Proceedings of the Joint LEW13/ALMRW Conference

The proceeding from the Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand 2008 held in conjunction with the Australian Labour Market Research Workshop on December 11th and 12th 2008 atVictoria University of Wellington

Preface

This thirteenth conference in the series was held in December 2008 at Rutherford House on the Pipitea Campus of Victoria University of Wellington. After nearly 25 years of LEW conferences focused solely on New Zealand issues we decided to combine our thirteenth meeting with the Australian Labour Market Research Workshop (ALMRW). The resulting joint conference was the largest in the LEW series attracting papers from academics and graduate students from the major universities throughout Australiasia, many of the most prominent research organisations and an impressive number of staff within government departments

Preface

The twelfth conference on Labour, Employment and Work took place in November 2006, twenty two years after the first conference was held in May 1984. The purpose of these conferences has remained the same: communication among mainly New Zealand scholars on what continues to be this country 's most fundamental social and economic issue - our ability to provide adequate paid work for those seeking employment. Disseminating research into questions of labour, employment and work widely is one of the ways universities and the research community in general can make a contribution

Pride and the city

Pride in one's city is an individual, and collective as well as institutional response to urban conditions which may be harnessed in support of expanding urban facilities and services. Pride is likely to be felt most keenly by those who have a stake in the city and for this reason anecdotal reporting of urban pride in the media is subject to likely bias in favour of vested interests. In practice however we know very little about urban pride. The vast literature on urbanism does not appear to have identified any role for urban pride let alone indicating which cities gather pride or who among its inhabitants exhibit such pride This paper applies a multi-level statistical model to large random sample of residents in twelve New Zealand cities. From the results we learn that, although financial stake holding is relevant, urban pride is concentrated more broadly among those whose social and cultural identity is closely tied to the city. Where financial stake holding is most influential is when it is absent, for those experiencing financial difficulties are the most likely to disavow urban pride. Urban pride is a therefore a distributional property of cities in which the currencies are emotional and cultural as well as financial. Urban pride is relatively absent among those who fail to have a stake in the city as well as being weaker among those who live in relatively unattractive cities, and less attractive neighbourhoods. As a barometer of rewards to living and investing in the city, urban pride certainly warrants closer attention than it has received to date

Research into Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand: Overview of the Thirteenth Conference

The thirteenth LEW conference was nm in conjunction with the Australian Labour Market Research Workshop (ALMRW). In addition to hosting guests from the Australian academy, government and private research sectors we also drew an impressive number of papers from New Zealand. It was gratifying to see so many from the government sector, in particular the Department of Labour and Statistics New Zealand, and to be able to host a special session on social mobility offered by the Treasury Academics and private researchers from throughout the country continued their strong support of the conference

Residential sorting, neighbourhood effects and employment

Summary of Workshop at 14th Conference on Labour Employment and Work in New Zealand, 30 November, 2011

Research into Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand: Overview of the Twelfth Conference

This twelfth Labour, Employment and Work Conference generated papers from a wide set of contributions: researchers from government departments, academics from each of the country's eight universities, researchers from a range of private research organisations as well as practitioners from industry This year, with a buoyant economy and a twenty year low in unemployment, much of the emphasis was on the quality rather than the quantity of work; stress, injury, the meaning of 'career' and the quality of working life as well as job mobility all received specific attention.The following overview summarises the main points raised by 86 authors whose work is published in the 52 papers in these proceedings. The summaries appear under the 17 subject headings provided. The aim, as always, is to encourage others to both question and build on these ideas, to network and collaborate in new research in the two years before we meet again in Wellington in late 2008

Employment Dynamics in Regional Labour Markets: An Application of Gross Flows Analysis

This paper uses gross flows data for regions to show how the chance of leaving employment varies from place to place within New Zealand and how this risk of leaving employment influences subsequent search behaviour. We define labour market risk as the failure to sustain a continuous income stream through employment. Estimates of employment risk are made by applying a linear logit model to selected transition probabilities estimated from a quarter to quarter gross flows matrix constructed from New Zealand Household Labour Force Survey returns for the 14 year period 1986to 1999. We show how the risk of employment separations increase as the size of regional labour markers declines and their demand for labour weakens and how the diminished opportunities for employment in the peripheral regions encourages active rather than passive searching among those who leave employment. In regions with relatively high labour demand leaving employment is more likely to be followed by withdrawal from the labour force. By contrast, labour leaving employment in the weaker, provincial, labour markets is more likely to be followed by active searching (and hence unemployment). The way in which employment risk modifies search behaviour across the country affects the unemployed rate, raising it in weak markets and lowering overstating it in strong markers both temporally and geographically

The Wage Curve and Local Labour Markets in New Zealand

Blanchflower and Oswald argue in their 1994 book that there is a stable downward-sloping convex curve linking the level of pay to the local unemployment rate. They derived this so-called wage curve from measurements on individuals within regions (local labour markets) for several countries and periods. Other investigators have confirmed the robustness of this finding. In this paper we seek evidence for the wage curve in New Zealand drawing on data at the regional level by means of the /996 census of population and dwellings. New Zealand research is hampered by the inaccessibility of unit record data and the paper reports results based on publicly available grouped data. The results show that a cross-sectional wage curve does exist in New Zealand. The elasticity is in the range of-0.07 to -0.12, which is similar to results obtained for other countries. However, research to date has not been able to choose between competing explanations for this phenomenon. We argue that a better understanding of the dynamics of local labour markets is an essential requirement for further study of the wage curve