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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Bjuggren, Carl Magnus (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)); Skedinger, Per (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)) |
| Abstract: | We investigate the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on the propensity to hire workers from unemployment and active labor market programs (ALMPs), utilizing a reform that decreased dismissal costs for small firms only. Using administrative data from Sweden, we find that less stringent EPL increased the share of workers hired from unemployment and some ALMPs. Our results suggest that there was less screening of new hires after the reform, and that liberalization of EPL mitigates the stigma associated with unemployment and participation in ALMPs. |
| Keywords: | Employment protection; Active labor market programs; Unemployment |
| JEL: | H80 J60 J64 K31 |
| Date: | 2018–12–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1255&r=all |
| By: | Jaume, David (Bank of Mexico); Willén, Alexander (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | Temporary school closures (TSC) represent a major challenge to policymakers across the globe due to their potential impact on instructional time and student achievement. A neglected but equally important question relates to how such closures affect the labor market behavior of parents. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of temporary school closures on parental labor market behavior, exploiting the prevalence of primary school teacher strikes across time and provinces in Argentina. We find clear evidence that temporary school closures negatively impact the labor market participation of mothers, in particular lower-skilled mothers less attached to the labor force and mothers in dual-income households who face a lower opportunity cost of dropping out of the labor force. This effect translates into a statistically significant and economically meaningful reduction in labor earnings: the average mother whose child is exposed to ten days of TSCs suffers a decline in monthly labor earnings equivalent to 2.92% of the mean. While we do not find any effects among fathers in general, fathers with lower predicted earnings than their spouses also experience negative labor market effects. This suggests that the parental response to TSCs depend, at least in part, on the relative income of each parent. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggest that the aggregate impact of TSCs on annual parental earnings is more than $113 million, and that the average mother would be willing to forego 1.6 months of labor earnings in order to ensure that there are no TSCs while her child is in primary school. |
| Keywords: | School Disruptions; Child Care; Parents; Education; Labor Market; Gender Inequality |
| JEL: | I20 J16 J24 J45 J52 |
| Date: | 2018–12–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2018_030&r=all |
| By: | Diether W. Beuermann (Inter-American Development Bank); C. Kirabo Jackson (Northwestern University); Laia Navarro-Sola (Northwestern University); Francisco Pardo (Inter-American Development Bank) |
| Abstract: | Is a school’s impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on high-stakes tests, longer-run outcomes, or both? To answer the first question, we apply quasi-experimental methods to data from Trinidad and Tobago and estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools’ impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on low-stakes tests, dropout, crime, teen motherhood, and formal labor market participation. To answer the second question, we link estimated school impacts to parents’ ranked lists of schools and employ discrete choice models to estimate parental preferences. Parents value schools that causally improve high- stakes test scores conditional on average outcomes, proximity, and peer quality. Consistent with parents valuing the multidimensional output of schools, parents of high-achieving girls prefer schools that increase formal labor market participation, and parents of high-achieving boys prefer schools that reduce crime. |
| Keywords: | test scores, high stakes examinations, Trinidad and Tobago, parental investments |
| JEL: | I20 J00 |
| Date: | 2018–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2018-095&r=all |
| By: | Öner, Özge (University of Cambridge); Klaesson, Johan (Jönköping University) |
| Abstract: | This article analyses the relationship between the size and the quality of ethnic enclaves on immigrants’ labour market integration. Using exogenously defined grid cells to delineate neighbourhoods we find robust empirical evidence that the employment rate of the respective immigrant group in the vicinity (as a measure of enclave quality) facilitates labour market integration of new immigrants. The influence of the overall employment rate and the share of co-nationals in the neighbourhood tend to be positive, but less robust. We thus conclude that the quality is more important than the size of the ethnic enclave in helping new immigrants finding jobs. |
| Keywords: | Refugee immigrants; Ethnic enclave quality; Labor market outcomes |
| JEL: | F22 J15 J60 R23 |
| Date: | 2018–12–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1256&r=all |
| By: | Peter Kuhn; Kailing Shen; Shuo Zhang |
| Abstract: | We document how explicit employer requests for applicants of a particular gender enter the recruitment process on a Chinese job board. We find that 95 percent of callbacks to gendered jobs are of the requested gender; worker self-selection (“compliance” with employers’ requests) and employer callback decisions from applicant pools (“enforcement”) both contribute to this association, with compliance playing the larger role. Explicit gender requests account for over half of the gender segregation and gender wage gap observed on the board. Ad-level regressions with job title and firm fixed effects suggest that employers’ explicit gender requests have causal effects on the gender mix of applications received, especially when the employer’s likely gender preference is hard to infer from other contents of the ad. Application-level regressions with job title and worker fixed effects show that both men and women experience a callback penalty when applying to a gender-mismatched job; this penalty is significantly greater for women (44 percent) than men (26 percent). |
| JEL: | J16 J63 J71 |
| Date: | 2018–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25365&r=all |
| By: | Lawrence F. Katz; Alan B. Krueger |
