Essays on Productivity Dynamics and Labour Market Outcomes PDF Download

Author: Martin Reinhard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Melissa Christine LoPalo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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This dissertation examines determinants of worker productivity, labor market outcomes, and population health. The first chapter, previously published in the Journal of Public Economics, examines the impacts of cash assistance on refugee labor market outcomes. I exploit variation across states and over time in the generosity of cash assistance available to refugees upon arrival in the U.S. and study the impacts on wages and employment. I argue that cash assistance is randomly assigned to refugees conditional on characteristics such as education and country of origin, as refugee placement is decided by a committee that does not meet with the refugees or learn their preferences. I find that refugees resettled with more generous cash assistance go on to earn higher wages, with no significant change in the probability of employment. The effects are largest for highly-educated refugees. The second chapter examines the impact of temperature on the productivity and job performance of outdoor workers in developing countries. I overcome data challenges with studying individual-level productivity by studying household survey interviewers as workers. Using data from Demographic and Health Survey interviewers in 46 countries, I find that interviewers complete fewer interviews per hour worked on hot and humid days, driven by an increase in working hours. I also find evidence that suggests that workers allocate their effort towards tasks that are more easily observed by supervisors on hot days. The third chapter, previously published in Social Justice Research and co-authored with Diane Coffey and Dean Spears, examines the role of social inequality in population health outcomes in India, focusing on the case of casteism and child height in India. We describe evidence from the India Human Development Survey showing that children in villages with more strongly casteist attitudes are shorter on average, an association that is statistically explained by the association between casteism and the prevalence of open defecation

Author: Sebastian Buhai
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9051709218
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Author: J. McCombie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023050423X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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This collection of essays on Verdoorn's Law - the relationship between the growth of industrial productivity and output - presents a number of comprehensive surveys and assessments of the vast literature available. The collection not only includes an English translation of Verdoorn's seminal article originally published in Italian, but also new empirical evidence for the Verdoorn Law and new developments in the theoretical modelling of cumulative causation.

Author: Lien Ta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis comprises three chapters that delve into various labor market dynamics and the policy implications in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. In the first chapter (joint with Andre Kurmann and Etienne Lale), we investigate the dynamics of small businesses and employment using real-time data from the private sector throughout the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has led to an explosion of research using private-sector data to measure small business activity. Yet important questions remain about sample representativeness and how to identify business openings and closings. We propose new methods to address these issues by exploiting information on business activity from Google, Facebook, and Safegraph. We apply our methods to Homebase data and show that the resulting estimates closely fit official statistics. We then use the data to study whether small businesses have been hit harder by the pandemic and the extent to which the Paycheck Protection Program helped mitigate these effects. The second chapter (joint with Andreas Hornstein, Marios Karabarbounis, Andre Kurmann, Etienne Lale) focus on the effects of pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. UI acts as both a disincentive for labor supply and as a stimulus for labor demand. In equilibrium, the two effects combine, which may explain why several studies have found only small negative effects of the generous UI expansions during the pandemic on job finding rates and employment. In this paper we propose a new research design to estimate independently the disincentive effects of pandemic unemployment benefits. Using high-frequency worker-firm matched data from Homebase, we document that employment of low-wage businesses recovered more slowly from the initial pandemic shock than neighboring high-wage businesses, and that this recovery gap is significantly related to the relative generosity of UI benefits. By comparing neighboring businesses that are largely sharing the benefits of the local UI stimulus, our research design identifies more closely the disincentive effects of pandemic UI benefits. We use an equilibrium model of labor search with heterogeneity in firms and workers to translate the reduced-form estimate of the recovery gap into an unemployment duration elasticity and an aggregate employment loss. Our model, which captures well the recovery gap between low- and high-wage businesses, implies relatively low duration elasticities. Yet, the sheer size and multitude of the pandemic programs implies that the disincentive effects arising from the pandemic UI benefits are substantial and amount to 5 percent of normal employment. The third chapter studies work-from-home (WFH) work mode's implications on labor market. The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a widespread adoption of WFH practices and accelerated the advancement of remote work technologies. Surprisingly, even after the pandemic has subsided, a substantial shift towards WFH remains evident among workers. However, the accessibility to WFH is not uniform across all types of workers. Notably, high-tech industries, characterized by a predominantly high-skilled workforce, exhibit a higher prevalence of WFH. This raises concerns about the effects of WFH on workers employed in industries where remote work is unfeasible. In this paper, I develop a spatial equilibrium model that incorporates WFH to examine the implications on workers' mobility, local market outcomes, and overall welfare. I find 3 key insights: (1) there is a productivity threshold for WFH adoption, (2) there is a one-way dependence of low-skilled workers on high-skilled workers' mobility, and (3) if workers are fully mobile, both types of workers benefit from the introduction of WFH.

