Competitive Labor Market Research Articles

Navigating employability from the bottom up

ABSTRACTResearch focusing on young people’s career trajectories has emphasised ‘graduate employability’ with much less attention being afforded to the employability strategies used by disadvantaged youth, including the social, political and labour market contexts in which these emerge. This study explores how young people enrolled in entry-level, vocational training courses in Australia attempt to enhance their employability. Interviews explored perceptions of individual employability, the strategies utilised to improve employability, and the economic, personal and employment consequences of these strategies. Three main employability strategies were identified: gaining qualifications to meet employment expectations; securing work experience in a competitive labour market; and addressing economic and social challenges to secure and sustain employment. The study reveals how the dominant narratives of employability in education and employment policy are misaligned with the economic, social and labour market challenges faced by disadvantaged job-seekers with respect to notions of career and ‘fit’ between the individual and the labour market. Policy responses need to take account of the diverse ‘bottom up’ experiences and circumstances of different cohorts of young people.

The effect of immigration on unemployment in Europe: Does the core-periphery dualism matter?

The migrant crisis is one of the most challenging tasks the EU has ever faced. This paper uses a Panel Error Correction Model to assess the direction of the impact of immigration on domestic unemployment, in the short and in the long run, for a sample of 15 EU countries between 1997 and 2016. We test for different effects in core and periphery countries based on differences in macroeconomic fundamentals and labor market characteristics. In the long run, immigration is found to reduce unemployment in peripheral countries only, whereas in the short run, we find that immigration reduces unemployment for the whole sample. However, country-specific coefficients based on interactions with labour market characteristics indicate that short-run impacts are larger in Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries. Conversely, Italy, Greece and Portugal show the smallest impacts. Our results suggest that negative sentiments toward immigration due to labour market competition are mostly unjustified.

Beyond employability skills: Developing professional purpose

Rapid transformation of the workplace and a highly competitive labour market has changed the nature of graduate employability. In addition to discipline related knowledge, students now need to be proactive and adaptable in identifying career opportunities. This paper presents a conceptual model that views employability as determined by an overarching professional purpose mindset. This mindset reflects a person’s commitment to developing a professional future aligned to personal values, professional aspirations and societal outlook. Four specific mindsets are encapsulated within professional purpose (curiosity, collaboration, action and growth) and relate to three domains of development (self and social awareness; navigating the world of work and networks). Two studies were conducted to explore the professional purpose model. Study one was a qualitative study in which 33 undergraduate students (19 female; 14 male) explored their career decision making. Focus group and interview data showed that each of the four positive mindsets operated in many students’ proactive career related behaviours. However, for other students, alternative mindsets negatively influenced their career related behaviour. In the second study, 42 academics (28 male; 14 female) identified unit learning outcomes in existing curricula related to the three domains of development. All domains were evident but outcomes for navigating the world of work received most emphasis. Implications of the findings for further development of the professional purpose model are discussed.

Pengaruh Status Sosial Ekonomi, Kompetensi, dan Physical Appearance Terhadap Waktu Tunggu Mencari Kerja Alumni Fakultas Ekonomi dan Bisnis Universitas Udayana

This study aims to comprehensively examine the effect of socioeconomic status, competence, and physical appearance and examine which variables are most influential on the waiting time for job search for FEB alumni. Primary data is used as the central estimation, with a sample of FEB Unud alumni in the last three years. Evaluation is done by using multiple linear regression models with independent variables in the form of dummy variables. The estimation results provide a comprehensive picture of the factors influencing the injury time of seeking a job. The alumni work so that this can be a reference for faculties, especially Faculty of Business at Uiversitas Udayana, in developing curriculum and improving learning at the faculty level to produce quality graduates/outputs and approaching market needs productive work. The study results can also be a reference for Universitas Udayana alumni to improve competence and provide an overview in entering the labor market, which is increasingly complex and wins fierce labor market competition.

