Search

Historically otkhodnichestvo in Russia was designed as the temporary departure of peasants from their permanent residences in villages to earn money in regions where industry and agriculture were well developed. Preconditions for the development of this phenomenon included rural overpopulation and inability to provide sustenance for peasants' households only through local agricultural activities and homecrafts. Nowadays otkhodnichestvo can be defined as employment outside home municipality, forced by the lack of jobs or by the low level of wages in places of otlhodniks' permanent residence, where they return on a regular periodic basis. Expert estimates of the number of otkhodniks in nowadays Russia vary from 3 million to 15 million households. Such a large-scale phenomenon as otkhodnichestvo (despite its "invisibility" to the state) causes a heavy impact on the quality characteristics of different levels of societies serving as objects of public administration and subjects of local government. But neither the federal level of power nor the regional one fully comprehend the significance of the phenomenon. Sometimes it goes the other way round for the local government, which is the closest one to people: municipalities could be divided into two groups of those who detect otkhodniks and those who don't. But even in those cases when local governments are able to notice otkhodniks it, in fact, cannot be said that otkhodniks are under permanent scrutiny of municipal administrations as they are still mainly on their own. Research into the present day interaction between otkhodnichestvo and viability of municipalities is far from being complete and exhaustive. This paper outlines the interconnection between contemporary otkhodnichestvo and some political, economic and socio-cultural processes at the local level. Influence of otkhodnichestvo on the political and economic life and socio-cultural processes at the local level is of ambivalent nature, which does not allow to unambiguously evaluate if the impact brought on by it is functional or dysfunctional for municipalities. Development of otkhodnichestvo is caused by complex socio-economic reasons and it entails complex implications for the municipalities, to which the phenomenon is immanent. This paper consists of 3 sections, which describe political, economical and socio-cultural relevance of otkhodnichestvo to small towns which are at some level exposed to the phenomenon. The paper draws on various examples of this incoherent impact on small towns, situated in the non-black earth zone regions, where otkhodnichestvo was historically developed.

This paper studies the effect of labor market reform on the welfare cost of business cycles. Motivated by the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, the paper focuses on two labor market institutions: the unemployment insurance system determining search incentives and the system of job placement services affecting matching efficiency. The paper develops a tractable search model with idiosyncratic labor market risk and risk-averse workers, and derives a closed-form solution for the welfare cost of business cycles as a function of the various parameters of interest. An improvement in job placement services leads to a reduction in the welfare cost of business cycles, but a change in unemployment benefit generosity has in general an ambiguous effect. A quantitative analysis based on a calibrated version of the model suggests that the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005 reduced the non-cyclical unemployment rate by 3 percentage points and reduced the welfare cost of business cycles by 30 percent.

"There are various reasons why less-educated men have higher risks of labor market vulnerability - risks such as being unemployed or, if employed, having only low socioeconomic status. The commonly used argument is that these higher risks result from increased job competition caused by an oversupply of higher educated workers, who displace the less-educated from their jobs. In addition to exploring this argument, we investigate the impact of less-educated men's cognitive skills, their social resources, and the (historically embedded) signaling value of not having educational credentials. We study this impact by using institutional and compositional variations across labor market entry cohorts in the United States. For our analyses, we use the data of the 1974-2008 US General Social Survey (GSS). They show that an oversupply of high-educated workers mainly increases the unemployment risks of the higher-educated themselves. In labor market entry cohorts where the negative selection on parental background of the group of less-educated is more pronounced, the less-educated run a relatively high risk of unemployment." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Although there is still no consensus on the causes of large differences in income per capita across countries, a growing literature considers culturally-based beliefs and institutions as main drivers of the latter differences (Guiso et al. 2006; Tabellini 2010). The intuition is that institutions and beliefs affect the incentive to accumulate human and physical capital. Other strands of literature stress that the supply of entrepreneurship is a fundamental ingredient of economic growth and job creation. In this paper, we argue that the two views should be reconciled on the basis of the following arguments: a) occupational choices and the decision to accumulate human capital are affected by cultural and institutional factors; b) occupational choices are the main tool to allocate human capital within societies; c) entrepreneurs govern the allocation of resources in the economy, including the human resources. Confirming our hypothesis, our empirical analysis show that cultural factors matter and fatalism exerts a particularly negative effect on opportunity perception and on opportunity driven entrepreneurship. For what regards institutional variables, three interesting and somehow non conventional results emerge from the analysis. First, low start-up cost are particular favorable for necessity driven entrepreneurship but not for the opportunity driven ones. Second, labor market flexibility yields a lower probability of being an entrepreneur and this results holds for both necessity and opportunity driven entrepreneurs. Third, the more burdensome the administrative requirement (permits, regulations, reporting) in entrepreneurial activity, the lower the probability of being an opportunity driven entrepreneur. On the whole, our results yield some policy relevant implications: a) culturally-based beliefs matter for entrepreneurship and fatalism is more important than trust in others; b) education can affect people’s fatalism; c) entrepreneurial education can be an important tool for fostering good quality entrepreneurship, i.e. opportunity driven entrepreneurship; c) institutions matter for entrepreneurship and growth but, somehow, in unconventional ways.

