Proportion Of Skilled Workers Research Articles

Germany's recruitment of workers from Turkey, 1960–1973 – Some remarks

Germany's recruitment of workers from Turkey, 1960–1973 – Some remarks

Comparative advantage and moonlighting

We document three facts: (i) Higher educated workers are more likely to moonlight; (ii) conditional on education, workers with higher wages are less likely to moonlight; and (iii) the prevalence of moonlighting is declining over time for all education groups. We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to explain these patterns. A dominating income effect explains the negative correlation of moonlighting with productivity in the cross section and the downward trend over time. A higher part-to-full time pay differential for skilled workers (a comparative advantage) explains the positive correlation with education. We provide empirical evidence of the comparative advantage using CPS data. We calibrate the model to 1994 cross-sectional data and assess its ability to reproduce the 2017 data. The driving forces are productivity variables and the proportion of skilled workers. The model accounts for 56% of the moonlighting trend for skilled workers, and 67% for unskilled workers.

Exports, Imported Inputs, Two-way Trade, and Productivity: The Role of Absorptive Capacity

ABSTRACT This article estimates the effects of imported inputs, exporting, and two-way trade on productivity. This includes exploring the role of absorptive capacity in the underlying relationships using panel data from manufacturing firms in Ghana. The results show that the ability of firms that both export and import to enhance productivity contemporaneously in the short term depends critically on absorptive capacity as captured by the proportion of skilled workers. The ability of two-way traders to learn from prior exporting experience and assimilate R&D spillovers from prior use of imported inputs to enhance productivity in the short term depends on absorptive capacity.

ENDOGENOUS POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, WAGE INEQUALITY, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

The paper suggests that the political changes brought about by the increase in the proportion of college graduates in the U.S. labor force in the 1970s may have contributed to the decline in the college premium during the 1970s and its increase during the 1980s and 1990s. The study argues that the proportion of skilled workers in the labor force affected their relative importance in the political process. Thus, the increase in the proportion of skilled workers during the 1970s reduced the skill premium in the short run, but induced a change in policies that favored skilled workers and increased the skill premium in the long run.

Is firm-sponsored training a palliative? A common agency approach

ABSTRACTWe analyse the issue of firm-sponsored training under product market imperfections. In this setting, qualification becomes a public good for firms when their profits are increasing in the stock of skilled workers but remains a private good to students/workers. Students have to pay a tuition fee but at the same time firms sponsor education: universities sell training to both. We prove that the proportion of skilled workers is larger in more competitive economies/industries while the share of firms in the financing of training is a monotonically decreasing function of the degree of competition. An increase of the latter indeed increases the equilibrium skilled wage while reducing its sensitivity to an increase of the supply of skilled workers. The firms’ aggregate expenditures on training per worker are nevertheless a nonmonotonic function of the competitiveness of the economy.

The impact of knowledge spillovers and innovation on firm-performance: findings from the Balkans countries

This paper investigates factors affecting firm performance. Using data from Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys (BEEPS 2013–2014), findings indicate that the following have a positive effect on firm performance: (i) innovative activities; (ii) knowledge spillovers; (iii) foreign ownership; and (iv) the proportion of skilled workers in the workforce. The paper therefore argues that innovation activities are endogenously related to firm performance, and that the performance of firms is influenced by knowledge spillovers and innovation activities, among other firm characteristics. The paper contributes to the literature by identifying spillovers and innovation activities as causal variables of firm performance—a novel approach to investigating knowledge spillovers and innovation activities.

Increased longevity and social security reform: questioning the optimality of individual accounts when education matters

In many European countries, population aging had led to debate about a switch from conventional unfunded public pension systems to notional systems characterized by individual accounts. In this article, we develop an overlapping generations model in which endogenous growth is based on an accumulation of knowledge driven by the proportion of skilled workers and by the time they have spent in training. In such a framework, we show that conventional pension systems, contrary to notional systems, can enhance economic growth by linking benefits only to the partial earnings history. Thus, to ensure economic growth, the optimal adjustment to increased longevity could consist in increasing the size of existing retirement systems rather than switching to notional systems.