Author: Mark Setterfield
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349273937
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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This volume collects original contributions and recent research in economic theory and the political economy of unemployment and inflation from a team of internationally renowned scholars. These essays, collected in honour of John Cornwall, demonstrate the importance of economic institutions for economic outcomes and share his focus on the need for high level economic theory to be socially relevant. The book includes an intellectual biography of the honouree by Geoff Harcourt and Mehdi Monadjemi and a full bibliography of his work.

Author: Deb Kusum Das
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351002538
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
The world, of late, has seen a productivity slowdown. Many countries continue to recover from various shocks in the macro business environment, along with structural changes and inward looking policies. In contemporary times of growth slumps, various exits and protectionist regimes, this book engages with the study of productivity dynamics in the emerging and industrialized economies. The essays address the crucial aspects, such as the roles of human capital, investment accounting and datasets, that help understanding of productivity performance of global economy and its several regions. This book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and professionals in the field of economic growth, productivity and development studies. This will also be an important reference on empirical industrial economics in both India and the world.

Author: Moritz Bernhard Ritter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780494676790
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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This dissertation consists of three essays in Macroeconomics. The first essay assesses the impact of offshoring on aggregate productivity and on labour market outcomes by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which workers acquire task-specific human capital. The dynamic nature of the model allows for differentiation between short and long run effects. While the welfare effects are unambiguously positive and independent of the skill-content of the offshored and inshored tasks, the distribution of the gains from trade critically depends on the time horizon. Workers with human capital specific to the inshored tasks gain over those performing offshored tasks in the short term. In the long run, the gains from trade are equally distributed among ex-ante identical agents. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy; welfare gains from increased offshoring are found to be substantial even after taking into account losses in specific human capital for workers in the offshored occupations along the transition path.The second essay integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. Trade liberalization will cause a reallocation of workers both within and across industries, which will affect both types of inequality in a way that is consistent with findings from the empirical literature on trade and inequality. A calibrated version of the model can account for much of the effect of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market.The final essay incorporates a distortionary tax into the microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. An optimal policy may consist of both a positive tax rate and a positive nominal interest rate: if the buyer's surplus share is inefficiently small, the intensive margin is distorted and the constrained optimal policy combines a sales tax with a money growth rate above that prescribed by the Friedman rule. Monetary, but not fiscal, policy alters the agent's bargaining position, leaving a special role for a deviation from the Friedman rule.

Author: Damoun Ashournia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Moritz Bernhard Ritter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780494676790
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in Macroeconomics. The first essay assesses the impact of offshoring on aggregate productivity and on labour market outcomes by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which workers acquire task-specific human capital. The dynamic nature of the model allows for differentiation between short and long run effects. While the welfare effects are unambiguously positive and independent of the skill-content of the offshored and inshored tasks, the distribution of the gains from trade critically depends on the time horizon. Workers with human capital specific to the inshored tasks gain over those performing offshored tasks in the short term. In the long run, the gains from trade are equally distributed among ex-ante identical agents. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy; welfare gains from increased offshoring are found to be substantial even after taking into account losses in specific human capital for workers in the offshored occupations along the transition path. The second essay integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. Trade liberalization will cause a reallocation of workers both within and across industries, which will affect both types of inequality in a way that is consistent with findings from the empirical literature on trade and inequality. A calibrated version of the model can account for much of the effect of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market. The final essay incorporates a distortionary tax into the microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. An optimal policy may consist of both a positive tax rate and a positive nominal interest rate: if the buyer's surplus share is inefficiently small, the intensive margin is distorted and the constrained optimal policy combines a sales tax with a money growth rate above that prescribed by the Friedman rule. Monetary, but not fiscal, policy alters the agent's bargaining position, leaving a special role for a deviation from the Friedman rule.