While it is clear that natural disasters have serious welfare consequences for affected populations, less is known with respect to how local labour markets in low income countries adjust to such large shocks, in particular the general equilibrium effects of the increase in the demand for construction as well as the inflow of resources in the aftermath of natural disasters. Combining data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey, the Desinventar database, the US Geological Survey and district level employment indicators, this paper explores how a large earthquake in Indonesia affected local labour markets, in particular the evolution of wages and employment across sectors. We find that wage growth in the agriculture sector is significantly higher in earthquake affected areas. We propose two mechanisms for this result: a higher growth rate of the price of rice in agricultural communities which switch from being net sellers to net buyers of rice and a downward shift in the supply of workers in the agricultural sector. We show evidence for both mechanisms.

This paper analyzes job referral effects that are based on residential location. We use georeferenced record data for the entire working population (liable to social security) and the corresponding establishments in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, which is Germany's largest (and EU's second largest) metropolitan area. We estimate the propensity of two persons to work at the same place when residing in the same neighborhood (reported with an accuracy of 500m×500m grid cells), and compare the effect to people living in adjacent neighborhoods. We find a significant increase in the probability of working together when living in the same neighborhood, which is stable across various specifications. We differentiate these referral effects for socioeconomic groups and find especially strong effects for migrant groups from former guestworker countries and new EU countries. Further, we are able to investigate a number of issues in order to deepen the insight on actual job referrals: distinguishing between the effects on working in the same neighborhood and working in the same establishment - probably the more accurate measure for job referrals - shows that the latter yield overall smaller effects. Further, we find that clusters in employment although having a significant positive effect play only a minor role for the magnitude of the referral effect. When we exclude short distance commuters, we find the same probabilities of working together, which reinforces our interpretation of this probability as a network effect. Diese Studie untersucht die Effekte von Job-Empfehlungen, die aus dem Wohnumfeld herrühren. Wir verwenden geocodierte Prozessdaten für die erwerbstätige Bevölkerung (in sozialversicherungspflichtiger und geringfügiger Beschäftigung) und die entsprechenden Betriebe in der Metropolregion Rhein-Ruhr, Deutschlands größter Metropolregion (und die zweitgrößte der EU). Wir schätzen die Wahrscheinlichkeit, mit der zwei Personen am selben Ort arbeiten, wenn sie in derselben Nachbarschaft wohnen (gemessen in einem 500m × 500m Raster), und vergleichen diese mit der Wahrscheinlichkeit, wenn eine der beiden Personen in einer angrenzenden Rasterzelle wohnt. Wir finden einen signifikanten Zuwachs in der Wahrscheinlichkeit zusammen zu arbeiten wenn die Personen in derselben Nachbarschaft wohnen; dieser Befund bleibt über verschiedene Spezifikationen robust. Wir differenzieren die Empfehlungseffekte nach sozioökonomischen Gruppen und finden vor allem für Migranten aus den traditionellen Gastarbeiterentsendeländer und aus den neuen EU-Mitgliedsstaaten starke Effekte. Darüber hinaus können wir eine Reihe von Aspekten untersuchen, um das Verständnis bezüglich Job-Empfehlungen zu vertiefen: Die Unterscheidung zwischen dem Effekt auf Zusammenarbeit in derselben Nachbarschaft und demselben Betrieb - möglicherweise das genauere Maß für Job-Empfehlungen - zeigt, dass letztere insgesamt kleiner ausfallen. Darüber hinaus finden wir, dass die Konzentration von Beschäftigung zwar auch einen positiven Zusammenhang erzeugt, aber nur eine kleine Rolle im Hinblick auf die Größenordnung des Empfehlungseffektes spielt.Wenn wir Kurzstreckenpendler (innerhalb desselben Postleitzahlbezirks) ausschließen, bleiben die Wahrscheinlichkeiten gemeinsam zu arbeiten unverändert, was unsere Interpretation dieser Wahrscheinlichkeit als Netzwerkeffekt untermauert.

This article analyzes the microeconomic relation between innovation and employment, using company data from R&D Scoreboard for Europe covering 2000–2008. A reduced form equation in which R&D can account for both product and process innovation is estimated. The existence of non-constant elasticities is assessed, due to the combination of efficient scale and decreasing return to R&D: in our empirical estimates the scale effect tends to prevail for a given R&D intensity generating an increasing relation between total turnover and employment. These results have important implications for policymakers: innovation supporting policies should be correctly tailored and monitored since the results depend on the characteristics of the benefiting firms. Moreover, R&D intensity on GDP should be managed with care if taken as a policy target, given that the denominator is endogenous and non-linearly dependent on research expenditure. Este artigo analisa a relação microeconômica entre a inovação eo emprego, utilizando os dados do R&D Scoreboard para a Europa cobrindo 2000-2008. Estima-se uma equação em forma reducida em que a I&D podem ser responsâveis por inovação de producto ou de processos. A existência de elasticidades não constantes é avaliada, devido à combinação de escala eficiente e retornos decrecientes â I&D: em nossas estimativas o efeito de escala tende a prevalecer para um determinado nivel da intensidade de I&D gerando uma relação crescente entre volume de negócios total e emprego. Estes resultados têm implicações importantes para os formuladores de políticas: as políticas de apoio â inovação devem ser corretamente adaptadas e monitoradas já que os resultados dependem das características das empresas beneficiárias. Além disso, a intensidade de I&D no PIB como alvo de políticas deve ser gerida com cuidado, uma vez que o denominador é endógeno e não linearmente dependente das despesas de investigação.

