Wages, Implicit Contracts, and the Business Cycle: Evidence from a European Panel

This paper examines the cyclical behavior of hours and wages in a unique panel of 11 European countries, and documents signi?cant history dependence in wages. Workers who experience favorable market conditions during their tenure on the job, have higher wages, and work fewer labor hours. Unobserved differences in productivity, such as varying job quality, or match-speci?c productivity are not likely to explain this variation. The results instead point to the importance of contractual arrangements in wage determination. In economies with decentralized bargaining practices, such arrangements resemble self-enforcing insurance contracts with onesided commitment (by the employer). On the other hand, in countries with strong unions and centralized wage bargaining, wage behavior is better approximated by full-commitment insurance contracts.Business Cycles; Wage Rigidity; Implicit Contracts

Real wage growth over the business cycle:contractual versus spot markets

We study the wage growth of job stayers over the business cycle, and show that wage adjustments within a job spell display significant history dependence. This is at odds with the spot market model, which implies that the wage growth of a worker within a job spell depends solely on the change in the contemporaneous economic conditions. Instead, we find that workers hired during recessions, or those who experienced unfavorable economic conditions since they were hired, receive larger wage raises during expansions, and are subject to smaller wage cuts during downswings. The change in the contemporaneous conditions, on the other hand, is not a significant determinant of wage growth. Our findings are consistent with a model of implicit insurance contracts where neither the employer nor the worker can fully commit to the contract.Business Cycles,Wage Rigidity, Implicit Contracts, Cyclical Selection

Baby-boom, baby-bust and the Great Depression

The baby-boom and subsequent baby-bust have shaped much of the history of the second half of the 20th century; yet it is still largely unclear what caused them. This paper presents a new unified explanation of the fertility Boom-Bust that links the latter to the Great Depression and the subsequent economic recovery. We show that the 1929 Crash attracted young married women 20 to 34 years old in 1930 (whom we name D-cohort) in the labor market possibly via an added worker effect. Using several years of Census micro data, we further document that the same cohort kept entering into the market in the 1940s and 1950s as economic conditions improved, decreasing wages and reducing work incentives for younger women. Its retirement in the late 1950s and in the 1960s instead freed positions and created employment opportunities. Finally, we show that the entry of the D-cohort is associated with increased births in the 1950s, while its retirement turned the fertility Boom into a Bust in the 1960s. The work behavior of this cohort explains a large share of the changes in both yearly births and completed fertility of all cohorts involved

Reducing underage alcohol and tobacco use: Evidence from the introduction of vertical identification cards

From 1994-2009, forty-three states changed the design of their driver's license/state identification cards in an effort to reduce underage access to and consumption of alcohol and tobacco. In these states, individuals under the age of 21 are issued licenses that are vertically oriented, whereas licenses for individuals 21 and older retain a traditional horizontal shape. This paper examines the effect of this design change on underage alcohol and tobacco use. Using a difference-in-difference methodology, we find a reduction in drinking and smoking for 16 year olds. These results are robust to the inclusion of state-specific linear time trends, and are upheld in a triple difference model that uses a within state control group of teens that did not receive a vertical license to control for state-specific unobserved factors. Interestingly, we find that the effects of the design change are concentrated in the 1-2 years after a state begins issuing vertical licenses; there is little evidence of an effect of the license on underage consumption in the long-run. This finding is consistent with a scenario where, over time, teens substitute towards other methods of obtaining age-restricted products, and/or retailers continue to make underage sales

Occupations after WWII: The Legacy of Rosie the Riveter

WWII induced a dramatic increase in female labor supply, which persisted over time, particularly for women with higher education. Using Census micro data we study the qualitative aspects of this long term increase through the lenses of the occupations women held after the war. Almost two decades after its end, we find that WWII had lasting, albeit complex but interesting effects on the occupational landscape. It led to a significant increase in the presence of young women, who were of working age at the time of the war, in manufacturing and professional/managerial occupations, while it entailed a decrease in the presence of older cohorts in clerical. Though differently, the effects surprisingly extended to the next generation of women who were too young to be working at the time of the war. For this cohort, the increase was concentrated in clerical and manufacturing. The entry of this very young cohort in clerical jobs and the exit of the older, suggests within-gender crowding-out; the increased presence of both cohorts in manufacturing, that the legacy of the wartime Rosies permeated occupational choices

Local-regional richness relationship in fouling assemblages - Effects of succession

The number of species in a local habitat depends on local and regional processes. One common approach to explore ecological saturation of local richness has been to plot local versus regional richness. We expand this approach by incorporating two dimensions of diversity - taxonomic and functional - and different successional ages of marine fouling communities. In four different biogeographic regions (Mediterranean Sea, NE Atlantic, Western Baltic Sea and North Sea) 60 experimental units made from artificial substratum were deployed for colonization. Local richness was assessed as the average number of species and functional groups (FG) per unit area while regional richness was estimated as the estimated (Jack 2) asymptote of the accumulation curves for species or FG in local panel communities. Our findings indicate that the nature of the relationship between local and regional diversity is sensitive to successional stage and the dimension of diversity considered. However, as a general pattern, for taxonomic and functional richness, the slope of the local-regional relationship increased in the course of succession. We discuss how this pattern could have been produced by a combination of low number of recruiting species and incomplete competitive exclusion as is typical for early Successio

Healthcare payment reforms across western countries on three continents: Lessons from stakeholder preferences when asked to rate the supportiveness for fulfilling patients’ needs

International audienceTo test the hypothesis that care typology-being complex and highly unpredictable versus being clear-cut and highly predictable-guides healthcare payment preferences of physicians, policy makers, healthcare executives, and researchers. We collected survey data from 942 stakeholders across Canada, Europe, Oceania, and the United States. A total of 48 international societies invited their members to participate in our study. Study design Cross-sectional analysis of stakeholder survey data linked to four scenarios of care typology: primary prevention, trial-and-error care, standard care and network care. Principal findings We identified two “extremes”: (1) dominant preferences of physicians, who embraced fee for service (FFS), even when this precludes the advantages of other payment systems associated with a minimal risk of harm (OR 1.85 for primary prevention; OR 1.89 for standard care, compared to non-physicians); and (2) the dominant preferences of healthcare executives and researchers, who supported quality bonus or adjustment (OR 1.92) and capitation (OR 2.05), respectively, even when these could cause harm. Conclusions Based on exploratory findings, we can cautiously state that payment reform will prove to be difficult as long as physicians, healthcare executives, and researchers misalign payment systems with the nature of care. Replication studies are needed to (dis)confirm our findings within representative subsamples per area and stakeholder grou

Do international institutions matter? Socialization and international bureaucrats

A key component of (neo-)functionalist and constructivist approaches to the study of international organizations concerns staff socialization. Existing analyses of how, or indeed whether, staff develop more pro-internationalist attitudes over time draw predominantly on cross-sectional data. Yet, such data cannot address (self-)selection issues or capture the inherently temporal nature of attitude change. This article proposes an innovative approach to the study of international socialization using an explicitly longitudinal design. Analysing two waves of a large-scale survey conducted within the European Commission in 2008 and 2014, it examines the beliefs and values of the same individuals over time and exploits exogenous organizational changes to identify causal effects. Furthermore, the article theorizes and assesses specified scope conditions affecting socialization processes. Showing that international institutions do, in fact, influence value acquisition by individual bureaucrats, our results contest the widely held view that international organizations are not a socializing environment. Our analysis also demonstrates that age at entry and gender significantly affect the intensity of such value change