Download or read book The Minimum Level of Unemployment and Public Policy written by Frank Cook Pierson and published by Kalamazoo, Mich. : W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. This book was released on 1980 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the role of the federal government in reducing persistent joblessness that prevails at relatively high levels even during periods of high employment or prosperity ("structural unemployment"). While the problem of cyclincal joblessness dominates public policy discussion at the present time, structural unemployment is being increasingly recognized as one of the nation's most serious domestic problems. Persistent high levels of "prosperity" or structural unemployment are attributable to seemingly intractable structural imbalances within the economy. The key policy problem centers on the use of aggregative and structural policies to reduce total unemployment to the 4-5 percent range and to bring the hard-to-employ into the economic mainstream without inducing increased inflation. The study concludes that, while differing in degree, both cyclical and structural unemployment should be addressed in periods of high as in periods of low employment. The most critical issue to resolve is how to balance short-run and long-run goals for the economy in the selection of public policy alternatives. (KC)

Download or read book How the Government Measures Unemployment written by and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statistical method used by the USA labour administration for the measurement of unemployment.

Download or read book Unemployment Policy written by Dennis J. Snower and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-15 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is substantial disagreement among policy-makers about how governments should respond to the problem of high unemployment. Thus far there has been little, if any, systematic attempt to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the main unemployment policies available to governments in market economies. Individual policy recommendations are usually made in isolation from one another. This book attempts to provide a balanced assessment of the various policy options, including the following: demand management versus supply-side policy, subsidizing employment and training, restructuring labour market regulations, and reforming the welfare state. The book also examines the political economy of unemployment policy and the effect of this policy on productivity growth.

Download or read book Employment Effects of Minimum Wage Rates written by John M. Peterson and published by American Enterprise Institute Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Minimum Wages written by E. G. West and published by Economic Council of Canada and the Institute for Research on Public Policy. This book was released on 1980 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph on minimum wages, with special reference to Canada - covers trends since 1965 concerning local level wage structure and wage determination, and deals with economic theory issues regarding employment, unemployment, income distribution and prices, effectiveness as an anti-poverty and income redistribution tool, and its preference to negative income tax. Bibliography pp. 111 to 119 and statistical tables.

