensive, but succinct manner, the key points surrounding four economic issues that generate, today, much discussion and debate. These are the issues of growth, unemployment, distribution and government. It is aimed at an audience that is sufficiently interested in economic issues to read a book that sets out these issues clearly, comprehensively and above all, seriously. This has implications for both the style and the content of the book. Clarity requires that the arguments be presented coherently, without resort to jargon. Comprehensiveness requires a wide perspective embracing theoretical, empirical and policy matters. Lastly, seriousness requires that the most up-to-date thinking on economic matters is presented in digestible form, but without violence to the integrity of the original arguments. Achieving this trinity of objectives has been the primary aim of this book.

Download or read book Essays on Economic Fluctuations and Growth written by Yongsung Chang and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Labor Economics written by Shahriar Sadighi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics which are self-contained and can be read independently of the others. The first essay, coauthored with Professor Modestino, measures mismatch unemployment in US economy in the post-recession era and explores the heterogeneity among educational groupings. The second essay estimates the changing effects of cognitive ability on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults between 1980s and 2000s. The third essay, coauthored with Professor Dickens, examines the impact of measurement error in survey data on identifying the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US economy. Essay I: No Longer Qualified? Changes in the Supply and Demand for Skills within Occupations-- In this study, we extend the framework developed by Sahin et al. (2014) to measure mismatch unemployment since the end of the Great Recession and explore the heterogeneity among educational groupings. Our findings indicate that mismatch across two-digit industries and two- digit occupations explain around 17- 20 percent of the recent recovery in the US unemployment rate since 2010. We also capture movements in employer education requirements over time using a novel database of 87 million online job posting aggregated by Burning Glass Technologies and further show that mismatch is not only greater in magnitude for high-skill occupations but also is more persistent over the course of the recent labor market recovery, possible accounting for the shift rightward that has been observed in the aggregate Beveridge Curve by other researchers. Furthermore, we shed light on at least one of the potential causes of mismatch on the demand side, providing evidence that labor demand shifts among high-skilled occupation groups exhibit a permanent increase in the share of employers requiring a Bachelor's degree as well as other baseline, specialized, and software skills listed on job postings, suggesting a role for structural shifts associated with changes in technology or capital investment. Our results demonstrate that equilibrium models where unemployed workers accumulate specific human capital and, in equilibrium, make explicit mobility decisions across distinct labor markets, can mean that workers are chasing a moving target-at least among high-skilled occupations. Furthermore, our findings inform debates focused on workforce development strategies and related educational policies where decision making could benefit from the use of real-time labor market information on employer demands to provide guidance for both job placement as well as program development. Essay II: The Changing Impacts of Cognitive Ability on Determining Earnings of College Bound and Non-College Bound Young Adults-- Using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I investigate the changing impact of cognitive ability, as captured by performance on AFQT tests, on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults. My findings indicate that cognitive ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort and its impact on wage determination has undergone a drastic change between 1980s and 2000s. My results tend to corroborate the findings of previous studies which emphasize the lifecycle path of technological development from adoption to maturation and trace back the labor market outcomes observed over these periods to pre- and post-2000 patterns in technology investment and its consequent boom-and-bust cycles in the demand for cognitive skills. Essay III: Measurement Error in Survey Data and its Impact on Identifying the Extent of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity-- In this study, we employ data drawn from the 1996, 2001, 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, which cover the years 1996-2013, to assess the effectiveness of dependent interviewing at reducing bias in the estimates of the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in the US economy. In the 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, dependent interviewing was used much more extensively than in the past. This questioning method by focusing on changes rather than levels of wages and using responses from prior interviews to query apparent inconsistencies over time reduces the incidence of reporting and measurement errors. Our change-in-wage distributions derived from SIPP 2004 and 2008 panels exhibit remarkably larger zero-spikes and asymmetries vis-℗♭℗ -vis those derived from 1996 and 2001 panels before dependent interviewing was used. These results are consistent with the findings of previous studies that used payroll data or statistical techniques to correct for reporting error. We apply one such technique to the SIPP panels before and after the introduction of dependent interviewing. In the pre-2004 panels the correction is large and results in a distribution that closely resembles the uncorrected distributions of the 2004 panel. When the correction is applied to the 2004 panel no evidence of errors is found.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets Monetary Policy and Uncertainty written by Neil Ware White (IV) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.

