Toothless Reforms? The Remarkable Stability of Female Labor Force Participation in a Top-Reforming Country

Low Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) constitutes a foregone opportunity at both the macro and at the micro levels, potentially increasing the vulnerability of households and lowering the long-run development perspectives of a country. Most international organizations and national policy makers see low FLFP as a serious issue that needs to be addressed by adopting appropriate policies. We investigate the possible reasons of the remarkable stability of FLFP in a top-reforming upper-middle income country. Our goal is to in disentangle the different forces at work and to draw useful lessons for the design of participation-enhancing policies. Using data from a nationally representative Household Survey covering the period 2003-2015, we employ Blinder-Oaxaca (Blinder, 1973 and Oaxaca, 1973) type decomposition to decompose changes over time in FLFP levels into parts that are due to changes in observable factors versus changes in the strength of impact of these factors. This allows us to identify possible shifters of the FLFP rate and propose areas of special interest for policy making. We show that the stability of FLFP in Georgia during the period 2003-2013 is due to offsetting socio-economic changes taking place in the country, and that the increase in the last period covered by our dataset – 2013-2015 – can be attributed to the emergence of new labor opportunities for women. We conclude that, while useful, supply-side economic reforms are not sufficient to increase FLFP and need to be complemented by demand-side policies aiming at creating more and better work opportunities for women

Essays in international economics

This dissertation consists of two papers on International Trade topics. The first paper addresses the development of trade patterns between countries in transition and developed economies. The second paper focuses on the nonparametric estimation of the Knowledge-Capital model of multinationals. The first paper provides a framework for understanding patterns of trade between transition countries (TE) and developed countries. An augmented generalized gravity model is used to compare actual and expected levels of trade. All standard gravity-type variables are significant and have signs as expected. Factor endowments play an important role in explaining country trade flows. In all industries TE exports appear to be less capital- and skill-intensive, being at the same time more land-intensive compared to TE imports from developed countries. Skill is one of the most important factors boosting trade with the developed countries. It has a particularly high effect on export development in manufactures sectors. The second paper adopts a very flexible framework of additive nonparametric regression to obtain new empirical evidence on the knowledge-capital (KC) model of multinational activity. Previous empirical studies of the KC model have relied on a linear parametric specification despite of the highly nonlinear nature of the model. Results of these studies have produced mixed evidence on the KC model, mostly stemming from the weak support of its vertical component. In contrast, our results obtained using a new backfitting procedure, the local linear smooth backfitting of Mammen et al. (1999), are largely consistent with theoretical predictions. In particular, the results support the hypothesis of greater divergence in resource endowments leading to increased affiliate activity

Employment vs. Homestay and the Happiness of Women in the South Caucasus

Modern women often face an uneasy choice: dedicating their time to reproductive household work, or joining the workforce and spending time away from home and household duties. Both choices are associated with benefits, as well as non-trivial costs, and necessarily involve some trade-offs, influencing the general feeling of happiness women experience given their decision. The trade-offs are especially pronounced in traditional developing countries, where both the pressure for women to stay at home and the need to earn additional income are strong, making the choice even more controversial. To understand the implications of this choice on the happiness of women in these types of countries we compare housewives and working women of the South Caucasus region. The rich data collected annually by the Caucasus Research Resource Center allows us to match working women with their housewife counterparts and to compare the level of happiness across the two groups – separately for each country as well as for Armenian and Azerbaijani minorities residing in Georgia. We find a significant negative happiness gap for working women in Armenia and in Azerbaijan, but not in Georgia. The absence of such a gap among the Armenian and Azerbaijani minorities of Georgia indicates that the gap is mostly a country- rather than an ethnicity-specific effect

Job Market Outcomes of IDPs: The Case of Georgia

Internally displaced people (IDPs) constitute a serious economic, social and cultural problem for many countries, including countries in transition. Despite the importance of the problem, there are only a handful of previous studies investigating the issue of labor market outcomes of IDPs. We aim to fill this gap in the literature using 13 years of Integrated Household Surveys over 2004-2016 from Georgia, which experienced large flows of internal migrants from the early 1990s until now. Our analyses indicate that the labor market outcomes of IDPs are much worse than those of local residents. Specifically, IDPs are 3.9 to 11.2 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force, depending on the period and duration of IDP status. IDPs are also up to 11.6 percentage points more likely to be unemployed, sometimes even after 20 years of forced displacement. Finally, IDPs residing in a locality for more than 5 years receive persistently lower wages than local residents with similar characteristics, with the gap widening over time, reaching some 16 percentage points in the last period under analysis

Development of human capital management system in the transportation industry

This paper discusses the importance and methods of Human Resource management in the high-technology companies of the Travel, Transport and Logistic industry. The qualification and motivation of the employees is a key factor of increasing the effectiveness and competitiveness of the big marker players. In this study the particular attention is paid to the digital tools and software to optimize and improve the quality of the HR business processes. As a result of this study, it was found that information technologies can reduce the time of the recruiting and hiring processing and present the detailed analytics on the workforce to the executive management. It would be interesting to consider the impact of investments in HR business process optimization on the general effectiveness of the transportation industry

Patience, Cognitive Abilities, and Cognitive Effort:Survey and Experimental Evidence From a Developing Country

This study sheds light on the relationship between cognition and patience by documenting that the correlation between cognitive abilities and delay discounting is weaker for the same group of individuals if choices are incentivized. This study conjectures that higher cognitive effort, which induces higher involvement of the cognitive system, moderates the relationship between patience and cognition. For 107 subjects drawn from the adult population in Tbilisi, this study examines the relationship between various measures of cognitive ability and that of patience. Specifically, we consider the relationship between the Cognitive Reflection Test, a numeracy test, self-reported math ability measure, enumerators’ assessments, and incentivized and hypothetical trade-offs between smaller-sooner and larger-later payments

Assessing the impact of technological change on similar occupations: Implications for employment alternatives.

BackgroundThe fast-changing labor market highlights the need for an in-depth understanding of occupational mobility impacted by technological change. However, we lack a multidimensional classification scheme that considers similarities of occupations comprehensively, which prevents us from predicting employment trends and mobility across occupations. This study fills the gap by examining employment trends based on similarities between occupations.MethodWe first demonstrated a new method that clusters 756 occupation titles based on knowledge, skills, abilities, education, experience, training, activities, values, and interests. We used the Principal Component Analysis to categorize occupations in the Standard Occupational Classification, which is grouped into a four-level hierarchy. Then, we paired the occupation clusters with the occupational employment projections provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We analyzed how employment would change and what factors affect the employment changes within occupation groups. Particularly, we specified factors related to technological changes.ResultsThe results reveal that technological change accounts for significant job losses in some clusters. This poses occupational mobility challenges for workers in these jobs at present. Job losses for nearly 60% of current employment will occur in low-skill, low-wage occupational groups. Meanwhile, many mid-skilled and highly skilled jobs are projected to grow in the next ten years.ConclusionOur results demonstrate the utility of our occupational classification scheme. Furthermore, it suggests a critical need for skills upgrading and workforce development for workers in declining jobs. Special attention should be paid to vulnerable workers, such as older individuals and minorities