100,449 research outputs found

    Essays in Labor Economics and International Economics

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    This dissertation includes three essays in labor economics and international economics. The first essay studies the relationship between the amount of a loan demanded by firms and their labor demand. Governments have developed small loan programs with a reduced interest rate to decrease unemployment in Iran. Using longitudinal, firm-level data from the years 2005 to 2010 in Iran, this study examines the effect of one Iranian province\u27s loan program on employment based on two different methods of evaluating causal effects. The first method applies a difference-in-difference fixed effects matching estimator to estimate the employment effect of the program. The second method applies the generalized propensity score to estimate the impact of the amount of a loan on employment. The results from the first method suggest that the loan program has a positive and significant effect on the employment of treated firms. The results from the second method suggest that the estimated employment effects increase with the amount of the loan, whereas there is a decrease in the marginal effects of an additional amount of loan. The second essay investigates how the difference between firms\u27 inflation expectations, measured by the loan amounts they demand, and actual inflation affects their labor demand. In addition, I examine the relationship between firms\u27 inflation expectations and wages in an individualistic bargaining model in which individual workers bargain over wages with their employers. Theoretically, the model shows that a firm\u27s actual labor demand meets its expected labor demand if the firm has a rational expectation regarding inflation. On the other hand, the firm\u27s actual labor demand does not meet its expected labor demand if the firm cannot forecast inflation correctly. Empirically, I use firm-level data from a province in Iran between 2004 and 2011 to test the model\u27s predictions. The empirical results confirm that there is a specific loan amount for which firms\u27 expected labor demands meet their actual ones. In contrast, there is a gap between firms\u27 expected labor demands and their actual ones for any other loan amount. Furthermore, the result indicates that there is a positive and significant relationship between the loan amounts demanded by firms and wages. These results can be explained by firms\u27 inflation expectations and show that they are not consistent with full-information rational expectations models, though they are not far away from them. The third essay examines the effects of the trade sanctions imposed on Iran in 2010 on employment, demand for skilled labor, and wages. I use industrial manufacturing data that cover 10 years before and 5 years after the sanction, 28 provinces, and more than 200 different industries. The results regarding the employment impact of the trade sanctions show that there was remarkable job destruction, most notably in domestically active industries, during the sanction period. The decomposition of the increase in the aggregate demand for skilled labor sheds light on the fact that it comes from labor reallocation within industries, not from across industries. The trade sanctions adversely affected both exporters\u27 and non-exporters\u27 total-factor productivity; however, non-exporters endured a larger negative impact. This induced biased technological change between exporters and non-exporters, which resulted in a market share reallocation towards exporters. As a result, the demand for skilled production workers and their per-capita real average wage increased, whereas the demand for non-production workers and their per-capita real average wage decreased during the sanction years. This opposite effect is explained by the elasticity of substitution

    Whom do high-growth firms hire?

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    We study employment and new hires among high-growth firms (HGFs) in the Swedish knowledge-intensive sectors 1999–2002. Using matched employer–employee data, we find that HGFs are more likely to employ young people,poorly educated workers, immigrants, and individuals who experienced longer unemployment periods. However, these patterns seem ontingent on the stageof the firm’s evolution. HGFs that have already realized some rapid growth are more likely to hire individuals from other firms, even though immigrants are still overrepresented among new hires. In the case of both HGF employees and HGF new hires, employment opportunities in HGFs are provided by young and small firms

    The Benefits to Employers of Raising Workforce Basic Skills: A Review of the Literature

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    Job Loss and Effects on Firms and Workers

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    This paper serves as an introduction and (incomplete) survey of the wide-ranging literature on job loss. We begin with a discussion of job stability in the US and the commitment between firms and workers, and how this has changed in recent years. We then focus on the short and long-term consequences to workers (i.e. wages, health outcomes) following a layoff, and the effect which mass layoffs have on future firm performance. The changing nature of these relationships over the past several decades is a central theme of this paper. We review the common data sources used to examine these questions, and identify many influential papers on each topic. Additionally, we discuss alternative policies to the typical mass layoff, such as worksharing