Download or read book Economic Reforms Growth and Inequality in Latin America written by Gustavo Indart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2004. Growth, income distribution, and labour markets are issues of pivotal importance in the Latin American context. Examining unique theoretical issues and the empirical evidence, this book provides a critical analysis of the key elements of income distribution determinants, labour market functions, trade policies, and their interrelations. As the advance of globalization becomes seemingly unstoppable, this book provides an important reappraisal of the impact of this new phenomenon, and in particular, the pernicious impact it may have on income growth and distribution. The key objective of the volume is to integrate more fully the analysis of trade and labour market economists, in order to better understand the labour market and income distribution implications of globalization and international integration. Forty years after the early calls to appropriately investigate the micro foundations of macroeconomics, the separation of the two at the policy level is more damaging than ever before - particularly for developing regions; this volume therefore makes an important contribution at the theoretical and policy levels by bringing together macroeconomic and microeconomic analyses.

Download or read book Essays on Growth Labor Markets and Democracy written by Carola Moreno Valenzuela and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation studies economic growth, directly and indirectly, from three different perspectives: labor markets, financial markets, and social institutions. The issues addressed are the effect on labor markets of implementing an unemployment insurance system when eligibility is stochastic, the predictive power of sovereign spreads for future economic growth and inflation, and the impact of the democratic history of a country on economic growth. The first chapter studies the quantitative effects on the labor market of implementing an unemployment insurance system in which not all unemployed are eligible for unemployment benefits, and moreover, eligibility is positively correlated with labor productivity. The main result is that higher benefits result on higher negotiated wages for the proportion of unemployed who are insured and lower wages for the uninsured. Moreover, the average behavior of the market is driven by the proportion of insured unemployed. Consequently, the standard results are obtained: higher benefits increase average unemployment, market tightness, average wages and unemployment duration. The second chapter studies whether the spreads of sovereign bonds issued in international markets provide marginal information with which one can predict output growth and inflation. These instruments have only rarely been studied, especially in the context of emerging countries. The tests carried out for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia and Mexico show that, in most cases, spreads are useful as leading indicators for output growth. To a lesser extent, they are also useful for predicting inflation. The main contribution of the paper is to provide an alternative financial leading indicator for economies that lack indicators at the domestic level. The third chapter proposes a particular way of thinking about the causal effect of social institutions and their impact on economic growth. The key insight is that institutions' effects cumulate over time. In contrast with the previous literature that found that current democracy plays little or no role in determining output growth this chapter shows that cumulative experience with democracy is a very significant factor. The tests are robust to several specifications, different measures of the stock of democracy and different samples.

Download or read book Essays on the Transmission of Economic Shocks written by Claire H. Hollweg and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis explores the transmission of economic shocks. Although the thesis is structured as four stand-alone chapters, the common theme throughout is identifying the impact of economic shocks: either idiosyncratic shocks at the household-level, macroeconomic shocks emanating from foreign countries and transmitted through global markets, or countries' own macroeconomic policy changes (for example, structural reforms or trade reforms). Each chapter applies a different empirical methodology, including structural estimation, reduced form instrumental variables estimation, and growth accounting. Finally, each chapter utilizes a different dataset and country sample selection. While one chapter uses a micro dataset from household-level surveys, others use cross-country datasets at the aggregate country level. Both developed and developing countries are considered in the analyses. The thesis begins by exploring the relationship between idiosyncratic income changes and consumption changes of Australian households over the period 2001-2009. A major contribution to the literature is the use of the Household Income and Labor Dynamics of Australia dataset that includes panels on both consumption and income data. For the entire sample of Australian households, nearly full consumption smoothing exists against transitory shocks. Although less consumption smoothing exists against permanent shocks, Australian households still achieve a high degree of consumption smoothing against highly persistent shocks, particularly when compared to households in the United States. Durable purchases, female labor supply, and taxes and transfers are all found to act as consumption-smoothing mechanisms. The thesis then explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive list of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, employment levels, average wage index, and labor force participation rates. After documenting the average trends across countries in the labor-market outcomes up to ten years on either side of each country's reform year, fixed-effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions are performed to account for likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor-market outcomes. Overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor, particularly for informal workers. Redistributive effects in favor of workers, along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson effect, may be at work. The thesis then explores the impact of trade liberalization on macroeconomic estimates of productivity using Brazil as a case study. Trade and economic reforms can affect the price of capital goods relative to other tradable and especially non-tradable goods. If the price of capital investments rises more than the price of all goods and services in the economy, mismeasurement of the price of capital caused by the divergence in these relative prices would result in an overestimated capital stock and underestimated TFP. This chapter overcomes this bias by constructing a capital price index using international trade data on capital goods' unit values then adjusts the index to reflect domestic Brazilian prices. A significant recovery between 1992 and 2006 is observed, highlighting the important role of the price deflator in growth accounting. The final chapter of this thesis proposes a methodology to measure the vulnerability of a country through exports to fluctuations in the economic activity of foreign markets. Export vulnerability depends first on the overall level of export exposure, measured as the share of exports to a foreign market in gross domestic product, and second on the sensitivity of exports to fluctuations in foreign gross domestic product. This sensitivity is captured by estimating origin-destination specific elasticities of exports with respect to changes in foreign gross domestic product using a gravity model of trade. Although the results suggest differences in elasticity estimates across regions as well as product categories, the principal source of international heterogeneity in export vulnerability results from differences in export exposure to global markets.

