Download or read book Wages and Employment Across Skill Groups written by Bernd Fitzenberger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some time, it has been debated whether a lack of wage flexibility is at the roots of the high and persistent unemployment in West Germany. In the presence of a skill bias in labor demand, which increases the relative de mand for more highly skilled labor over time, there only seems to exist the choice between higher wage inequality or higher unemployment rates. This study scrutinizes whether and in what way this line of thought is consis tent with empirical findings for West Germany. The analysis ranges from extensive descriptive evidence on wage trends to the estimation of a struc tural model of wage bargaining. As the most important database, I use the IAB-Beschiiftigtenstichprobe from 1975 to 1990. This study was accepted as a Habilitation thesis by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Konstanz in October 1998. The only major change relates to appendix B on the block bootstrap procedure now summarizing the main aspects of the method. I am very grateful to my advisor Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Franz for his support, encouragement, and inspiration. From 1993 to 1997, he ran the Center for International Labor Economics at the University of Konstanz in such a way that it provided a fruitful environment for empirical research in labor economics. I am also indebted to Prof. Dr. Winfried Pohlmeier and to Prof. Dr. Gerd Ronning for undertaking the task to evaluate my Habilitation thesis.

Download or read book Generating Jobs written by Richard B. Freeman and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1998-02-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American economy is in danger of leaving its low-skilled workers behind. In the last two decades, the wages and employment levels of the least educated and experienced workers have fallen disastrously. Where willing workers once found ready employment at reasonable wages, our computerized, service-oriented economy demands workers who can read and write, master technology, deal with customers, and much else. Improved education and training will alleviate this problem in the long run, but educating the new workforce will take a substantial national investment over many years. In the meantime, we face increasingly acute questions about how to include low-skill workers in today's economy. Generating Jobs takes a hard look at these questions, and asks whether anything can be done to improve the lot of low-skilled workers by intervening in the labor market on their behalf. These micro demand-side policies seek to improve wages and employment levels—either by lowering the costs of hiring low-skilled workers through employer subsidies, or by raising wage levels, benefit levels, or hours of employment, or by providing employment via government jobs. Although these policies are not currently popular in the U.S., they have long been used in many countries. Generating Jobs provides a clear-eyed assessment of this history, and asks if any of these policies might be applicable to the current problems of low-skilled workers in the United States. The results are surprising. Several recently touted panaceas turn out to be costly and ineffective in the American labor market. Enterprise zones, for instance, are an expensive way of moving jobs into areas of high unemployment, costing as much as $60,000 per job. Similarly, job-sharing, which has had uneven success in Europe, turns out to be ill-suited to conditions in the U.S., where wages are relatively low and workers need to work long hours to maintain income. On the other hand, a number of older, less flashy policies turn out to have real, if modest, benefits. Wage subsidies have increased employment among qualifying workers, and public employment policies can increase the number of workers from targeted groups working during the program. While acknowledging that many solutions are counterproductive, this definitive review of active labor market policies shows that many programs can offer real help. More than any rhetoric, Generating Jobs is the best guide to future action and a serious response to those who claim that nothing can be done.

Download or read book The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.

