Job Amenities Research Articles

How Much Are Government Jobs in Developing Countries Worth?

Abstract Government jobs in developing countries are valuable not just because they pay relatively higher wages, but also because they provide many valuable amenities. How does the value of these amenities compare with the nominal wage itself? The observed search behavior of candidates preparing for competitive exams for government jobs is used to infer a lower bound on the total value of a government job, including amenities. Based on a sample of 147 candidates preparing for civil service exams in Pune, India, the amenity value of a government job is estimated to comprise at least two-thirds of total compensation. The high amenity value is not driven by misinformed beliefs about the nominal wage, nor by a high value placed on the process of studying itself. Insights from focus group discussions help explain which government job amenities are most valued in this setting.

Is Workplace Temperature a Valuable Job Amenity? Implications for Climate Change

Is Workplace Temperature a Valuable Job Amenity? Implications for Climate Change

Working from home as an economic and social change: A review

WFH (working from home) has been crucial to the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic and is expected to continue to grow in importance even after the pandemic. WFH is becoming more popular among employees due to benefits such as flexible work schedules and no or less frequent commuting. Given the prevalence of WFH, a large literature has studied various aspects of WFH, and this paper reviews the literature. As WFH is a work mode, the literature has mainly considered labor-economics related issues, including the feasibility of WFH across jobs and the effects of WFH on workers’ productivity and well-being. However, this paper views WFH as an economic and social change not just as a new work mode, as WFH has far-reaching effects on our society and economy. As such, this paper emphasizes the topics that have received relatively less attention such as WFH as a job amenity and the effects of WFH on the environment.

Public- and private-sector jobs: a cross-country perspective

Abstract This article reassesses the conventional wisdom that public-sector jobs have worse pay but better amenities than equivalent private-sector jobs, using data from 22 European countries and the USA. Earnings gaps are shown to be heterogeneous across countries—public sector work carries a premium in Europe but a penalty in the USA. However, whereas European public-sector workers report better job amenities—better job security and work–life balance—than their private-sector counterparts, there are no public–private amenity differentials for US workers. Public-sector work also has fewer pay-for-performance schemes. Finally, the public sector does not seem to ensure a fairer work environment, compared to the private sector, in terms of workplace discrimination and harassment. These stylized facts inform the external validity of extrapolating individual case studies to different contexts.

Compensating Wage Differentials in Labor Markets: Empirical Challenges and Applications

The model of compensating wage differentials is among the cornerstone models of equilibrium wage determination in labor economics. However, empirical estimates of compensating differentials have faced persistent credibility challenges. This article summarizes the Rosen model of compensating differentials and chronicles the advances, setbacks, and lessons learned from empirical studies. The progression from cross-sectional to panel models alleviated biases caused by unobserved human capital but yielded new insights into the importance of other biases, including those caused by labor market frictions and endogenous job mobility. I discuss recent approaches that use matched employer-employee data and quasi-random variation in job amenities to address some of these challenges. I then present two examples of applications of compensating differentials: the evaluation public health and safety policies that rely on the value of statistical life, and the measurement and interpretation of earnings inequality.

Sources of Wage Growth

This paper investigates the sources of wage growth over the life cycle, determined by sectoral and firm mobility, unobserved ability, the accumulation of cognitive-abstract or routine-manual skills, and whether workers enroll in vocational training at the start of their career. Our analysis uses longitudinal administrative data over three decades and shows that routine-manual skills drive early wage growth, while cognitive-abstract skills become more important later. Moreover, job amenities are an important determinant of mobility decisions. Vocational training has long-term effects on career outcomes through various channels and generates returns for both the individual and society.

Immigration and work schedules: Theory and evidence

We develop a theoretical framework to analyze the effects of immigration on native job amenities, focusing on work schedules. Immigrants have a comparative advantage in production at, and lower disamenity cost for nighttime work, which leads them to disproportionately choose nighttime employment. Because day and night tasks are imperfect substitutes, the relative price of day tasks increases as their supply becomes relatively more scarce. We provide empirical support for our theory. Native workers in local labor markets that experienced higher rates of immigration are more likely to work day shifts and receive a lower compensating differential for nighttime work.