The 2007-2009 recession is characterized by: a large drop in employment, an unprecedented decline in firm entry, and a slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data, I show that financial constraints reduced employment growth in small relative to large firms by 4.8 to 10.5 percentage points. The effect of financial constraints is robust to controlling for aggregate demand and is particularly strong in small young firms. I show in a heterogeneous firms model with endogenous firm entry and financial constraints that a large financial shock results in a long-lasting recession caused by a missing generation of entrants.

According to numerous accounts, the Great Recession has left many recent college graduates struggling to find jobs that utilize their education. However, a look at the data on the employment outcomes for recent graduates over the past two decades suggests that such difficulties are not a new phenomenon: individuals just beginning their careers often need time to transition into the labor market. Still, the percentage who are unemployed or “underemployed”—working in a job that typically does not require a bachelor’s degree—has risen, particularly since the 2001 recession. Moreover, the quality of the jobs held by the underemployed has declined, with today’s recent graduates increasingly accepting low-wage jobs or working part-time.

We study the effect of public health insurance eligibility on labor supply by exploiting the largest public health insurance disenrollment in the history of the United States. In 2005, approximately 170,000 Tennessee residents abruptly lost public health insurance coverage. Using both across- and within-state variation in exposure to the disenrollment, we estimate large increases in labor supply, primarily along the extensive margin. The increased employment is concentrated among individuals working at least 20 hours per week and receiving private, employer-provided health insurance. We explore the dynamic effects of the disenrollment and find an immediate increase in job search behavior and a steady rise in both employment and health insurance coverage following the disenrollment. Our results suggest a significant degree of "employment lock" - workers employed primarily in order to secure private health insurance coverage. The results also suggest that the Affordable Care Act - which similarly affects adults not traditionally eligible for public health insurance - may cause large reductions in the labor supply of low-income adults.

The paper analyzes the regional disparities brought by each employment status concerning the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years of age and over especially focusing on the regional agglomeration. Specifically, it investigates the characteristics of spatial autocorrelations or geographical clusters based on the statistics of the regional specialization. Thus it definitely investigates the degree of agglomeration based on each specialization state, not the original data from the statistics of each labor category such as the number of the unemployed persons or the simple unemployment rates. The method is based on the share and rate calculations which would be almost equivalent to the well-known Location Quotient technique. With respect to the geographical agglomeration, some interesting regional characteristics of the working population have been found by mainly an exploratory way. From some results, several states such as North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska indicate specific regional features whi

This paper provides an evidence-based assessment of the current situation prevailing in the Greek market for skills and jobs. The synthesis of available skills intelligence for Greece, the country most severely affected by the global economic crisis of 2008, is crucial as it is currently faced with tough decisions regarding the allocation of limited resources in the face of economic austerity. The paper engages in a comparative overview of Greece's performance on flagship Europe 2020 indicators on education and employment in relation to the EU. An empirical analysis of the incidence and determinants of skill mismatches in the Greek and EU job markets is also undertaken, using data from several European data sources. It is argued that a stronger vocational education and training pillar may constitute a valuable option for strengthening the links between the initial educational system and the labour market in Greece. But tackling skill mismatch requires skill development and skill utilization policies in the workplace. A stronger commitment to enhancing the skill content of jobs by employers via the adoption of high performance workplace practices, investment in continuous training, less reliance on casual labour and policies to support small and medium-sized enterprises in the war for talent are necessary if Greece is to make the most of its rich skills reserves.

We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of the fasting period due to the rotating Islamic calendar. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: 1) longer Ramadan fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and 2) it increases subjective well-being among Muslims. We then examine labor market outcomes, and find that these results cannot be primarily explained by a direct reduction in labor productivity due to fasting. Instead, the evidence indicates that Ramadan affects Muslims' relative preferences regarding work and religiosity, suggesting that the mechanism operates at least partly by changing beliefs and values that influence labor supply and occupational choices beyond the month of Ramadan itself. Together, our results indicate that religious practices can affect labor supply choices in ways that have negative implications for economic performance, but that nevertheless increase subjective well-being among followers.

Employees in the UK are not being denied their fair share of economic growth, according to research by João Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen. Their investigation of claims that wage growth has become 'decoupled' from productivity growth finds that decoupling has been overstated and cannot be used to justify redressing the balance between wages and profits. They show that the share of UK income going to labour is basically the same now as it was 40 years ago. The real problem is inequality among employees: wage inequality has risen massively since the late 1970s. Improving skills in the bottom half of the education distribution will boost productivity and real wages.

We simulate corporate tax reform in a single good, five-region (U.S., Europe, Japan, China, India) model, featuring skilled and unskilled labor, detailed region-specific demographics and fiscal policies. Eliminating the model's U.S. corporate income tax produces rapid and dramatic increases in the model's level of U.S. investment, output, and real wages, making the tax cut self-financing to a significant extent. Somewhat smaller gains arise from revenue-neutral base broadening, specifically cutting the corporate tax rate to 9 percent and eliminating tax loop-holes.