Public attitudes toward immigration policies in South Korea

ABSTRACTThis paper examines whether economic or socio-psychological concerns determine anti-immigration attitudes in South Korea, in an effort to address regional asymmetries in existing immigration studies. An analysis reveals that labour market competition and fiscal burden concerns do not affect anti-immigration attitudes, but xenophobia, the conceptual views of citizenship, and the expectation of the impact of immigration on the national economy determine anti-immigration attitudes, a result in keeping with existing studies of anti-immigration attitudes in European or North American countries. However, when policies have humanitarian dimensions, the ethno-cultural views of Korean identity tend to reduce anti-immigration attitudes, a finding that runs counter to the empirical results from studies in the Western context. In addition, multiculturalism appears to affect anti-immigration attitudes when measured in terms of general immigration policies, but not when specific immigration groups are referenced. I conclude by discussing the implications of these new findings.

When unionisation is profitable for firms in network industries

AbstractIn an industry characterised by the presence of network effects, this paper investigates a duopolistic game in which firms may choose whether to bargain over wages and employment with unions or to face a competitive labour market (i.e., without unions). If unions are sufficiently wage‐sensitive, it is shown that the presence of sufficiently large network effects makes unionisation the Pareto efficient sub‐game perfect Nash equilibrium outcome for firms.

Talent Attraction through Online Recruitment Websites: Application of Web 2.0 Technologies

Talent attraction is one of the major challenges for HR managers. With the rise of online recruitment channels, the number of applicants for a given job vacancy have increased substantially. In addition, the time taken in finding the right talent from the huge pool of applications has increased significantly, adding up to the hiring cycle. In today’s competitive labour market, employers need to highlight their brand image to prospective job-seekers, so that there is higher chance of recruiting the best talent that fits their manpower requirement. In this paper, an attempt is made in investigating that to what extent web 2.0 technologies such as podcasts, blogs and online employee testimonials may enhance the employer's brand value in the eyes of employed professionals. A multi-group moderated mediation analysis is conducted with 361 working professionals who are active online recruitment platform users. The analysis helps establish the effect of the perceived quality and credibility of career websites on job-seekers’ perception about the employer and on their subsequent application intention. The findings reveal positive effect of video podcasts and realistic employee testimonials presented through third party blogs on job-seekers’ perceived quality and credibility of the job advertisement. This phenomenon is reflected in their heightened attraction for the employer and eventual intention to apply for jobs at the firm.

More necessary and less sufficient: an age-period-cohort approach to overeducation from a comparative perspective

In many countries, the skilled labor market has lagged educational expansion. As a result of increased competition, younger cohorts of the highly educated face decreasing returns to education or overeducation. Surprisingly, decreasing occupational outcomes do not coincide empirically with the economic returns among those with tertiary education. Regarding the process of changes in economic returns to education based on cohort transformations, we expect that the expansion of tertiary education affects specific cohorts, which find themselves facing more labor market competition. As a result, the economic returns to education should decrease among younger cohorts even when the overall returns to education remain stable over time. To study this process, we model economic returns with a new age-period-cohort-trended lag (APCTLAG) method, which allows us to compare the gap in economic returns between tertiary and less than tertiary education over cohorts. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we analyze trends over three decades in 12 countries. Our results confirm that educational returns for tertiary education have declined over time, even though the gap between the educated and the less educated has remained similar in most of the countries. For younger cohorts, tertiary education has become more necessary to survive in the competitive labor market, but the actual economic returns have decreased—making tertiary education less sufficient than before.

Relatedness and the Resource Curse: Is There a Liability of Relatedness?

abstractLiterature in evolutionary economic geography has emphasized knowledge spillover benefits of co-location with related industries. We draw on resource curse literature to demonstrate that relatedness also comes with costs in the form of labor market competition. Using a case study of a growth period in the Norwegian petroleum industry, we show that this had positive as well as negative implications for related industries. Industries related to petroleum grew faster than unrelated industries over the period. However, they also suffered from high labor costs and loss of human capital. Related industries had to pay higher wages than unrelated industries, even after controlling for worker characteristics. Furthermore, several of their employees, in particular the most productive ones, left for the petroleum industry. The relationship between petroleum and related industries is asymmetric insofar as workers tend to leave related industries for petroleum at higher rates than vice versa. Furthermore, the petroleum industry recruits the most productive workers from related industries and returns its least productive workers. Overall, this could potentially lead to de-skilling in related industries, which could more than outweigh any potential knowledge spillover benefits from their relatedness to the petroleum industry. Consequently, we argue that relatedness is not an even playing field: there may be losers, as well as winners, from relatedness.