Globalization, Skill Accumulation and the Skill Premium

We analyze the impact of globalization upon the skill premium (inequality) in advanced countries from a two-goods North–South model with skill accumulation. Globalization consists of an increase in the size of the South. Its impact on inequality depends on its intensity and on the pre-globalization proportion of skilled workers. The post-globalization inequality is a non-monotonic function of the pre-globalization proportion of skilled workers and of the globalization intensity. The impact is different for the generation in work and for the following generations. There is a threshold value of the skill endowment under (above) which inequality is lower (higher) after than before globalization.

Company training and low‐skill consumer‐service jobs in Ireland

This paper identifies market forces which induce employers to provide training in Ireland. It investigates if they are present in sufficient strength in the consumer service sectors with a high concentration of low‐skill jobs to provide a basis to upgrade such jobs. Data from a survey of firms on training incidence, duration, and cost are used in OLS regressions to investigate the determinants of training at national and sector level. The results show that firm size, the proportion of skilled workers, foreign ownership, perception of changing skill requirements and tightness of the labour market all influence employers' training decisions. Analysis of sector‐specific effects indicates that firms in consumer service sectors are unlikely to respond to market forces by increasing training to a level which would encompass low‐skill jobs. However, policies involving the school system and company‐based training could help to enhance low‐skill jobs in consumer service sectors.

What's Different about Exporters? Evidence from Colombian Manufacturing

Using a large panel of Colombian manufacturing plants, this paper finds that exporters are significantly larger, more capital intensive, have higher labour productivity, and pay higher wages than nonexporters three years before exporting for the first time. The differential in performance increases in the years leading to entry in the export market. After entry, sales, employment, and the proportion of skilled workers in the labour force keep growing significantly faster for exporters, but the growth of labour productivity and capital intensity is indistinguishable for exporters and nonexporters.

Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality: An Alternative Theory and Some Evidence

I present a model where firms decide what types of jobs to create and then search for suitable workers. When there are few skilled workers and the skilled-unskilled productivity gap is small, firms create a single type of job and recruit all workers. An increase in the proportion of skilled workers or skill-biased technical change can create a qualitative change in the composition of jobs, increasing the demand for skills, wage inequality, and unemployment. I provide some evidence that there has been a change in the composition of jobs in the United States during the past two decades. (JEL E24, J31, J64)

Unemployment, wage rigidity, and the returns to education

If real wage formation is rigid then an increase in the proportion of skilled workers in the economy may increase the relative unemployment rate of the unskilled, thus rendering them ‘obsolete’ or ‘unemployable’. This in turn may generate increasing returns to education and multiple equilibria. A human intensive equilibrium may coexist with a physical capital intensive equilibrium. The ranking of equilibria with respect to welfare and unemployment is a priori ambiguous.

The Labor Reserve and the Skill Debate

Competing assertions abound about changes in the skill structure of wage labor. One claims that workplace changes do not necessarily lead to a general deskilling, but enhance skill levels for certain categories of wage labor; another, that such changes contribute to a general deskilling of the paid workforce. Despite having been the focus of much research, these competing assertions remain unresolved. Braverman's discussion of the labor reserve and its pattern of inclusion into the paid workforce promises one possible resolution. Incorporation of a sizable proportion of female workers from the latent labor reserve negated a trend towards an increased proportion of skilled workers in the U.S. paid workforce from 1950 to 1987. Implications of the particular pattern of inclusion and exclusion of this labor reserve are discussed in terms of the debate surrounding the deskilling and reskilling of wage labor in general.