Many studies have been conducted to analyze the effect of stricter Employment Protection Legislation (EPL). However, almost all of them has focused on an ex-post impact; leaving aside a second but equally important channel: expectations. This paper aims to analyze the role of expectations on peruvian formal and informal labor market; using news as our identification variable. We use the monthly number of news related to the approval of the General Labor Law (GLL), a proposal entailing future stronger labor rigidities, from January 2001 to May 2012. Using the Permanent Employment Survey (EPE), we find a negative relation between expectations towards a stricter labor market and both employment and average income. News mainly affect formal occupied EAP, arousing a substitution effect from formal to informal employment. We also discover that the effect of expectations differs in periods with higher versus lower GDP growth. Finally, we find some evidence supporting news having a cumulative effect: the larger the previous stock of news, the weaker the effect.

The circular interplay between demography-employment-productivity-PayGo is investigated for Italy and Italian geographical repartitions. Looking forward to the mid-long run, the paper offers simulations of the burden each effective worker and each active citizen will have to bear to finance via pay-as-you-go public health care provisions and pensions. This paper is completely self standing but, at the same time, it is part of the wider project "Present and Future of PayGo in Italy, Europe and Us". It constitutes the third chapter of this project, the first and the second being uploaded on MPRA as well. Other chapters follow. nicola c. salerno (nicola.salerno@tin.it)

Gender stereotypes are well established also among women. Yet, a recent literature suggests that learning from other women experience about the effects of maternal employment on children outcomes may increase female labor force participation. To further explore this channel, we design a randomized survey experiment, in which 1500 Italian women aged 20 to 40 are exposed to two informational treatments on the positive consequences of formal childcare on children future educational attainments. Surprisingly, we find that women reduce their intended labor supply. However, this result hides strong heterogenous effects: high educated non-mothers are persuaded by the informational treatments to increase their intended use of formal child care (and to pay more); whereas low educated non-mothers to reduce their intended labor supply. These findings are consistent with women responding to monetary incentive and/or having different preferences for maternal care. These heterogenous responses across women send a warning signal about the true effectiveness — in terms of take up rates — of often advocated public policies regarding formal child care.

It is widely believed that in the US wage growth has fallen massively behind productivity growth. Recently, it has also been suggested that the UK is starting to follow the same path. Analysts point to the much faster growth of GDP per hour than median wages. We distinguish between "net decoupling" - the difference in growth of GDP per hour deflated by the GDP deflator and average compensation deflated by the same index - and "gross decoupling" - the difference in growth of GDP per hour deflated by the GDP deflator and median wages deflated by a measure of consumer price inflation. We would expect that over the long-run real compensation growth deflated by the producer price (the labour costs that employers face) should track real labour productivity growth (value added per hour), so net decoupling should only occur if labour's share falls as a proportion of gross GDP, something that rarely happens over sustained periods. We show that over the past 40 years that there is almost no net decoupling in the UK, although there is evidence of substantial gross decoupling in the US and, to a lesser extent, in the UK. This difference between gross and net decoupling can be accounted for essentially three factors (i) compensation inequality (which means the average compensation is growing faster than the median compensation), (ii) the wedge between compensation (which includes employer-provided benefits like pensions and health insurance) and wages which do not and (iii) differences in the GDP deflator and the consumer price deflator (i.e. producer wages and consumption wages). These three factors explain basically ALL of the gross decoupling leaving only a small amount of "net decoupling". The first two factors are important in both countries, whereas the difference in price deflators is only important in the US.

We investigate the relationship between the main indicators of the labour market in Russia. We try to construct a model of the Russian labour market and identify key relationships. Our special attention is drawn to the impact of the crisis on the Russian labour market and influence of oil price on labor market indicators. We estimated two types of models. They are systems of simultaneous equations model (SEM) and VECM. We received that real wage in Russia are more flexible than employment. During the crisis period real wage was decreasing. SEM model shows that real wage positively depends on real oil price. While the number of employed and unemployment don’t depend on real oil price.

Between 1992 and 2009, 30 US states adopted laws mandating that health insurance plans cover screenings for prostate cancer. Because prostate cancer screenings are used almost exclusively by men over age 50, these mandates raise the cost of insuring older men relative to other groups. This article uses a triple-difference empirical strategy to take advantage of this quasi-random natural experiment in raising the cost of employing older workers. Using Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data from the March Supplement of the Current Population Survey, I find that the increased cost of insuring older workers results in their receiving 2.8% lower hourly wages, being 2% less likely to be employed and being 0.7% less likely to have employer-sponsored health insurance.

Female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2011 are surprisingly low and have stagnated since the late 1980s. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wage and education levels, married women's labor force participation hovered around 18 percent. Analysis of five large cross-sectional micro surveys shows that a combination of supply and demand effects have contributed to this stagnation. The main supply side factors are rising household incomes and husband's education as well as the falling selectivity of highly educated women. On the demand side, the sectors that draw in female workers have expanded least, so that changes in the sectoral structure of employment alone would have actually led to declining participation rates.