Work Accommodations in Canadian Social Firms: Supervisors’ and Workers’ Perspectives

Social firms (SFs) are an appealing model for people with a mental health condition who are having difficulties maintaining their employment in a competitive labour market. The goal of this study is to compare the availability of work accommodations in two types of Canadian SFs, by interviewing supervisors working in adapted enterprises and consumer/survivor-run businesses, and by obtaining the perceptions of the workers with a mental health condition regarding the usefulness of these accommodations. Results indicate accommodations in both types of SFs are readily available and useful. A significant difference between the two types of SFs is the availability of a job coach whose presence workers found useful in adapted enterprises. Natural supports from stakeholders (e.g., supervisors, job coach) are important for work sustainability.

Non-Competitive Wage-Setting as a Cause of Unfriendly and Inefficient Leadership

This paper develops a simple economic model to examine how leadership styles in organizations depend on the prevailing wage-setting conditions for workers. In particular, we examine a leader who can -- in addition to the use of monetary incentives -- motivate a worker by adopting leadership styles that differ in their non-monetary consequences for the worker's well-being. Some leadership styles produce non-monetary benefits for workers (such as those involving the provision of praise to high-performing workers), other styles impose non-monetary costs (such as those involving social punishment for low performers). We show that leaders never use the latter type of leadership when the worker is hired in a competitive labor market. In contrast, in labor markets with non-competitive wage-setting (e.g., in the presence of trade union bargaining or minimum wage legislation) leaders sometimes do use the 'unfriendly' style, and the more so the worse the worker's labor market prospects are. We show that this is socially inefficient. 'Friendly' leadership styles are always adopted when they are socially efficient.

Transformative and Selective Systems: A Study in Comparative Sociology of Academic Markets Careers

The article explores the relationship between academic career structure and labor market organization characterizing different national academic systems. Selective and transformative systems are described as two opposite ideal types. The principal constitutive difference between them is that the selective system requires scholars to move between organizations at least ones during their academic career, and introduces time limits for staying at the lower steps of the academic ladder, while transformative systems do not prohibit inbreeding or ban staying indefinitely at lower academic ranks. The academic systems of Great Britain, Germany, Russia, USA, and France are used to demonstrate how this fundamental difference is related to many other parameters of institutional organization of national academic worlds, such as labor market competitiveness, selection procedures complexity, whether the labor market is driven by supply or demand, the level of geographic mobility, the presence of tenure, the role of formal indicators in academic productivity assessment, and the overall status of the academic profession.

Globalization, Market Power, and the Natural Interest Rate

We argue that strong globalization forces have been an important determinant of global real interest rates over the last five decades, as they have been key drivers of changes in the natural real interest rate—i.e. the interest rate consistent with output at its potential and constant inflation. An important implication of our analysis is that increased competition in goods and labor market since the 1970s can help explain both the large increase in real interest rates up to the mid-1980s and—as globalization forces mature and may even go into reverse, leading to incrementally rising market power—its subsequent and protracted decline accompanied by lower inflation. The analysis has important implications for monetary policy and the optimal pace of normalization.

Stop Invasion! The Electoral Tipping Point in Anti-Immigrant Voting

Why do anti-immigrant political parties have more success in areas that host fewer immigrants? Using regression discontinuity design, structural breaks search methods and data from a sample of Italian municipalities, we show that the relationship between the vote shares of anti-immigrant parties and the share of immigrants follows a U-shaped curve, which exhibits a tipping-like behavior around a share of immigrants equal to 3.35 %. We estimate that the vote share of the main Italian anti-immigrant party (Lega Nord) is approximately 6 % points higher for municipalities below the threshold. Using data on local labor market characteristics and on the incomes of natives and immigrants, we provide evidence which points at the competition in the local labor market between natives and immigrants as the more plausible explanation for the electoral success of anti-immigrant parties in areas with low shares of immigrants. Alternative stories find less support in the data.