Where have all the workers gone? Recalls, retirements, and reallocation in the COVID recovery

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. economy suddenly and swiftly lost 20 million jobs. Over the next two years, the economy has been on the recovery path. We assess the labor market two years into the COVID crisis. We show that early employment dynamics were almost entirely driven by temporary layoffs and later recalls. Taking these into account, we show that the labor market remained surprisingly tight throughout the crisis, despite the dramatic job losses. By spring 2022, the labor market had largely recovered and was characterized by extremely tight markets and a slightly depressed employment-to-population ratio driven largely by retirements. Finally, we see surprisingly little evidence of excess reallocation, despite predictions that COVID would dramatically and permanently change the way we live and work. We do see that employment has reallocated somewhat away from low-skilled service jobs, and, in light of the job vacancy patterns, conclude that worker preferences or changes in job amenities are driving this shift. In addition, the retirements paved the way for movements up the job ladder, making low-skilled customer-facing jobs even less desirable.

Paying for Work-Family Balance: Assessing the Role of Family-Friendly Job Amenities in Occupational Segregation

Workers in female-dominated occupations earn less, on average, than workers in comparable male-dominated occupations. To explain the gendered occupational wage disparity, com pensating differentials theory focuses on women’s preferences and asserts that women cluster in occupations that pay less in exchange for family-friendly job amenities. On the other hand, the devaluation perspective argues these wage discrepancies are the result of the cultural devaluation of women’s work that leads to both lower wages and a lower likelihood of having job amenities. Using data from the 2017–2018 American Time Use Survey Leave Module, I examine whether workers in female-dominated occupations are indeed more likely to have access to family-friendly job amenities. I focus on workers’ access to three contemporary family-friendly job amenities: paid leave, remote work, and flexible scheduling. I find that workers in female-dominated jobs are no more likely to have access to family-friendly job amenities than workers in male-dominated jobs. Additionally, family-friendly job amenities are associated with higher wages, not the lower wages as compensating differentials posits. These findings suggest that compensating differentials theory cannot explain the clustering of women in lower-paying occupations.

Job Amenities and Earnings Inequality

Job Amenities and Earnings Inequality

The Market for CEOS: Building Legacy and Feeling Empowered Matter

We develop a two-sided multidimensional matching model of the market for CEOs that allows for both pecuniary and non-pecuniary (amenity) compensation. The model is estimated by maximum likelihood estimation using matched CEO-firm data from Denmark. We show that CEOs have preferences for building legacy and gaining empowerment. The legacy mechanism explains why there is low mobility in the CEO market, even though firms demand general CEO skills. The empowerment mechanism explains why CEOs are willing to sacrifice significant pecuniary income to manage high equity firms. The overall conclusion is that job amenities matter in the market for CEOs.

A note on the estimation of job amenities and labor productivity

This paper introduces a maximum likelihood estimator of the value of job amenities and labor productivity in a single matching market based on the observation of equilibrium matches and wages. The estimation procedure simultaneously fits both the matching patterns and the wage curve. While our estimator is suited for a wide range of assignment problems, we provide an application to the estimation of the Value of a Statistical Life using compensating wage differentials for the risk of fatal injury on the job. Using US data for 2017, we estimate the Value of Statistical Life at $6.3 million ($2017).

Altruism and Inequality: How Pro-social Pay Discounts Offset the College Pay Premium

In an era of substantial labor market inequality, employers increasingly invoke pro-social mission, corporate responsibility and organizational purpose. Many commentators criticize these prosocial commitments as ineffectual and insincere. In this paper, we argue on the contrary that these employer commitments inadvertently reduce earnings inequality. Building on research on job values, we hypothesize that college graduates are more willing to sacrifice pay for pro-social impact. So employers’ increased emphasis on pro-social job amenity will lower pay disproportionately for higher skill workers. We test this theory with data on the near-universe of online US job postings. We find that pro-social jobs which require a college degree post 10 percent lower wages than standard postings with exactly the same job requirements. Wages at pro-social, but low-education jobs, are no different from comparable regular jobs. This gap reduces the aggregate college wage premium by around 5 percent. We present a variety of supplementary evidence using resumes, survey data and an online experiment with hiring managers. The findings show that employers' embrace of pro-social messages can offset macro-level inequality.