Download or read book Full Employment and Growth written by James Tobin and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of twenty-six essays written by Yale economics professor Tobin, "the Keynesian who won't quit" (and proud of it). These essays defend Keynesian policies against extremes of classical economics, as well as respond to recent economic developments in the areas of "globalization," the transition to capitalism in former communist economies, and the rise in poverty and inequality in the US. The volume is divided five parts dealing with macroeconomic, monetary, fiscal, international economic relations, and social policies. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Essays in Economic Fluctuations written by Leonard Tampubolon and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Nicholas Anthony Carollo and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays in labor economics with a focus on economic and institutional differences in regional labor markets. It separately explores the causes and consequences of two major trends in the United States - the declining geographic concentration of immigrant location choices and the increasing prevalence of state-level occupational licensing requirements. Chapter one shows that the geographic concentration of the foreign-born population in the United States fell sharply between 1980 and 2010 as immigrants were increasingly drawn to areas with historically low migrant inflows. This trend was driven primarily by the changing location choices of new immigrant cohorts, though secondary migration has played a minor role as well. An analysis of the determinants of location choice across four decades suggests that immigrants remain highly responsive to local labor market conditions, but the traditionally strong pull of ethnic enclaves has diminished over time. Chapter two describes the construction of a novel dataset that compiles over one hundred years of occupational licensing, certification, and registration requirements in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The data are assembled through a comprehensive analysis of numerous primary and secondary sources and currently identify major state and federal policy changes for 250 unique occupation categories. It is the first occupational licensing database to link each policy to both current statutes or administrative regulations, as well as to historical legislation covering the entire twentieth century. A comprehensive analysis of state session laws, in particular, allows me to observe the exact text of all legislative acts enacting, amending, or replacing statutes that reference specific occupations. Using the content of these laws, I record the enactment and effective dates of regulatory changes and several variables that characterize the type of regulation that was adopted. Relative to existing sources, my data offer a significantly longer time series, the ability to observe superseded legislation, and a more complete coding of legal prohibitions that differentiates between practice and title restrictions. Chapter three studies the short- and long-run impact of occupational licensing on labor market outcomes in the United States using the data described in chapter two. I implement an event study design that exploits within-occupation variation in the timing of licensing statutes across states to trace out the dynamic response of earnings and employment to policy changes. I find consistent evidence across several independent employer and household surveys that the typical licensing statute adopted during the past half-century increased worker earnings, but had null or weakly positive effects on employment. Twenty-five years after licensing statutes were adopted, cumulative wage growth in treated state-occupation cells exceeded that of untreated controls by 4 to 7%. Over the same time period, my results rule out an average disemployment effect greater than -5%. The data show much larger decreases in employment, however, among occupations that have little potential to cause serious harm. In cases where the consumer protection rationale for licensing is more plausible, I find simultaneous increases in both earnings and employment following the adoption of licensing requirements.

Download or read book Essays on Student Debt Unemployment and Labor Market Outcomes written by Jin Yan (Ph. D. in economics) and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on studying the effect of certain life events including accumulating student debt and incidences of unemployment on workers' labor market outcomes. The chapters use economic models to guide empirical analysis and find that both student debt and unemployment experience can negatively impact workers' future earnings. The models in Chapter 2 and 3 both feature imperfect information about workers' underlying ability and learning through noisy productivity signals over time. Both chapters suggest that information frictions in the labor market can be costly. Chapter 2 develops and estimates a model of career choices and experimentation featuring imperfect information, risk aversion, and incomplete markets. The model emphasizes the importance of career experimentation in driving earnings growth and shows that information frictions cause risk-averse graduates with student debt to choose a safe career path with a flatter experience-earnings profile which is consistent with the empirical results. Chapter 3 finds that the longer a worker is unemployed, the less he earns initially coming out of an unemployment spell, but the wage penalty of unemployment duration decreases over time. The findings are consistent with the prediction of the employer learning with statistical discrimination model developed in Altonji and Pierret (2001) which suggests that information frictions can motivate profit-maximizing employers to use unemployment duration as a negative signal to predict workers' productivity at the time of hire, put extra negative weight on unemployment duration when making initial wage offers, and alleviate it only after learning about workers’ underlying ability. Chapter 4 presents a flow-based methodology for real-time unemployment rate projections to characterize the evolution of the unemployment rate during the recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the chapter analyzes fluctuations in the unemployment rate through the lens of labor market flows and this approach performed considerably better at the onset of the COVID-19 recession in spring 2020 in predicting the peak unemployment rate as well as its rapid decline in the following months. The predictive power of the methodology comes from its combined use of real-time data with the flow approach