Problem of Pre-capitalist Elements of Production in Farming Villages and a Perfectly Competitive Labor Market in Discussion of Low

Problem of Pre-capitalist Elements of Production in Farming Villages and a Perfectly Competitive Labor Market in Discussion of Low

The Impact of WTO Accession on Chinese Firms’ Product and Labor Market Power

This paper examines the causal impact of domestic trade liberalization on Chinese firms' product and labor market power. To recover both market power measures, we identify a firm's regime of competitiveness, corresponding to a product market setting and a labor market setting, at any point in time. The identification is based on implementing the distance test, which takes the dependence between both settings into account. The product market setting is defined to be imperfectly competitive if the firm sets a price-cost markup, which is our model consistent measure of product market power. The labor market setting is defined to be imperfectly competitive if the firm either pays a wage markup or sets a wage markdown. Our model consistent measure of labor market power is either the workers' bargaining power during work-firm negotiations in the former or the wage elasticity of the firm's labor supply curve capturing its wage-setting power in the latter. To establish causal evidence of trade shocks on product and labor market power, we use China's WTO accession in 2001 as an identification strategy. Reducing tariffs on intermediate inputs decreases the likelihood of shifting firms away from an imperfectly competitive labor market setting. Reducing tariffs on final goods increases the likelihood of shifting firms away from setting wage markdowns. Trade liberalization via input tariff reductions increases a firm's price-cost markup but decreases the degree of wage-setting power that it possesses, conditional on the relevant product/labor market setting. Such joint responses of firms' pricing behavior in product and labor markets to trade policy changes are important for understanding the distributional consequences of trade shocks and the underlying drivers of increased inter-firm wage disparities.

Educational Systems and the Need to Review Traditions in Order to Respond to Labour Market Demands

This article attempts to present the challenges facing modern educational systems in the EU, and particularly that of Bulgaria, and which are the result of the dynamics of both the digital epoch, and a labour market without borders. The paper brings forward arguments in favour of reviewing and reconsidering the concept of educational policies addressing adequate employee skills for a competitive labour market. Conclusions and suggestions are made on the basis of research into the national regulatory framework and the recommendation of EESC.

Exporting and Offshoring with Monopsonistic Competition

We develop a model of international trade with a monopsonistically competitive labour market in which firms employ skilled labour for headquarter tasks and unskilled workers to conduct a continuum of production tasks. Firms can enter foreign markets through exporting and through offshoring, and we show that due to monopsonistic competition our model makes sharply different predictions, both at the firm level and at the aggregate level, about the respective effects of the export of goods and the offshoring of tasks. At the firm-level, exporting leads to higher wages and employment, while offshoring of production tasks reduces the wages paid to unskilled workers as well as their domestic employment. At the aggregate level, trade in goods is unambiguously welfare increasing since domestic resources are reallocated to large firms with high productivity, and firms with low productivities exit the market. This reduces the monopsony distortion present in autarky, where firms restrict employment to keep wages low, resulting in too many firms that are on average too small. Offshoring on the other hand gives firms additional scope for exercising their monopsony power by reducing their domestic size, and as a consequence the resources spent on it can be wasteful from a social planner’s point of view, leading to a welfare loss.

Motivating Employees Through Career Paths

Firms have discretion over task allocations, which may dampen employees' career prospects, and, hence, motivation. Task assignments and worker motivation interact through the extent of labor market competition; that is, the possibility of moving to another firm. More competition enhances motivation but decreases firms' incentives to assign workers to informative tasks. One consequence is that competitive firms sometimes choose strategies that lead to intermediate competition. When the employee pool is heterogeneous, firms might choose different human resources practices that attract different kinds of workers, and differentiate themselves through the career opportunities within and beyond the firms that they offer.

Monopsony Power and Guest Worker Programs

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We find that many guest workers face moderately or highly concentrated labor markets, based on federal merger scrutiny guidelines, and that concentration generally decreases wages. For example, moving from a market with an HHI of zero to a market comprised of two employers lowers H-1B worker wages approximately 10 percent, and a pure monopsony (one employer) reduces wages by 13 percent. A simulation shows that wages under pure monopsony could be 47 percent lower, suggesting that employers do not use the extent of their monopsony power. Enforcing wage regulations and decreasing barriers to mobility may better address issues of exploitation than antitrust scrutiny.