north american migration returns to skill border effects and mobility costs utilizing a utility maximizing roy type discrete choice model of worker location in canadian provinces and u s states that incorporates returns to skill amenities fixed costs distance langua

the wage effects of high performance work organization in manufacturing an unresolved question about now widespread innovative work systems such as teams and quality programs is whether they influence wage determination this study examines that possible association in manufacturing the author uses data from the 1997 national establishment survey that allow examination of how new work systems affected not only employees who were directly involved in them but other workers as well the key finding is that for core blue collar manufacturing employees higher wages were associated with high performance work organization hpwo systems while higher skill levels and computer based technologies were associated with higher wages the key mechanism appears to have been productivity gains independent of skill and technology that were shared via various across the board wage payment systems hpwo systems appear to have increased managers wages as well although through different channels the author finds no evidence that hpwo related wage gains led to greater wage inequality amon

economic globalization and women s employment the case of manufacturing in mexico sociological research has been generally critical of the effects of economic globalization on developing countries however greater worldwide economic integration may have created new employment o

the rise of intra occupational wage inequality in the united states 1983 to 2002 wage inequality has increased dramatically in the united states since the 1980s this article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three digit level using the current population survey from 1983 to 2002 we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within occupational inequality grew faster than betweenoccupational inequality we estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period the results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intraoccupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data these findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market correspondingly a more comprehensive approach one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the new economy is warranted

migration regional equilibrium and the estimation of compensating differentials in this study we have developed an improved model of net migration that encompasses both equilibrium and disequilibrium components instrumental variables fixed effects estimates of the model with time series data for 51 areas in the united states over the period 1971 1988 support the importance of both equilibrium and disequilibrium factors in migration excerpt

from the fringe to the fore labor unions and employee compensation conventional wisdom suggests that labor unions raise worker wages while the newer empirical literature finds only negligible earnings effects i reconcile this apparent contradiction by arguing th

public conservation land and employment growth in the northern forest region we quantify the effect that public conservation lands have on employment growth in the northern forest region of the united states a model of simultaneous employment and net migration growth is estimated with data on non metropolitan counties from 1990 to 1997 exogenous variables include the 1990 share of the land base in public conservation uses we find that net migration rates were higher in counties with more conservation lands but the effects are relatively small no significant effect on employment growth is detected as well variables measuring changes in public timber harvests have no effect on employment growth

small is bountiful labor markets and establishment size although there exist no detailed published studies on trends in workplace size most research in stratification and industrial sociology has operated with the implicit assumption that in the course of the twentieth century workers have found themselves in increasingly larger establishments this assumption has focused considerable attention on such concomitants of the assumed increase as growth in bureaucratic control and internal labor markets this paper gives thefirst systematic empirical account of the evolution of workplace size and presents results that call into question the appropriateness of the current allocation of research energy it is suggested that far more attention be paid to analysis of small firms and establishments it is well known that one of the major changes in the organization of work during the twentieth century has been the shift from small to large employers in contested terrain edwards 1979 vii notes that seventy five or a hundred years ago nearly all employees worked for small firms while today large numbers toil for the giant corporations from the theory of segmented labor markets we know that the internal labor market in the large company has become an increasingly standard locale for intragenerational mobility and that as thurow points out the need for on the job training leads employers to eliminate competition for jobs among those who must train one another the net result is the formation of a series of internal labor markets with limited ports of entry thurow 1975 85 86 dunlop 1966 32 observes in a similar vein that for the typical enterprise hiring in jobs are only a small fraction of the total number of job classifications the forces that have brought about this transformation of the workplace have been extensively documented advances in technology have facilitated increasingly large operations with corresponding scale