    Job Flows and Establishment Characteristics: Variations Across U.S. Metropolitan Areas

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    This paper addresses the role played within metropolitan areas by heterogeneous agent models of constant churning. The evidence shows positive relationships between job turnover, young establishments, and metropolitan employment growth. Most areas, however, differ in their levels of job creation rather than job destruction. Results persist after controlling for regional differences in industry, but less so when controlling for differences in the establishment age distribution, and are consistent overall with standard models of creative destruction. Evidence from several entering cohorts, however, contradicts the vintage replacement process of creative destruction models. Namely, job destruction decreases as establishments age and there is no clear inverse relation between establishment entry rates and exit ages. These patterns are instead consistent with a turnover process seen in standard models of firm learning. Further evidence suggests that these patterns vary systematically with the overall employment growth of a region. Together, the results suggest that (i) processes of both creative destruction and firm learning may matter for local labor dynamics, but future models will have to reconcile with this new evidence, and (ii) intrinsic local factors, such as the “business climate”, may affect the dynamics of both processes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39995/3/wp609.pd

    Changing an Unfavorable Employment Reputation: A Longitudinal Examination

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    Although a favorable employment reputation plays an important role in generating a large and qualified pool of job applicants for an organization (Rynes & Cable, 2003), little research has investigated whether organizations can improve applicants’ existing unfavorable employment reputation perceptions. Results from a four-week longitudinal experiment using 222 student job seekers revealed that participants’ employment reputation perceptions improved after exposure to recruitment practices and followed diminishing returns trajectories over time. High information recruitment practices (e.g., personal communication from a recruiter) from both single and multiple sources were more effective for changing unfavorable employment reputation perceptions than repeated mere exposure to the organization (i.e., exposure to only the company logo), and high information practices from multiple sources were the most effective overall. Finally, participants reporting less familiarity with the organization experienced greater reputation change across the four weeks, but only for participants in the mere exposure condition

    Profit sharing, separation and training

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    Theory presents two broad channels through which profit sharing can increase worker training. First, it directly increases training by alleviating hold-up problems and/or by encouraging co-workers to provide training. Second, it indirectly increases training by reducing worker separation and increasing training investments' amortization period. This article provides the first attempt at separately identifying these two channels. We confirm a strong direct effect, but also identify a weaker, more tenuous indirect effect. This suggests that profit sharing's influence on training is unlikely to operate primarily through its reduction on separations while simultaneously presenting the first evidence confirming the prediction of an indirect causation

    Worker Flows, Job Flows and Firm Wage Policies: An Analysis of Slovenia

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    Like many transition economies, Slovenia is undergoing profound changes in the workings of the labor market with potentially greater flexibility in terms of both wage and employment adjustment. We investigate the impact of the changing labor market for Slovenia using unique longitudinal matched employer-employee data that permits measurement of employment transitions and wages for workers and links of the workers to the firms with whom they are employed. We can thus measure worker flows and job flows in a comprehensive and integrated manner. We find a high pace of job flows in Slovenia especially for young, small, private and foreign owned firms and for young, less educated workers. While job flows have approached the rates observed in developed market economies, the excess of worker flows above job flows is lower than that observed in market economies. A key factor in the patterns of the worker and job flows is the determination of wages in Slovenia. A base wage schedule provides strict guidelines for minimum wages for different skill categories. However, firms are permitted to offer higher wages to an individual based upon the success of the worker and/or the firm. Our analysis shows that firms deviate from the base wage schedule significantly and that the idiosyncratic wage policies of firms are closely related to the observed pattern of worker and job flows at the firm. Firms with more flexible wages (measured as less compression of wages within the firm) have less employment instability and also are able to improve the match quality of its workers.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39871/3/wp486.pd
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