Download or read book Working and Poor written by Rebecca M. Blank and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last three decades, large-scale economic developments, such as technological change, the decline in unionization, and changing skill requirements, have exacted their biggest toll on low-wage workers. These workers often possess few marketable skills and few resources with which to support themselves during periods of economic transition. In Working and Poor, a distinguished group of economists and policy experts, headlined by editors Rebecca Blank, Sheldon Danziger, and Robert Schoeni, examine how economic and policy changes over the last twenty-five years have affected the well-being of low-wage workers and their families. Working and Poor examines every facet of the economic well-being of less-skilled workers, from employment and earnings opportunities to consumption behavior and social assistance policies. Rebecca Blank and Heidi Schierholz document the different trends in work and wages among less-skilled women and men. Between 1979 and 2003, labor force participation rose rapidly for these women, along with more modest increases in wages, while among the men both employment and wages fell. David Card and John DiNardo review the evidence on how technological changes have affected less-skilled workers and conclude that the effect has been smaller than many observers claim. Philip Levine examines the effectiveness of the Unemployment Insurance program during recessions. He finds that the program's eligibility rules, which deny benefits to workers who have not met minimum earnings requirements, exclude the very people who require help most and should be adjusted to provide for those with the highest need. On the other hand, Therese J. McGuire and David F. Merriman show that government help remains a valuable source of support during economic downturns. They find that during the most recent recession in 2001, when state budgets were stretched thin, legislatures resisted political pressure to cut spending for the poor. Working and Poor provides a valuable analysis of the role that public policy changes can play in improving the plight of the working poor. A comprehensive analysis of trends over the last twenty-five years, this book provides an invaluable reference for the public discussion of work and poverty in America. A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy

Download or read book Wages and Employment written by Arijit Mukherjee and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is little doubt that significant income inequality persists across as well as within countries, and that wage differential exists between male and female workers across the industries and within establishments. The differences in earnings not only affect the well-being of the current generation but also have major long-term impacts on health, education and skill formation of future generations. Although an important goal of a country is to improve the well-being of their workers, the ways to achieve this goal may differ. This book presents recent research on labor economics, addressing issues such as gender wage gap, regional wage disparity, inter-and intra-industry wage inequality, the wage effects of immigration and the effects of wage negotiations in organizations. There are three parts in this book. Part A contains five chapters addressing the issue of gender wage gap. Part B also contains five chapters on regional studies to show the effects on wage, skill formation and the correlation between public and private sector employments. Part C focuses on wage negotiations in organizations. The book provides several important insights into many contemporary labor market issues.

Download or read book Wage Inequality and Industrial Change written by Chinhui Juhn and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using data from the 1940-1980 Decennial Census and the 1988-1992 March Current Population Surveys, this paper examines the impact of industrial change on male wage inequality over a period of five decades (1940-1990). Alternative measures of skill such as the wage percentile, education and occupation indicate that wage inequality between more and less skilled male workers fell substantially during the 1940s and increased most dramatically during the 1980s. Examination of industrial change over this longer time period shows that the demand for the most highly educated and skilled male workers relative to the least skilled male workers increased no faster during the 1970s and the 1980s than during the earlier decades. In contrast, the demand for men in the middle skill categories (such as those in basic manufacturing) expanded during the 1940s and the 1950s and contracted severely during the 1970s and 1980s. This suggests that the growth of jobs in the middle skill categories may be closely related to overall wage inequality. Cross sectional regressions based on state level data also show some empirical support for the hypothesis that a decline in demand for medium skilled groups increases overall wage inequality.

Download or read book Technological Change Firm Heterogeneity and Wage Inequality written by Guido Matias Cortes and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We argue that skill-biased technological change not only affects wage gaps between skill groups, but also increases wage inequality within skill groups, across workers in different workplaces. Building on a heterogeneous firm framework with labor market frictions, we show that an industry-wide skill-biased technological change shock will increase between-firm wage inequality within the industry through four main channels: changes in the skill wage premium (as in traditional models of technological change); increased employment concentration in more productive firms; increased wage dispersion between firms for workers of the same skill type; and increased dispersion in the skill mix that firms employ, due to more sorting of skilled workers to more productive firms. Using rich administrative matched employer-employee data from Germany, we provide empirical evidence of establishment-level patterns that are in line with the predictions of the model. We further document that industries with more technological adoption exhibit particularly pronounced patterns along the dimensions highlighted by the model.