The American Historical Association: Latin American Labor History

Several of the panels on Latin at the December 1990 meeting of the American Historical Association took up themes and debates of concern to historians of labor and the working class. In a panel entitled Immigrants, Not Conquistadors: The Spanish Presence in Latin during the National Period, Diana Velez (Tinker Foundation) stressed the way shifts in Spanish government policy affected the ebb and flow of emigration toward Latin in the pre-World War I period. While nineteenth-century governments had sought to bar or tightly restrict emigration out of national security concerns, a looser policy was adopted as officials came to perceive that permitting and regulating emigration could offer an alternative to agrarian reform, a means of widening foreign markets for Spanish exports, and a source of foreign currency income from Spaniards working abroad and sending a portion of their wages home. Birgit Sonnesson (New York University) compared Spanish chain-migration to Puerto Rico and Cuba, stressing the effects of the different social formations in the Spanish provinces where emigrants originated. Jos? Moya (University of Califor nia, Los Angeles) examined Spanish immigrants in Argentina between 1855 and 1930. Evidence from census manuscripts cast doubt on the standard two-class model of nineteenth-century Argentina, showing both an expansion of the middle class due to increasing public employment and a slow, incomplete process of proletarianization as industrial employment grew but mechanization lagged. Argentina attracted large numbers of skilled immigrants, and the labor force did not undergo deskilling in the early phases of industrialization. Indeed, the proportion of skilled workers in the labor force grew from 34 percent in 1870 to 43 percent in 1914. A panel on Recent Research on the History of the Family in Latin America included a paper by Mark Szuchman (Florida International University) that called for further research on changes in productive relations and the impact thereof on the proletarian family. He suggested that the Latin American experience con trasted with that of Western Europe. Whereas capitalist development weakened the patriarchal family in Europe, in Latin it worsened the position of women by driving them back into the home. Elizabeth Ann Kuznesof (University of Kansas) pointed out that recent research on family history in Brazil has highlighted the prevalence there of nuclear and female-headed households in urban areas and among ex-slaves, thereby challenging the paradigm developed by Gilberto Freyre wherein the patriarchal extended family was considered hegemonic.

An alternative approach to immigration policy: Rationing by skill

Current U.S. immigration policy places a heavy emphasis on kinship ties with a U.S. citizen or resident alien in rationing immigration visas. An alternative policy is to focus on the skills of visa applicants. Immigrants with higher levels of schooling and with skills that are more readily transferable to the U.S. labor market are more productive, as measured by their earnings. A larger proportion of skilled workers in a cohort of immigrants tends to narrow the differences in earnings among skill groups in the native-born population. This reduces income inequality and reduces the use of income transfers by the low-skilled native-born population. More highly-skilled immigrants also make less use of income-contingent transfers. A point-system would be necessary to combine the multidimensional aspects of skill. The adoption of skill-based rationing with a point system in Canada led to an increase in the skill level of the immigrants.

Occupational rehabilitation of psychiatric cases; a follow-up study of 115 cases.

1. A brief historical review of the modern machinery for the rehabilitation and resettlement of psychiatric disabled persons in the United Kingdom is described. 2. The present investigation was designed to discover the fate of psychoneurotic patients who had been referred to the D. R. O. for placement and thereby to determine the efficacy of the joint work carried out by Roffey Park Rehabilitation Centre and the D. R. O. service. 3. The method of investigation consisted of the follow-up by D. R. O. s of 115 consecutive cases about 2 years after hospitalization; 15 were untraceable. A social worker then interviewed 97 of these patients; of the 3 remaining, 2 were in mental hospitals and 1 was untraceable. 4. A description of the sample at the time of admission to Roffey Park is included. 5. The results of the follow-up are enumerated. There appears to be little change in the ratio of employed to unemployed, but there is an apparent increase in the proportion of skilled workers. 6. Thirty-eight patients had improved in health, 43 were unimproved, and 18 were worse than on admission to Roffey Park. 7. Thirty-four patients were living satisfactorily at home, 37 had fairly satisfactory homes, and 26 were living unsatisfactorily. 8. Twenty-one patients were recommended for Government Training Courses. Five gave up before the end; of the 16 completing training only 10 were working in their training trades. The disturbing effect of delay in starting training is stressed. 9. The results are discussed and compared with those of other investigations. 10. A plea is made for further research to discover whether the expenditure on the Government Training Scheme is justified and to improve the present methods of selection of trainees.