Labor Market Screening and Social Insurance Program Design for the Disabled

We evaluate social insurance program designs for the disabled by empirically implementing a frictional labor market model with screening employment contracts. In the model, firms post a screening contract consisting of wage and job amenities, and workers with different levels of disability make labor supply decisions. We first theoretically analyze the optimal structure of disability insurance (DI) and firm subsidies for hiring the disabled. Then, by exploiting policy variation in hiring subsidies for the disabled, we empirically examine which job amenities may be used by firms to screen out the disabled, and we structurally estimate our equilibrium model. Using the estimated model, we quantitatively explore the optimal joint design of DI and firm subsidies for employing disabled workers. We find a welfare improving role of firm subsidies that encourage firms to provide more job amenities, mitigating the labor supply disincentives of DI and labor market distortions induced by firms screening contracts. Finally, we show that the presence of a firm's screening incentive significantly affects the effectiveness of the policies: the optimal level of DI should be higher to ameliorate contract distortions caused by the firm's screening activities.

Immigration and Work Schedules: Theory and Evidence

We develop a theoretical framework to analyze the effects of immigration on native job amenities, focusing on work schedules. Immigrants have a comparative advantage in production at, and lower disamenity cost for nighttime work, which leads them to disproportionately choose nighttime employment. Because day and night tasks are imperfect substitutes, the relative price of day tasks increases as their supply becomes relatively more scarce. We provide empirical support for our theory. Native workers in local labor markets that experienced higher rates of immigration are more likely to work day shifts and receive a lower compensating differential for nighttime work.

Bidding for teams

We develop a simple competing job auction model to study wages and employment within teams. If synergies favor larger teams, the basic competing job auction model predicts that workers are generally paid a wage less than their marginal product of labor and that there is too much entry of firms. We then extend the model to allow for workplace competition. In this case, the firms can also compete by a commitment to job amenities and a minimum scale of operation. We then find that wages are always equal to the marginal product of labor and entry of firms is efficient.

A Note on the Estimation of Job Amenities and Labor Productivity

This note introduces a maximum likelihood estimator of the value of job amenities and labor productivity in a single matching market based on the observation of equilibrium matches and wages. The estimation procedure simultaneously fits both the matching patterns and the wage curve. Our estimator is suited for applications to a wide range of assignment problems.

Prostitution, hours, job amenities and education

We analyze the relationship between education and criminal behavior based on a survey of nearly 700 North American female escorts who provide (typically illegal) prostitution services. Nearly 40% of the women in our sample report college completion. College-educated women are less likely to see clients in any given week and do not earn higher average hourly wages. However, conditional on seeing any clients, college-educated prostitutes see more clients and provide longer client sessions. We demonstrate that these results are consistent with a model in which college-educated prostitutes have better outside options to prostitution, but are also able to reduce the marginal disutility of prostitution work by attracting fewer unpleasant clients and by combining sexual services with non-sexual services such as companionship, where college education may be productive.

A Note on the Estimation of Job Amenities and Labor Productivity

A Note on the Estimation of Job Amenities and Labor Productivity

Cause and Consequence of Cross Border Illegal Migration from South Wollo, Ethiopia

Developing countries such as Ethiopia the phenomenon of cross border Illegal migration which is mainly triggered by rural 'push' causes than urban 'pull' causes is the main cause of unbalanced rate of population growth and distribution between urban and rural areas in origin and destination states. This situation in turn affects the healthy development of both urban and rural areas. In spite of this fact, not much in known on many of the recent aspects of illegal migration. The present study of migration from Kutaber is mainly concerned with an assessment of the major causes and consequences of cross border illegal migration of people from rural- urban areas to foreign countries mainly to Gulf States. To achieve the objective 120 household heads were selected randomly from three kebeles of the woreda to Schedule interview. Both primary and secondary data were employed and were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Key informant interview and focus group discussions were prepared to generate information about the cause and consequences of illegal migration from Kutaber Woreda. Some of the causes of illegal migration are: land fragmentation, poverty, drought, need to join friends and relatives, income generation, the search for job and urban amenities, un coordinated activity of legal emigration process, and facilities in desired state are the most important. The study shown that the large family size and small land holding exposed to cross border illegal migration. Many of the migrants encountered problems at the initial period of adjustment and adaptation and even while traveling in night forest and coastal areas. While negative side of illegal migration is moral deterioration, Dept crisis, work load on migrant and remaining family, rejection by their families, and the community as they failed to meet expectations to return with adequate material wealth.