Download or read book Evidence on the Impact of Public Policy on Labor Market Transitions and Unemployment written by Paul Louis Schumann and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Securing the Right to Employment written by Philip Harvey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basing his proposal on plans developed by New Deal social welfare administrators, Harvey analyzes the feasibility and desirability of using public sector job creation to secure a right to employment. He shows that such a policy would provide more effective relief from the problems of poverty and unemployment than do existing arrangements while permitting a major expansion in the production of public goods and services without increasing tax burdens. The economic side-effects and administrative problems associated with the policy are carefully explored and found manageable. Finally, the book concludes with an assessment of the political interests that stand in the way of policy initiatives like the one proposed. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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 Labor Markets and Social Security written by John T. Addison and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John T. Addison and Paul J. J. Welfens Because inflation seems moribund in OECD countries, stubborn unemployment became the top policy priority of the 1990s. Unemployment has increased in many countries, reaching critical levels for unskilled and young workers in most continental EU countries. Europe's employment performance has continued to lag that in North America. The U. S. in particular achieved a remarkable combination of low inflation and full employment in the late 1990s, at a time when the EU suf fered from record unemployment rates, even if inflation was remarkably low. Since the 1980s, the consensus view among economists is that structural unem ployment plays a much more important role than cyc1ical unemployment in Europe, but that labour costs (wage costs plus nonwage costs) are also part of Europe's labour market problem. Most EU countries rely on a pay-as-you-go pub lic pension system. Contribution rates gradually increased in the 1980s and 1990s, when the share of young workers in overall employment was dec1ining and life expectancy increasing. Rising nonwage costs from the pension system are but one important feature of labour markets in Europe. Given the remarkable dynamics of labour markets, new entry into the labour force, labour turnover, and changes in employment characteristics, one has to also search for other factors behind sus tained unemployment. High unemployment is critical for EU countries, where one can point to rela tively few positive developments after 1975. The U. K.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Public Economics written by Attila S. Lindner and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing inequality and stagnating wages at the bottom of the earning distribution are the most striking social phenomena of the last 30 years. Moreover, the 2009 Great Recession surged unemployment and created unprecedented tension between rich and poor in most developed countries. These circumstances renewed the interest of politicians, policy makers, and economists toward public policies aimed at alleviating inequality. In this thesis, I empirically assess the effectiveness of two prominent public policies in helping the poor: the minimum wage and unemployment insurance. Minimum wage is the most radical policy tool for elevating the wages of the bottom economic bracket. However, despite several decades of microeconometric evidence for increases, the minimum wage remains a highly controversial policy. The first two chapters of this dissertation are devoted to assessing the economic effects of an unusually large and persistent increase in the minimum wage instituted in Hungary in 2001. The minimum wage to the median wage increased from the current U.S. level (35%) to the level of 55%, which is equivalent with an (~60%) increase in the minimum wage in real terms. In the first chapter, my co-author Péter Harasztosi and I study the employment effects of this unique minimum wage reform. We propose a new approach to estimating the employment effects of a minimum wage increase that exploits information on the distribution of wages before and after the policy change. We infer the number of jobs destroyed by comparing the number of pre-reform jobs below the new minimum wage to the excess number of jobs paying at (and above) the new minimum wage. The evolution of the earning distribution in Hungary shows that this ratio is close to one, suggesting that most firms responded to the reform by raising wages instead of destroying jobs. We confirm this conclusion using comparisons across subgroups of workers with larger and smaller fractions of worker affected by the minimum wage change. Our group-level estimates, again, imply that the higher minimum wage had, at most, a small negative effect on employment, and with the standard errors we can rule out larger than -0.3 employment elasticities with respect to wages. In the second chapter, my co-author Péter Harasztosi and I study the economic incidence of the minimum wage polices. If minimum wage increase has a small negative effect on employment and a large effect on wages, the total remunerations allocated to low-wage workers must increase. Using a large panel of firms and the Hungarian minimum wage increase, we show that this is indeed the case: firms highly exposed to the minimum wage experienced a large increase in their total labor cost. However, this raises a question: who pays for this cost increase? We show that firms' profits are not affected in response to the minimum wage, suggesting that firm-owners do not bear the incidence of the minimum wage increase. Instead, we document that total revenue of low-paying employers increased considerably, indicating that firms passed the effect of the minimum wage to consumers. Consistent with that explanation, we show that firms facing more elastic output demand, and so less ability to pass-through the effect of the minimum wage, experienced larger employment losses and lower increase in their total labor cost. In the third chapter, Stefanno DellaVigna, Balázs Reizer, Johannes Schmieder and I scrutinize the job search behavior of the unemployed. We propose a model of job search with reference-dependent preferences, where the reference point is given by recent income. Newly unemployed individuals are faced with a loss because their recent past income is higher than the unemployment benefit they receive, and so they search hard. However, over time they get used to lower income, and thus search less. They search harder, again, in anticipation of a benefit cut, only to ultimately get used to the change. The model fits the typical shape of the exit from unemployment, including the spike at the UI exhaustion point. The model also makes unique predictions for the response of benefit changes. Second, we provide evidence using a reform in the unemployment system in Hungary. Most unemployment insurance programs have constant replacement rate for a fixed period, typically followed by lower benefits under unemployment assistance. In November 2005, Hungary switched from this standard single-step UI system to a two-step system, with unchanged overall generosity. We show that the system generated increased hazard rates in anticipation of, and especially following, benefit cuts in ways the standard model has a hard time fitting, even when allowing for unobserved heterogeneity. We structurally estimate the model and estimate a weight on gain-loss utility comparable to the weight of the standard utility term, and a speed of adjustment of the reference point of eight months. The results suggest that a revenue-neutral shift to multiple-step UI systems can speed exit from unemployment.