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive one disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and social backgrounds while providing alternatives to conflict. Unfortunately, in many African countries, unemployment rates are low and growth is seldom jobless. Regrettably, most of the poor work long hours and cannot make ends meet while the violation of basic human rights is not uncommon. Again, youth unemployment and unmet job expectations are alarming. Consequently, this paper provides a framework that cuts across sectors and shows that the best policy responses vary across African countries (depending on their levels of development, endowments, demography and institutions). Thus, at all stages of development, forcing economic production to spread evenly across areas is both elusive and expensive. Policy makers should therefore identify and execute strategies that balance development outcomes across areas by means of domestic integration instruments. However, in places where integration is hardest, the policy response should be comprehensively total: institutions that unite, infrastructure that connects, interventions that target, incentives that motivate as well as information and communication technologies that enables or drives.

We document in two very different datasets an inverted U-shaped relationship between work experience and entrepreneurship among movers. The first dataset consists of 1,248, U.S. lawyers who were forced to seek alternative employment after the sudden dissolutions of their employers. The second consists of over 7.5 million observations on Swedish workers, where job separation is predominantly unrelated to job destruction. Our empirical results are consistent with a model of stochastic accumulation of employer-specific and transferable skills, where the mix between the two is not fully observable to outside parties.

Conventional labor supply studies assume constant eligibility monitoring of income-tested program participants, but the time between two consecutive eligibility certifications (the “recertification period”) can be as long as a year for Medicaid/CHIP recipients. In this paper, I study the optimal recertification period for this population. A long recertification period, while reducing monitoring costs, is predicted to induce program participation via temporary income adjustments. However, I find no support for this prediction using the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Given this, I propose a simple framework to compute the optimal recertification period and find 12 months to be its lower bound. (JEL H75, I18, I38, J13, J22)

We study the long-run effects of one of the most ambitious regional development programs in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Using as controls authorities that were proposed but never approved by Congress, we find that the TVA led to large gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed when the program's subsidies ended. Gains in manufacturing employment, by contrast, continued to intensify well after federal transfers had lapsed--a pattern consistent with the presence of agglomeration economies in manufacturing. Because manufacturing paid higher wages than agriculture, this shift raised aggregate income in the TVA region for an extended period of time. Economists have long cautioned that the local gains created by place-based policies may be offset by losses elsewhere. We develop a structured approach to assessing the TVA's aggregate consequences that is applicable to other place-based policies. In our model, the TVA affects the national economy both directly through infrastructure improvements and indirectly through agglomeration economies. The model's estimates suggest that the TVA's direct investments yielded a significant increase in national manufacturing productivity, with benefits exceeding the program's costs. However, the program's indirect effects appear to have been limited: agglomeration gains in the TVA region were offset by losses in the rest of the country. Spillovers in manufacturing appear to be the rare example of a localized market failure that cancels out in the aggregate. JEL Codes: R11, J20, N92, O40. Copyright 2014, Oxford University Press.

U radu se analizira zadovoljstvo starijih radnika kao čimbenik koji, zajedno s drugim osobnim i radnim čimbenicima, može značajno utjecati na odluku da se odgodi umirovljenje kada takvu odluku donosi pojedinac. Polazeći od činjenice da je stopa zaposlenosti starijih radnika u Sloveniji u 2011. godini bila najniža u Europskoj uniji, cilj je ovoga rada odrediti razinu zadovoljstva starijih radnika poslom u Sloveniji u usporedbi s Europskom unijom, analizirati njezine dimenzije, specifična obilježja u svezi s dobi, spolom, sektorom gospodarske aktivnosti i tipom zanimanja, kao i ustanoviti čime je ta razina ponajviše uvjetovana. Statistička analiza rezultata Petog europskog istraživanja uvjeta rada (the Fifth European Working Conditions Survey) iz 2010. godine pokazuje da se Slovenija nalazi na 15. mjestu među zemljama članicama Europske unije u pogledu zadovoljstva poslom starijih radnika, te stoga zaostaje za prosjekom Europske unije. Iako su slovenski stariji radnici, kao i njihove europske kolege, najzadovoljniji s obavljanjem korisnog rada, a najmanje zadovoljni s izgledima za napredovanje u karijeri, usporedba s drugim zemljama članicama Europske unije pokazuje da su relativno nezadovoljni s uvjetima rada, plaćom i adekvatnošću motivacije za najbolje moguće obavljanje posla, a relativno su zadovoljni s obavljanjem korisnog rada i sa svojim kolegama. Analiza ujedno ukazuje i na to da je razina zadovoljstva starijih radnika poslom najviše uvjetovana njihovim zadovoljstvom s adekvatnom motivacijom za najbolje moguće obavljanje posla., This paper deals with the study of older workers’ job satisfaction as a factor that, combined with other personal and job-related factors, can significantly influence the decision to postpone retirement when this decision is in the hands of an individual. Starting from the fact that the employment rate of older workers in Slovenia in 2011 was the lowest in the EU, the paper aims to establish the level of older workers’ job satisfaction in Slovenia compared to the EU, analyse its dimensions, its specifics related to age, gender, sector of economic activities and type of profession, as well as ascertain what determines it the most. A statistical analysis of the results of the Fifth European Working Conditions Survey of 2010 reveals that Slovenia ranks 15th among the EU member states in terms of older workers’ job satisfaction, thus lagging behind the EU average. While Slovenian older workers, the same as their European counterparts, are most satisfied with doing useful work and the least with their prospects for career advancement, a comparison with other EU member states shows that they are relatively dissatisfied with working conditions, salary and adequacy of the motivation to give one’s best performance, and relatively satisfied with doing useful work and with their colleagues. The analysis also shows that the level of older workers’ job satisfaction in Slovenia is determined most by their satisfaction with the adequacy of the motivation to give one’s best performance.