Download or read book Wage Inequality in Latin America written by Julián Messina and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused the decline in wage inequality of the 2000s in Latin America? Looking to the future, will the current economic slowdown be regressive? Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant literature and providing new evidence on what we know from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. The answer to the fi rst question can be broken down into several parts, although the bottom line is that the changes in wage inequality resulted from a combination of three forces: (a) education expansion and its eff ect on falling returns to skill (the supply-side story); (b) shifts in aggregate domestic demand; and (c) exchange rate appreciation from the commodity boom and the associated shift to the nontradable sector that changed interfi rm wage diff erences. Other forces had a non-negligible but secondary role in some countries, while they were not present in others. These include the rapid increase of the minimum wage and a rapid trend toward formalization of employment, which played a supporting role but only during the boom. Understanding the forces behind recent trends also helps to shed light on the second question. The analysis in this volume suggests that the economic slowdown is putting the brakes on the reduction of inequality in Latin America and will likely continue to do so—but it might not actually reverse the region’s movement toward less wage inequality.

Download or read book Efficient Bargaining and the Skill Structure of Wages and Employment written by Winfried Pohlmeier and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper presents structural estimates for a bargaining model which nests the right-to-manage, the efficient wage bargaining, the seniority and the standard neoclassical labor demand model as special cases. In contrast to most existing models, our approach accounts for heterogeneous skill groups which differ in terms of productivity and representation in the bargaining process through union preferences. The paper introduces the concept of quot;virtualquot; firms which allows us to (i) test the efficient contract model against models implying that firms operate on the labor demand curve and to (i) overcome a potential misspecification of firms' output markets. Estimates of structural parameters are obtained from a novel cross-section of German firms of the business related service sector which includes information on skill-specific wage rates at the firm level. Central results of this paper are that unions do care about both wages and employment in the bargaining process and that firms operate on the contract curve. The bargaining power of unions in East Germany turns out to be much weaker than in West Germany.

Download or read book The Unbearable Stability of the German Wage Structure written by Eswar Prasad and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2000 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this paper is to document the evolution of the German wage structure over the period 1984-97. The paper also investigates the roles of various factors that could have influenced patterns of changes in the wage structure. While a documentation of the evolution of the wage structure in Germany is interesting in its own right, the analysis in this paper, by facilitating comparisons with changes in the wage structures of other industrial countries, could potentially provide important clues to understanding the poor functioning of the German labor market in recent years. In particular, the analysis sheds light on the reasons behind and possible solutions for a particularly troubling problem, the high and rising rate of nonemployment among low-skilled workers.

Download or read book Labor Markets Employment Policy And Job Creation written by Lewis C. Solmon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clear, accessible volume provides a comprehensive overview of the ongoing debate over the determining factors of and key influences on employment growth and labor market training, education, and related policies in the United States. Drawing on the work of distinguished labor economists, the chapters tackle questions posed by job and skill demands in the "new high-tech economy" and explore sources of employment growth; productivity growth and its implications for future employment; government mandates, labor costs, and employment; and labor force demographics, income inequality, and returns to human capital. These topics are central concerns for government, which must judge every prospective policy proposal by its effects on employment growth. Washington keeps at least one eye firmly on the jobs picture, and public officials at every level are constantly aware of the issues surrounding American job security. The jobs issue reaches beyond this focus on the unemployment rate and on total employment, including the rate at which employment is seen as growing, the growth of real wages, the security of employment, returns to human capital, uncertainty about the education and training best suited for a world of rapidly changing economic conditions, and the distribution of the gains from growth across economic classes and population groups.

Download or read book Wages and Employment written by Arijit Mukherjee and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is little doubt that significant income inequality persists across as well as within countries, and that wage differential exists between male and female workers across the industries and within establishments. The differences in earnings not only affect the well-being of the current generation but also have major long-term impacts on health, education and skill formation of future generations. Although an important goal of a country is to improve the well-being of their workers, the ways to achieve this goal may differ. This book presents recent research on labour economics, addressing issues such as gender wage gap, regional wage disparity, inter-and intra-industry wage inequality, the wage effects of immigration and the effects of wage negotiations in organisations. There are three parts in this book. Part A contains five chapters addressing the issue of gender wage gap. Part B also contains five chapters on regional studies to show the effects on wage, skill formation and the correlation between public and private sector employment. Part C focuses on wage negotiations in organisations. The book provides several important insights into many contemporary labour market issues.