Download or read book Key Policies for Addressing the Social Determinants of Health and Health Inequities written by Centers of Disease Control and published by World Health Organization. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evidence indicates that actions within four main themes (early child development fair employment and decent work social protection and the living environment) are likely to have the greatest impact on the social determinants of health and health inequities. A systematic search and analysis of recommendations and policy guidelines from intergovernmental organizations and international bodies identified practical policy options for action on social determinants within these four themes. Policy options focused on early childhood education and care; child poverty; investment strategies for an inclusive economy; active labour market programmes; working conditions; social cash transfers; affordable housing; and planning and regulatory mechanisms to improve air quality and mitigate climate change. Applying combinations of these policy options alongside effective governance for health equity should enable WHO European Region Member States to reduce health inequities and synergize efforts to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Download or read book Activating the Unemployed written by Neil Gilbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last decade has witnessed a conspicuous alteration in policies protecting unemployed people in modern welfare states. Social policies are increasingly designed to encourage economic independence. Policy makers have introduced a wide range of reforms linking disability, unemployment, and welfare programs cash benefits to work-oriented measures.Welfare policies are being framed by a new emphasis on recipients' obligations, emphasizing that the receipt of benefits creates a responsibility to take action towards becoming self-reliant. The objective is to minimize the duration of dependence or improve the well-being of family or community. Activating the Unemployed addresses this growing interest in work-oriented measures. This represents a shift in the dominant discourse on social welfare from focus on the citizen's rights to social benefits to emphasis on their responsibilities to work and lead an active life. In this volume, a distinguished array of international contributors provide cross-cultural perspectives to analyze recent diverse policy initiatives to activate the unemployed in nine countries-Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each provides a systematic account of the background, design, implementation, and results of employment-oriented measures. Collectively they permit comparison of organized responses to common problems in the areas of public assistance (welfare), unemployment, and disability, among others. Further chapters seek to broaden perspectives on policy options, the issues raised, and lessons learned in the course of activating the unemployed. This thorough and insightful account addresses significant contemporary issues and concerns about welfare, social security, and unemployment. It will aid policy makers, professionals, and scholars in assessing current trends in welfare in various countries throughout the world.

Download or read book Ending Unemployment written by Melvin R. Levin and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Government s Policy for Jobs written by S. J. Nickell and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Labour Economics And Public Policy Managing The Labour Markets For Competitiveness written by Soon Beng Chew and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book serves as a textbook on labour economics and public policy in labour markets.It also shows how Singapore has been successful in establishing a world class labour market. One attribute of such a labour market is the high purchasing power of wages for the average worker for essentials such as housing, healthcare, quality education for children and retirement consumption, which motivates Singaporeans to work hard. The second attribute is a macro-focused labour union that works closely with the government, and is able to prevent excessive wage increase.

Download or read book Designing Labor Market Institutions in Emerging and Developing Economies written by Mr.Romain A Duval and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses theoretical aspects and evidences related to designing labor market institutions in emerging market and developing economies. This note reviews the state of theory and evidence on the design of labor market institutions in a developing economy context and then reviews its consistency with actual labor market advice in a selected set of emerging and developing economies. The focus is mainly on three broad sets of institutions that matter for both workers’ protection and labor market efficiency: employment protection, unemployment insurance and social assistance, minimum wages and collective bargaining. Text mining techniques are used to identify IMF recommendations in these areas in Article IV Reports for 30 emerging and frontier economies over 2005–2016. This note has provided a critical review of the literature on the design of labor market institutions in emerging and developing market economies, and benchmarked the advice featured in IMF recommendations for 30 emerging market and frontier economies against the tentative conclusions from the literature.

Download or read book Policies Towards Full Employment written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2000-04-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the proceedings of a conference on labour markets. It advances thinking on new policy measures, such as active labour market policies and measures to "make work pay".