Labor Economics Research Articles

Labour productivity, its main indicators, forms of manifestation, and ways to improve

The purposes of the article are to study the content of labour productivity, generalise its main indicators, essence of constant trends manifested in the form of an economic law, disclose its forms of manifestation and ways to increase as well as to attract the attention of subjects of these processes to take regulatory measures. The object of the study is labour in the main link of the economy. The subject are political and economic, social and labour relations between participants of the production process regarding the increase in the labour productivity. Its methodological framework covers provisions explaining the nature of the continuity of labour processes based on the labour productivity. Its main sources are considered using the methods of scientific abstraction, comparison, logical, historical, causal, dialectical methods. Among the scientific results is the conclusion about the essence of the economic law of increasing productivity of social labour, about some properties of the forms of its manifestation, number of directions for accelerating the increase and continuity of the labour process. The scientific and practical significance of the article lies in the possible usefulness for the main link of the economy which corrects its own strategies and development programmes of authorities at various levels during the implementation of economic policy as well as of higher educational institutions of the country where economic theory and labour economics are taught.

Штрихи к биографии А.Д. Зайкина: офицер, ученый, учитель (часть 2). К столетию со дня рождения

Part one of this article, presented in the previous issue of the magazine, examined the life path of a prominent domestic scientist. In the second part, his scientific heritage is analyzed. Attention is drawn to the features of his scientific creativity, conducting scientific research at the intersection of labor law and economics. A description of A.D. Zaykin’s contribution to the development of doctrines on the legal organization of remuneration and pension legal relations is given.

Is Parental Leave Costly for Firms and Coworkers?

Previous articleNext article No AccessIs Parental Leave Costly for Firms and Coworkers?Anne A. Brenøe, Serena Canaan, Nikolaj Harmon, and Heather RoyerAnne A. Brenøe Search for more articles by this author , Serena Canaan Search for more articles by this author , Nikolaj Harmon Search for more articles by this author , and Heather Royer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Just Accepted Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725554 HistoryAccepted March 31, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Netherlands’ Minimum Wage 1969–2022: Can We Learn from Decline?

Abstract This paper evaluates the evolution of the Dutch minimum wage since its introduction in 1969 and discusses this as an intriguing case suggesting that a deeper, economic analysis of firm and employee behaviours is required for minimum-wage analysis in general. The real level of the minimum wage has fallen tremendously after 1979, all the way back nowadays to the level of the early 1970s, due to the system of uprating and to government interventions. The minimum-wage employment share shows an even stronger decline after 1979, but, surprisingly, the share below the unchanged real minimum wage of 1979 and in bands above this has remained largely unchanged. Intriguingly, firms have continued paying the same. Composition shifts in minimum-wage employment are significant, towards larger enterprise on the demand side and towards part-time employees on the supply side. Nationally and internationally, virtually all available minimum-wage analyses of employment effects focus on rises of the minimum wage and ignore drops. However, OECD data show that declines are surprisingly frequent, making them perfectly normal economic occurrences that firms will account for. I argue that declines deserve examination in their own right, certainly also from a monopsonistic perspective. Plausibly, declines incite different responses from increases, and their analysis will require the examination of heterogeneous behaviour of both firms and employees. Such analysis will reinforce the economics of minimum-wage analysis as advocated by David Neumark and its integration in labour economics as advocated by David Card.

Measuring Labor Market Power in Developing Countries: Evidence from Colombian Plants

Previous articleNext article No AccessMeasuring Labor Market Power in Developing Countries: Evidence from Colombian PlantsFrancesco Amodio and Nicolás de RouxFrancesco Amodio Search for more articles by this author and Nicolás de Roux Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Just Accepted Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725248 Views: 27Total views on this site HistoryAccepted March 28, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Efficacy of Tournaments for Nonroutine Team Tasks

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Efficacy of Tournaments for Non-Routine Team TasksFlorian Englmaier, Stefan Grimm, Dominik Grothe, David Schindler, and Simeon SchudyFlorian Englmaier Search for more articles by this author , Stefan Grimm Search for more articles by this author , Dominik Grothe Search for more articles by this author , David Schindler Search for more articles by this author , and Simeon Schudy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Just Accepted Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725553 HistoryAccepted April 19, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Do Less Informative College Admission Exams Reduce Earnings Inequality? Evidence from Colombia

Previous articleNext article No AccessDo less informative college admission exams reduce earnings inequality? Evidence from ColombiaEvan RiehlEvan Riehl Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Just Accepted Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725167 Views: 13Total views on this site HistoryAccepted March 22, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Geography of Job Tasks

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Geography of Job TasksEnghin Atalay, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel TannenbaumEnghin Atalay Search for more articles by this author , Sebastian Sotelo Search for more articles by this author , and Daniel Tannenbaum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Just Accepted Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725360 Views: 7Total views on this site HistoryAccepted March 28, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Influence of the Revenues of the Co-Financed Universities of Ecuador on the Expenditure For Salaries of the Academic and Administrative Personnel