| Abstract: | This paper describes and tries to reconcile trends in alternative work arrangements in the United States using data from the Contingent Worker Survey supplements to the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 1995 to 2017, the 2015 RAND-Princeton Contingent Work Survey (CWS), and administrative tax data from the Internal Revenue Service for 2000 to 2016. We conclude that there likely has been a modest upward trend in the share of the U.S. workforce in alternative work arrangements during the 2000s based on the cyclically-adjusted comparisons of the CPS CWS’s, measures using self-respondents in the CPS CWS, and measures of self-employment and 1099 workers from administrative tax data. We also present evidence from Amazon Mechanical Turk that suggests that the basic monthly CPS question on multiple job holding misses many instances of multiple job holding |
| JEL: | J21 J81 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25425&r=all |
| By: | Haoran He; David Neumark; Qian Weng |
| Abstract: | We explore compensating differentials for job flexibility, using a field experiment conducted on a Chinese job board. Our job ads differ randomly regarding when one works (time flexibility) and where one works (place flexibility). We find strong evidence that workers value job flexibility – especially regarding place of work. Application rates are higher to flexible jobs, conditional on the salary offered. Additional survey evidence indicates that workers are willing to take lower pay for more flexible jobs. Non-experimental job board data do not indicate that workers value job flexibility, reinforcing the difficulty of estimating compensating differentials from observational data. |
| JEL: | J01 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25423&r=all |
| By: | Leyva Gustavo; Urrutia Carlos |
| Abstract: | We analyze the joint impact of employment protection and informality on macroeconomic volatility and the propagation of shocks in emerging economies. For this, we propose a small open economy business cycle model with frictional labor markets, labor regulation, and an informal sector, modeled as self-employment. The model is calibrated to the Mexican economy, in particular to business cycle moments for employment and informality obtained from our own calculations with the ENOE survey for the period 2005-2016. We show that international interest rate shocks, which affect specifically job creation in the formal sector, are key to obtain a counter-cyclical informality rate. In our model both the economy without an informal sector and the economy with informality but a lower burden of labor regulation feature higher volatility in employment but smaller fluctuations in TFP and output. |
| Keywords: | informality;business cycle;small open economy;job creation;employment protection;international interest rate shocks |
| JEL: | E24 E32 F44 J65 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdm:wpaper:2018-19&r=all |
| By: | Tania Babina; Sabrina T. Howell |
| Abstract: | This paper documents that corporate R&D investment increases employee departures to entrepreneurship. We use U.S. Census data, and instrument for R&D with its tax credit-induced cost. The ideas or skills that spill into startups seem to benefit from focused, high-powered incentives; for example, R&D-induced startups are much more likely to receive venture capital. The effect also seems to reflect ideas or skills that are poor complements to the firm’s assets. As human capital is inalienable and portable, and startups are crucial to economic growth, R&D-induced labor reallocation to startups appears to be a novel channel of R&D spillovers. |
| JEL: | G3 O3 |
| Date: | 2018–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25360&r=all |
| By: | Sara Burron; Gianna Giannelli |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the relationship between child labor and status in employment in adulthood. We aim to contribute to the literature that focuses on the obstacles to the formation early in life of the skills that allow people to avoid vulnerable employment and poverty. We focus on gender differences since the effects of child labor may differ greatly between boys and girls. Using the panel data survey for the Kagera region of Tanzania, we select children who were 7 to 15 years old in the 1990s and follow up with them in the first decade of the 2000s to study the consequences of child labor on their position in adult employment. We exploit the longitudinal structure of data to estimate linear probability models with fixed effects. We find that child labor is associated with vulnerable employment in adulthood and that this result is driven by the girls' sample. The analysis shows that negative adult employment effects arise when children who are younger than 11-12 work more than ten to twenty hours per week. Work on the household farm seems to have the largest negative effects for girls: the threshold lowers to 6 hours, and the probability of escaping from vulnerable employment decreases by approximately 20 to 40 percentage points for child laborers under 10. |
| Keywords: | child labor; vulnerable employment; unpaid work; women's employment in developing countries; Kagera region of Tanzania |
| JEL: | J13 J21 J24 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:frz:wpaper:wp2018_28.rdf&r=all |
| By: | Peter Ganong; Pascal J. Noel |
| Abstract: | Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We use the high-frequency response to a predictable income decline as a new test to distinguish between alternative consumption models. The sensitivity of spending to income we document is inconsistent with rational models of liquidity-constrained households, but is consistent with behavioral models with present-biased or myopic households. Depressed spending after exhaustion also implies that the consumption-smoothing gains from extending UI benefits are four times larger than from raising UI benefit levels. |
| JEL: | E21 E24 J65 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25417&r=all |
| By: | Lechner, Michael |
| Abstract: | Uncovering the heterogeneity of causal effects of policies and business decisions at various levels of granularity provides substantial value to decision makers. This paper develops new estimation and inference procedures for multiple treatment models in a selection-on-observables framework by modifying the Causal Forest approach suggested by Wager and Athey (2018). The new estimators have desirable theoretical and computational properties for various aggregation levels of the causal effects. An Empirical Monte Carlo study shows that they may outperform previously suggested estimators. Inference tends to be accurate for effects relating to larger groups and conservative for effects relating to fine levels of granularity. An application to the evaluation of an active labour market programme shows the value of the new methods for applied research. |
| Keywords: | Causal machine learning, statistical learning, average treatment effects, conditional average treatment effects, multiple treatments, selection-on-observable, causal forests |
| JEL: | C21 J68 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usg:econwp:2019:01&r=all |