Download or read book Essays in Financial Economics written by Hang Bai and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters that aim to understand the fundamental relations between asset prices and the real/financial decisions of firms. The first chapter studies the credit risk implications of labor market fluctuations, by incorporating defaultable debt into a textbook search model of unemployment. In the model, the present value of cash flows that firms extract from workers simultaneously drives unemployment dynamics and credit risk variation. The model generates fat right tails in both unemployment and credit spreads, and their strong comovement over the business cycle, in line with the historical U.S. data from 1929 to 2015. Quantitatively, the model reasonably replicates the level, volatility and cyclicality of credit spreads. Overall, the paper highlights labor market fluctuations as an important macroeconomic driver of credit risk variation. In the second chapter, co-authored with Kewei Hou, Howard Kung, and Lu Zhang, we study how rare economic disasters, events such as the Great Depression, affect the cross section of stock returns, in particular the relation between the CAPM and the value premium. In historical U.S. data, it is well-established that the CAPM fails miserably to explain the value premium during the post-Compustat period. Perhaps less well-known is that the CAPM turns out to capture the value premium pretty well during the long sample period from 1929 to 2014. To understand the drivers behind the differential performance of the CAPM, we embed disasters into a stylied investment-based asset pricing model. The key result is that our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value premium in finite samples in which disasters are not materialized, and its relative success in samples in which disasters are materialized. Due to measurement errors in pre-ranking market betas, the relation between these estimated betas and average returns is flat in simulations, consistent with the beta “anomaly,” even though the relation between true betas and expected returns is strongly positive. The third chapter empirically examines how asset returns vary over the credit cycle. I construct a variable called Corporate Credit Growth (hereafter CCG) to capture the phase of the credit cycle, and show that CCG strongly negatively predicts future excess stock returns both in sample and out of sample. A one-standard-deviation decrease in CCG is associated with a sizable 1.5% increase in the equity premium over the next quarter. The predictive power of CCG can not be accounted for by a wide range of previously studied predictors. Impulse response analysis indicates CCG contains information about the term structure of expected stock returns. Finally, the paper examines alternative indicators of the credit cycle and finds that credit flows to other sectors of the economy do not appear to predict returns in the equity market.

Download or read book What Unions No Longer Do written by Jake Rosenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in five, and just one in ten in the private sector. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have explained the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do shows the broad repercussions of labor's collapse for the American economy and polity. Organized labor was not just a minor player during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. For generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. What Unions No Longer Do details the consequences of labor's decline, including poorer working conditions, less economic assimilation for immigrants, and wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, resulting in a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.

Download or read book The Great Inflation written by Michael D. Bordo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Download or read book The Fissured Workplace written by David Weil and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety protections, and ever-widening income inequality. From the perspectives of CEOs and investors, fissuring--splitting off functions that were once managed internally--has been phenomenally successful. Despite giving up direct control to subcontractors and franchises, these large companies have figured out how to maintain the quality of brand-name products and services, without the cost of maintaining an expensive workforce. But from the perspective of workers, this strategy has meant stagnation in wages and benefits and a lower standard of living. Weil proposes ways to modernize regulatory policies so that employers can meet their obligations to workers while allowing companies to keep the beneficial aspects of this business strategy.

Download or read book Mastering Metrics written by Joshua D. Angrist and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-21 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and fun guide to the essential tools of econometric research Applied econometrics, known to aficionados as 'metrics, is the original data science. 'Metrics encompasses the statistical methods economists use to untangle cause and effect in human affairs. Through accessible discussion and with a dose of kung fu–themed humor, Mastering 'Metrics presents the essential tools of econometric research and demonstrates why econometrics is exciting and useful. The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five--random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences--are illustrated through well-crafted real-world examples (vetted for awesomeness by Kung Fu Panda's Jade Palace). Does health insurance make you healthier? Randomized experiments provide answers. Are expensive private colleges and selective public high schools better than more pedestrian institutions? Regression analysis and a regression discontinuity design reveal the surprising truth. When private banks teeter, and depositors take their money and run, should central banks step in to save them? Differences-in-differences analysis of a Depression-era banking crisis offers a response. Could arresting O. J. Simpson have saved his ex-wife's life? Instrumental variables methods instruct law enforcement authorities in how best to respond to domestic abuse. Wielding econometric tools with skill and confidence, Mastering 'Metrics uses data and statistics to illuminate the path from cause to effect. Shows why econometrics is important Explains econometric research through humorous and accessible discussion Outlines empirical methods central to modern econometric practice Works through interesting and relevant real-world examples