Objective: This study investigates the influence of income from co-financed universities on the salary expenses of teaching and administrative staff, aiming to understand how changes in employee salaries impact university revenues. Theoretical Framework: The research is grounded in labor economics and higher education finance theories, providing a robust context for analyzing the financial dynamics within universities. Method: Two econometric models were employed: a multiple linear regression model using ordinary least squares to measure individual effects and a panel data model with random effects to assess grouped effects. Data collection involved analyzing financial records from co-financed universities. Results and Discussion: The results indicate that increased salaries at Universidad Politécnica Salesiana and Universidad Católica Santiago de Guayaquil lead to higher income. A 1% increase in teachers' salaries results in a 0.49% income increase, while a 1% rise in administrative salaries leads to a 0.08% income decrease. These findings highlight significant implications and limitations. Research Implications: The study provides insights for budgeting strategies, salary policies, and financial planning in higher education. It emphasizes the practical and theoretical impacts of salary adjustments on university revenues. Originality/Value: This research contributes to the literature by exploring the novel relationship between employee salary increases and university revenues, offering valuable insights for financial decision-making in higher education institutions.

The level of medical care accessibility in Russia: Regional differentiation

The need to consider economic risks and respond to demographic challenges pushes the issues of creating and maintaining the quality of regions’ human potential, as well as saving population health to the research agenda. The aim of the study is to investigate the resourcing of regional health care systems in Russia in order to determine the level of medical care accessibility. Methodologically, the paper relies on the concepts of systems and regional economics, labour economics. The study applies time series and comparative analyses, as well as index, score-rating methods, composite coefficients calculation. The data is the socioeconomic and health care statistics by federal districts for 2005–2022 taken from the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation. The paper finds that regions differ in terms of the level of the medical care accessibility. Reportedly, the Ural Federal District ranked high for the efficiency of regional health care systems in 2021, which, according to the analysis, is due to the developed systems of preventive and emergency care. Conversely, the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts were at the bottom of the ranking because of the deficit of physicians in emergency departments and scarce health care financing. The findings may underlie the development of measures on the improvement of health care resourcing, management, and efficiency both at national and regional levels.

What politics does to the economic analysis of the employment relationship: a critical perspective on personnel economics

Abstract Personnel economics has undoubtedly been one of the major developments in mainstream labour economics in recent decades. Its aim is not simply to report on firms’ actual labour management practices but also to prescribe the optimal practices for managers to adopt. The pursuit of this goal has led it to close itself off from other approaches to the analysis of the employment relationship. Drawing on concepts from political science, we show that personnel economics is imbued with a particular conception of politics, even though it goes unacknowledged. Making this point visible enables us to show that other conceptions of politics than that to which personnel economics refers are possible and leads to the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of other points of view in matters of labour management.

Teacher value-added and the test score gender gap

This paper assesses the effect of teachers on the gender gap in student test scores. It combines different empirical strategies from the value-added and labor economics literature to estimate teacher value-added and its contribution to the math and reading gender gaps. We use rich administrative data from Chile that allow us to follow teachers through different classes in different years. Our main findings indicate that teachers explain up to 18% of student test score variance and help reduce the gender gap in math by 16.9%. The reduction in the math gender gap is greater in voucher schools (16.1%), among students with more educated mothers (24%) and among those with female math teachers (32.2%). We provide evidence supporting a within-class effect, instead of sorting (between-class) effect. We conduct several tests and robustness checks to assess the reliability of our findings.

Returns to labour mobility

Abstract Returns to labour mobility have too often escaped the attention they deserve as conduits of important forces in macro-labour models. These returns are shaped by calibrations of productivity processes that use theoretical perspectives and data sources from (i) labour economics and (ii) industrial organisation. By investigating earlier prominent studies, we conclude that the focus on firm size dynamics and shocks intermediated through neo-classical production functions in (ii) yields large returns to labour mobility that are robust to parameter perturbations. In contrast, the reliance on statistics in labour economics to calibrate per-worker productivity processes in (i) can give rise to fragilities in the sense that parameter perturbations that generate similar targeted statistics can have very different implications for returns to labour mobility.

Measuring the quality of a match

The quality of an employment match is a central concept in labor economics. It is relevant for evaluating the welfare impact of labor market policies, and for our understanding of labor market dynamics. This paper reviews the challenges associated with measuring match quality. We first review measures commonly used in the literature, their advantages, and drawbacks. We then present novel evidence from a survey sample of US employees where alternative measures were collected simultaneously. We show that while some of these measures correlate well, others do not. Finally, we present additional partial evidence on the correlations between measures based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), a substantially larger and nationally representative survey. The takeaway message is a word of caution regarding the interpretation of some of these measures and specific concerns regarding using wages and tenure as indicators of match quality.