Download or read book Observations and Conjectures on the U S Employment Miracle written by Alan B. Krueger and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper has three goals; first, to place U.S. job growth in international perspective by exploring cross-country differences in employment and population growth. This section finds that the U.S. has managed to absorb added workers -- especially female workers -- into employment at a greater rate than most countries. The leading explanation for this phenomenon is that the U.S. labor market has flexible wages and employment practices, whereas European labor markets are rigid. The second goal of the paper is to evaluate the labor market rigidities hypothesis. Although greater wage flexibility probably contributes to the U.S.'s comparative success in creating jobs for its population, the slow growth in employment in many European countries appears too uniform across skill groups to result from relative wage inflexibility alone. Furthermore, a great deal of labor market adjustment seems to take place at a constant real wage in the U.S. This leads to the third goal: to speculate on other explanations why the U.S. has managed to successfully absorb so many new entrants to the labor market. We conjecture that product market constraints contribute to the slow growth of employment in many countries

Download or read book Job Polarization and the Declining Fortunes of the Young Evidence from the United Kingdom written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper uses a life-cycle framework to document new stylized facts about the nexus between job polarization and earnings inequality. Using quarterly labor force data for the UK over the period 2000-2018, we find clear life-cycle profiles in the probability of being employed within each occupation type and wages earned therein. Cohort plots and econometric analysis suggest that labor market outcomes and prospects have gradually worsened for the young. These adverse trends are particularly significant for low-skill women: estimated cohort effects point to a fall in wages within each occupation as well as a lower propensity of being employed in abstract-task occupations. We also find evidence of general occupational downgrading in the UK, with more educated workers taking up fewer high-skill occupations than they did in the past. Our analysis informs the policy debate over appropriate measures needed to reduce skill mismatches and alleviate labor market transitions.

Download or read book The Race between Education and Technology written by Claudia Goldin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century. The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

Download or read book Differences and Changes in Wage Structures written by Richard B. Freeman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past two decades, wages of skilled workers in the United States rose while those of unskilled workers fell; less-educated young men in particular have suffered unprecedented losses in real earnings. These twelve original essays explore whether this trend is unique to the United States or is part of a general growth in inequality in advanced countries. Focusing on labor market institutions and the supply and demand forces that affect wages, the papers compare patterns of earnings inequality and pay differentials in the United States, Australia, Korea, Japan, Western Europe, and the changing economies of Eastern Europe. Cross-country studies examine issues such as managerial compensation, gender differences in earnings, and the relationship of pay to regional unemployment. From this rich store of data, the contributors attribute changes in relative wages and unemployment among countries both to differences in labor market institutions and training and education systems, and to long-term shifts in supply and demand for skilled workers. These shifts are driven in part by skill-biased technological change and the growing internationalization of advanced industrial economies.

Download or read book What s Up with U S Wage Growth and Job Mobility written by Mr.Stephan Danninger and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the global financial crisis, US wage growth has been sluggish. Drawing on individual earnings data from the 2000–15 Current Population Survey, I find that the drawn-out cyclical labor market repair—likely owing to low entry wages of new workers—slowed down real wage growth. There are, however, also signs of structural changes in the labor market affecting wages: for full-time, full-employed workers, the Wage-Phillips curve—the empirical relationship between wage growth and the unemployment rate—has become horizontal after 2008. Similarly, job-turnover rates have continued to decline. Job-to-job transitions—associated with higher wage growth—have slowed across all skill and age groups and beyond what local labor market conditions would imply. This raises concerns about the allocative ability of the labor market to adjust to changing economic conditions.