Concerns about the quality of state-financed nursing home care has led to the wide-scale adoption by states of pass-through subsidies, in which Medicaid reimbursement rates are directly tied to staffing expenditure. We examine the effects of Medicaid pass-through on nursing home staffing and quality of care by adapting a two-step FGLS method that addresses clustering and state-level temporal autocorrelation. We find that pass-through subsidies increases staffing by about 1% on average and 2.7% in nursing homes with a low share of Medicaid patients. Furthermore, pass-through subsidies reduce the incidences of pressure ulcer worsening by about 0.9%.

We discuss the two-way link between culture and economic growth. We present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is risky and requires investments that affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile. As a consequence, the occupational choice of entrepreneurship hinges on risk tolerance and patience. Parents expecting their children to become entrepreneurs have an incentive to instill these two values in their children. Cultural transmission is Beckerian, i.e., parents are driven by the desire to maximize their children's happiness. We also consider, in an extension, a paternalistic motive for preference transmission. The growth rate of the economy depends on the fraction of the population choosing an entrepreneurial career. How many entrepreneurs there are in a society hinges, in turn, on parental investments in children's patience and risk tolerance. There can be multiple balanced-growth paths, where in faster-growing countries more people exhibit an "entrepreneurial spirit." We discuss applications of models of endogenous preferences to the analysis of socio-economic transformations, such as the British Industrial Revolution. We also discuss empirical studies documenting the importance of culture and preference heterogeneity for economic growth.

We find large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers to interact and play with their children in ways that would develop their children's cognitive and personality skills. We re-interviewed the study participants 20 years after the intervention. Stimulation increased the average earnings of participants by 42 percent. Treatment group earnings caught up to the earnings of a matched non-stunted comparison group. These findings show that psychosocial stimulation early in childhood in disadvantaged settings can have substantial effects on labor market outcomes and reduce later life inequality.

Female labor supply can insure households against shocks to paternal employment. The paper estimates whether the female labor supply response to a paternal employment shock differs by eligibility to maternity employment protection. We exploit time-state variation in the implementation of unpaid maternity leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in the US which increased employment protection from 0 to 12 weeks. We find that mothers eligible for FMLA speed up their return to work in response to a paternal shock, with a conditional probability of being in work 53% higher than in households with no paternal shock. In contrast, there was a negligible insurance response for mothers with no employment protection.

This paper considers the relationship between local economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more- and less-disaggregated analyses – including an investigation of the migratory response to changing economic conditions – I update earlier state-level analyses of mortality and infant health and then consider how the estimated effects vary when the analysis is conducted at differing levels of geographic aggregation. This analysis reveals that more-disaggregated analyses severely understate the extent to which downturns are associated with improved health. Further investigation reveals that county economic conditions have an independent effect on mortality but that state and regional economic conditions are stronger predictors. I also leverage county-level data to explore heterogeneity in the link between county economic conditions and health across states, demonstrating that local downturns lead to the greatest improvements in health in low-income states.

This contribution examines the major features of UAE’s economy, its factors of strengths, undelying also its critical aspects. Furthermore, the work focuses on the crucial factors that characterize a diversified knowledge economy and indicates the policies that the economy of the United Arab Emirates must pursue in order to improve its performance and be a competitive economy at a global level. In addition, the paper tries to single out the new business sectors for the diversification and the development of the UAE’s economy.

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near Pittsburgh led that city to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms led to a dearth of entrepreneurial human capital across several generations. We test this idea by looking at the spatial location of past mines across the United States: proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with bigger firms and fewer start-ups in the middle of the 20th century. We use mines as an instrument for our entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth; this connection works primarily through lower employment growth of start- ups in cities that are closer to mines. These effects hold in cold and warm regions alike and in industries that are not directly related to mining, such as trade, finance and services. We use quantile instrumental variable regression techniques and identify mostly homogeneous effects throughout the conditional city growth distribution.

The West European Employment Problem. -The most characteristic feature of the unemployment experience in Western Europe is the inability of the unemployment rate to return to pre-shock levels. In addition to rather restrictive demand management at various occasions, the main reasons for this persistence of unemployment are probably the long-term paths of real and relative wages, wide marginal tax wedges, disincentives to hiring and job search and possibly also an erosion of social norms against living off benefits. It is argued that a package of complementary policy reforms is necessary to overcome the unemployment persistence in Western Europe.