Labor Mobility and Wage Dynamics: Understanding the Interplay of Factors in Modern Labor Economics

Labor Mobility and Wage Dynamics: Understanding the Interplay of Factors in Modern Labor Economics

Editorial

The Journal Scientific Research World Economy EconConnections - Professionals On Line, plays an essential role as the main platform for the dissemination of theoretical and empirical research in a wide range of disciplines within the field of economics and related areas. Enveloping a wide range of topics, it stands as the primary channel for the exploration of general economic theory, political economy, business economics, industrial economics, labor economics, urban and rural economics, development economics, technological economics, tourism economics, transportation economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, quantitative economics, resources and environmental economics, economic history and demography, as well as international trade, exchange rates, finance , accounting and insurance.

School Performance, Score Inflation, and Neighborhood Development

Next article No AccessSchool Performance, Score Inflation and Neighborhood DevelopmentErich Battistin and Lorenzo NeriErich Battistin Search for more articles by this author and Lorenzo Neri Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Just Accepted Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725001 HistoryAccepted March 08, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Spatial spillover effects of skilled migration on innovation in China

Despite the importance of interregional skilled migration to regional development, few studies have explored its spatial spillover effects and their changes over time. Thus, employing the Spatial Durbin Model, we investigate the presence of regional spillovers of skilled migration at both national and sub-national levels in China. Especially, we focus on the regional difference and change in the spatial spillover. Although our results confirm positive spillover effects at the national level due to the strong mobility characteristic of skilled migrants, developed regions benefit more from spillovers of skilled migration than developing regions, and such effects are divergent in different regions over time. Our findings also indicate that changes in spatial spillovers among regions are closely associated with the mobility of economic factors in geography. Theoretically, by considering the spatial effects of skilled migration on the innovation output of recipient regions, we extend the labour economics literature into geographical economic agglomeration, especially innovation economic geography. Methodologically, we examine the spatial effects at both national and sub-national levels, and capture the spatial externalities; we also apply Maximum Likelihood estimation to assess the endogeneity issues to understand the mechanisms of spillover change over time. The study can be of significance for municipalities in the policy-making of attracting talents and promoting regional innovation.

Go Vegan? Prejudice, (Blind) Experimentation, and Food Choices

We examine the role of prejudice and experimentation in the evaluation of a nonmainstream product. We conduct a randomized controlled experiment where participants evaluate a plant-based product. We vary (i) whether they can taste the product, (ii) whether the tasting is blind, and (iii) the timing of when they are informed that the product is plant-based. We find that blind and nonblind tasting significantly raise taste evaluations. However, blind experimentation is associated with the lowest willingness to pay. In short, blinding does not help overcome prejudice in contrast to findings in labor economics in the context of hiring decisions.

Informal land markets and ethnic kinship in West African cities

We present an urban land use model with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry regarding risks of contested land ownership, a very common issue in West African cities. A market failure emerges as sellers do not internalize the impact of their market participation decision on the average quality of traded plots, which in turn affects other sellers and buyers’ decisions. The equilibrium is suboptimal and has too many transactions of insecure plots and too few transactions of secure plots. This market failure can be addressed when agents trade along trusted kinship lines that discourage undisclosed sales of insecure plots. Such kinship matching is an important feature of West African societies, including on the market for informal land, as illustrated by a unique survey administered in Bamako, Mali. In the model, the extent to which the market failure is addressed increases with the intensity of kinship ties. When sellers also have the possibility of registering their property right in a cadastre, this not only further attenuates information asymmetry but also helps reduce risk. We find complementarity between kinship matching and registration: As transactions along trusted kinship lines tend to involve plots that are more secure on average, kinship matching makes registration better targeted at insecure plots traded outside kinship ties. In this context, a partial registration fee subsidy can bring the economy to the social optimum.11We are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for comments that helped us substantively improve the paper as well as to Amadou Cissé for the many discussions about social structures in West Africa that initially motivated this paper, to Demba Karagnara who coordinated field surveys in Bamako in 2012 and 2022, and to Pierre M. Picard, Jan Brueckner and Tony Yezer for suggestions and technical comments on the model. We are also grateful to Eliana la Ferrara and Karen Macours for useful insights on kinship and land markets in developing countries, as well as to Thierry Verdier, Miren Lafourcade and the participants to the Labor and Public Economics Seminar at the Paris School of Economics, to the International Conference of Development Economics and to the Annual Conference of the Centre for the Study of African Economies for various suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge the funding of the World Bank and of the Paris School of Economics Mobility Grant, a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR-18-CE22-0013-01), the Labex OSE and the Labor and Public Economics Group at the Paris School of Economics .