This study aimed at determining the factors of early retirement in Denmark by making use of longitudinal panel data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The outcome variable of interest was the self-assessed employment situation at the time of the interview. The binary outcome retired/not retired was regressed on covariate data from the preceding wave, thereby modeling potential factors contributing to a later decision to retire. There were 651 eligible observations, of which 160 (24.6%) participants took early retirement. The strongest factors encouraging early retirement were unemployment, inadequate support in difficult work situations, the use of drugs the week before the interview (for high cholesterol, high blood pressure and other medical conditions), and the existence of grandchildren, whereas greater reluctance to retire early was found in participants who had a chronic illness or disability, a feeling of sadness or depression during the month before the interview, at least one natural parent still alive, higher expectations of the government raising the retirement age, and better grip strength.

Despite the recent financial crisis the UK financial pay premium has continued to rise. To some extent this is a consequence of increased skill intensity in the finance sector, but this paper shows that finance workers have higher cognitive skills, on average, and this partly explains their higher wages. These are significant across all post-secondary education groups and not just those at the top. However, after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity we still find unexplainable rents to finance sector workers which are largely a consequence of bonuses. Though we also show that finance workers are more likely to be insecure about their job especially those that receive higher bonuses. In keeping with the existing literature on inequality we estimate demand and supply models to explain increasing inequality between finance workers vis-à-vis other workers. We find that finance workers are not perfect substitutes for non-finance workers in production, which is consistent with them having higher cognitive skills. Finally, we find relative demand shifts in favour of finance sector workers which are partially correlated with increased financial innovation and technical change, but most importantly we find that these demand shifts are slowing down.

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'Journal of Urban Economics' . This paper explores the interactions between congestion pricing and a tax-distorted labor market within a monocentric urban equilibrium model. We compute the efficiency gains of various second-best policies, i.e. combinations of toll schemes and revenue recycling programs, with a predetermined level of public revenue. We find that 35% of the space-varying road tax does not reflect marginal external congestion costs, but rather functions as a Ramsey-Mirrlees tax, i.e. an efficiency enhancing mechanism allowing space differentiation of the labor tax. Such a space-varying tax adds a quite different motivation to road pricing, since it can produce large welfare gains even in the absence of congestion. We show that both a cordon toll and a flat kilometer tax achieve over 80% of these gains when combined with specific types of revenue recycling, such as labor tax cuts or public transport subsidies. Sensitivity analysis shows that the optimal type of revenue recycling depends on the level of inefficiency in the provision of public transport prior to the introduction of congestion pricing.

We establish a correlation between the hierarchical structure of a firm and the likelihood of business creation among its former employees, using a sample of 16 million observations of Swedish workers and a novel proxy for hierarchies based on occupation data. Conditional on firm size and many other variables, employees in firms with more layers are less likely to enter entrepreneurship, to become selfemployed, and to switch to another employer. The effects of layers are much stronger for business creation than for jobswitching and they are stronger for entrepreneurship than for selfemployment. We discuss two potential explanations for the distinctive hierarchy effect we find. Part of the effect could be to be due to preference sorting by employees, and part due to employees in firms with fewer layers having a broader range of skills. One test showing that the probability of entrepreneurship increases with their prior rank in an organization is consistent with ability sorting and inconsistent with preference sorting.

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, income, labor market, inheritances, financial decision making in the partnership) that might explain this wealth gap. We find that all factors contribute to the explanation of the wealth gap within partnerships, with inheritances and income being particularly relevant. Furthermore, we find that specific characteristics (e.g. self-employment, no migration background, inheritances, high income) that decrease the wealth gap for women increase it for men. For men the respective coefficients are even stronger in absolute terms. When examining intra-partnership financial decision making, we find the gap to be significantly smaller when the female manages the money and larger if the male partner has the last word in financial decisions.

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Wirkungen des Elterngeldes auf das Geburtenverhalten in West- und Ostdeutschland. Insbesondere wurde anhand der Daten des Mikrozensus 2010 empirisch getestet, inwieweit die gesetzten Anreize zu verkürzten Geburtenabständen tatsächlich wirksam sind. Allgemein lässt sich festhalten, dass sich die Neuregelungen signifikant auf das Tempo einer Folgegeburt innerhalb der ersten drei Jahre nach vorhergegangener Geburt auswirken. Dennoch zeigen sich erhebliche Unterschiede zwischen dem Westen und dem Osten der Republik.

Structure of the economy refers to the shares of the broad sectors agriculture, industry, and services in gross domestic income (GDP) and employment. On the other hand, structural transformation refers the change in these shares over time. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of the forces behind structural transformation and investigate the link between economic growth and structural transformation in Turkey. The study begins by reviewing and evaluating the literature on structural transformation. Then the study empirically investigates the process of transformation and its link to economic growth on the basis of a multi–sector growth model. The study compares the structural transformation process in Turkey with that of some other countries on the basis of the findings of similar studies. The study concludes by making sub-sectoral economic policy suggestions in order to raise economic growth.

This work examines the effect of cultural differences on self-employment. All the individuals considered in the analysis are second-generation immigrants who were born and live under the same laws and institutions in the US. Following an epidemiological approach, the variation in self-employment rates by ancestors’ national origin can be considered as supporting evidence of the effect of culture on self-employment. Our results show that culture has quantitatively significant effects on self-employment. This finding is robust to alternative specifications and to the introduction of several controls. Additional analysis shows that there are differences in the impact of culture on self-employment by gender, in that men are more sensitive than women to culture; and by economic activity, in that those individuals involved in professional, scientific, and technical activities, and those in accommodation and food service activities, are more affected by the impact of cultural differences. We also examine the transmission of culture, observing an important role of the inter-generational transfer of culture, although the impact of culture on self-employment diminishes from generation to generation.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on fertility decisions of Italian working women using administrative data. We exploit a reform that introduced in 1990 costs for dismissals unmotivated by a ‘fair cause’ or ‘justified motive’ in firms below 15 employees and left firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. We use this quasi-experimental setup to study the hypothesis that increased EPL reduces future job insecurity and positively affects a female worker's proneness to take childbearing decisions. We use a difference in difference (OLS-DID) model to control for possible period-invariant sorting bias and an instrumental variable (IV-DID) model to account for time-varying endogeneity of the treatment status. We find that reduced economic insecurity following a strengthening of the EPL regime has a positive and sizable effect on fertility decisions of Italian working women. This result is robust to a number of checks regarding possible interactions with other policy reforms occurring around 1990, changes in the sample of workers and firms, and use of an alternative set of exclusion restrictions.

Few adolescents in the developing world receive sufficient guidance to make crucial life decisions during the transition from secondary to postsecondary education and into the labor market. Consequently, a significant number of graduates regret the decisions they make. The excessive rigidity of most higher education systems prevents lateral shifts between programs or from technical to university education. In addition, in Peru limited information about the range of programs and their labor market outcomes, combined with an increasing number of low-quality providers, contribute to the problem. A recent survey of Peru’s urban working-age population revealed that only 35 percent of young professionals (ages 22 to 30) were satisfied with the postsecondary choices they had made. This implies that, if given the opportunity, nearly two-thirds of young professionals would choose another career or institution, a different degree (university or technical), or would have entered the labor market directly after completing their secondary education.

This paper uses 2006 Canadian census data to examine patterns of wage differentials between immigrants and Canadian natives across the public and private sectors. Results reveal that the wage gap is much more a private sector issue than a public sector issue: the average wage gap is in favour of Canadian natives in the private sector but in favour of immigrants in the public sector; compared to natives, immigrants earn significantly less per year of domestic schooling and per year of domestic work experience in the private sector than in the public sector; foreign schooling and foreign work experience are less rewarded in the private sector than in the public sector; and, immigrants from non-traditional source countries are more at a disadvantage in the private sector than in the public sector.

In recent years, students have been paying more to attend college and earning less upon graduation—trends that have led many observers to question whether a college education remains a good investment. However, an analysis of the economic returns to college since the 1970s demonstrates that the benefits of both a bachelor’s degree and an associate’s degree still tend to outweigh the costs, with both degrees earning a return of about 15 percent over the past decade. The return has remained high in spite of rising tuition and falling earnings because the wages of those without a college degree have also been falling, keeping the college wage premium near an all-time high while reducing the opportunity cost of going to school.

In this paper, we document the intensive and extensive margin adjustments of labor market in Turkey and US.We find that both margins are important. More interestingly, the weight of intensive margin adjustment is substantially smaller than that of the extensive margin in both countries. This is robust to using various data sets and methods. Common wisdom and some theory would expect these countries to divert from each other significantly, because they represent two extreme points of labor market exibility with respect to OECD Employment Protection Index. A possible explanation for our empirical result is the sizable informal sector and self employment in Turkey as it might reduce the large hiring and firing costs and encourage firms towards extensive margin adjustment, and high hours per worker which might restrict the intensive margin adjustment, especially during booms.

Despite well-documented convergence during the later years of the 20th century, labor force attachment remains markedly higher for men than for women. The current paper employs rich longitudinal registry data to investigate the intergenerational transfer of the gender gap in labor force participation. We explore the extent that family- and community-level characteristics, measured in childhood, differentially predict the likelihood of employment for adult Norwegian men and women. Drawing on theories pertaining to the importance of information, skills and gender norms transfer, our empirical analysis demonstrates that a parsimonious set of family- and community-level characteristics can explain a substantial part of the gender gap. These results suggest that female labor force participation is constrained by the intergenerational transfer of beliefs and expectations about family and work.

Se estudia los efectos de cambios en el salario mínimo utilizando una base de datos que registra 7 cambios consecutivos de este indicador (entre 2002 y 2011). Se estima que 1 millón de trabajadores tienen ingresos en la vecindad del salario mínimo. Los efectos sobre el empleo son decrecientes en términos absolutos según tamaño de empresa: efecto moderado en grandes empresas y efectos mayores en empresas pequeñas. Finalmente, se sugiere que los cambios en el ingreso están correlacionados con los cambios en el salario mínimo, este resultado se sustenta en los movimientos de la distribución del ingreso ante cambios en el salario mínimo y según un modelo que captura los determinantes del ingreso. Los resultados son robustos a la alta rotación del mercado laboral peruano, es decir al considerar las transiciones empleo - empleo en los cálculos.