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

what happened to long term employment the role of worker power and environmental turbulence in explaining declines in worker tenure recent declines in the average length of time that u s workers spend with a given employer represent an important change in the nature of the employment relationship yet it is one whose causes are poorly understood i explore those causes using current population survey data on the tenure of men aged 30 65 from the years 1979 2008 i argue that long term employment relationships primarily occur when workers pressure employers to close off employment from market competition reducing the attractiveness of external mobility relative to internal opportunities and increasing employment security i then explore how two changes in organizations environments a decline in union strength and increased turbulence from changes in technology and globalization might have affected workers ability to secure such closed employment relationships over the last 30 years my results support the argument that declines in tenure reflect the reduced power of workers to secure closed employment relationships recent declines in tenure have been concentrated in large organizations and many of those declines are explained by controlling for the changing levels of industry unionization i find little evidence that foreign competition or technological change affected mobility the results are robust to measures of changing industry growth rates and within industry reorganization supplementary analyses suggest that layoffs are associated with different industry pressures than tenure and that voluntary mobility may have played an important role in declines in tenure

quality over quantity reexamining the link between entrepreneurship and job creation although much has been written about the quantity of jobs created by entrepreneurs scholars have yet to examine the quality of these jobs in this article the authors begin to address this important issue by examining nearly 5 000 businesses that began operations in 2004 they investigate the extent to which nascent employers provide what many think of as quality jobs those offering health care coverage and a retirement plan the authors find that because of small scale constrained resources and protection from institutional pressures start up companies do not provide their employees with either of these proxies for job quality and their likelihood of offering health or retirement benefits increases only marginally over their first six years of operation the finding that entrepreneurs impressive record of job creation is not matched by a similarly impressive outcome with respect to job quality challenges policymakers to ensure that entrepreneurs are encouraged to create quality employment opportunities in the course of creating new businesses abstract from author

can exchange rate predictability be achieved without monetary convergence evidence from the ems abstract the evidence presented here suggests that the european monetary system has indeed coincided with more predictable exchange rates nominal and real between france germany and italy but if increased monetary policy coordination is the main explanation then it is surprising that the conditional variance of real interest differentials between these countries does not appear to have fallen unless the disturbances are mostly real in which case fixed rates are suboptimal high onshore offshore interest differentials for franc and lira assets and the very slow convergence of intra ems inflation rates suggest that capital controls have played a large role

energy efficiency rebound effects and the environmental kuznets curve technological change is one factor used to justify the existence of an environmental kuznets curve and technological improvements have been argued to be a key factor in mitigating the impacts of economic growth on environmental quality in this paper we use a cge model of the scottish economy to consider the factors influencing the impacts of one form of technological change improvements in energy efficiency on absolute levels of co2 emissions on the carbon intensity of the economy co2 emissions relative to real gdp and the per capita ekc relationship these factors include the elasticity of substitution between energy and non energy inputs responses in the labour market and the structure of the economy our results demonstrate the key role played by the general equilibrium price elasticity of demand for energy and the relative influence of different factors on this parameter

economic segmentation worker power and income inequality how economic segmentation generates income inequality constitutes a central question for theories of economic and social organization and of socioeconomic achievement previous research emphasizes two sources of the structural variation in income 1 employers with large amounts of resources for a variety of reasons may find it in their interests to pay workers higher wages and 2 some workers are able to acquire power against their employers as well as against other workers and can therefore extract higher earnings in this paper we investigate several issues involved in the links among economic segmentation worker power and income inequality we argue that the structure of economic segmentation is multidimensional and reflects such distinct concepts as concentration economic scale state intervention in the market capital intensity and organization size worker power also is derived from diverse sources such as union membership occupational skill and licensing class position and tenure wi

migration and the dynamic stability of regional econometric models two different versions of a representative model of population employment and induced spending are introduced and discussed the second version is then fitted to time series data for alaska arizona colorado and florida and tested for sensitivity to slight variations in the parameters of the net migration equation all four fitted models are found to be dynamically unstable the implications concerning the equation are considered annotation

why do smaller firms pay less this paper uses data from the national longitudinal survey of young men and the current population survey for 1983 to examine the relationships among wages firm size and plant size we reach three key findings first plant size has little independent effect on wages once we have controlled for firm size for firms with fewer than 1 000 employees second we find evidence of sorting on observed and unobserved ability characteristics across firm sizes better educated and more stable workers are in larger firms third results from a first difference estimator indicate that about 60 percent of the wage size effect is due to unobserved heterogeneity when all firms are considered and about 100 percent when firms with 25 or more employees are considered

revenge of the managers labor cost cutting and the paradoxical resurgence of managerialism in the shareholder value era 1984 to 2001 institutional changes associated with the rise of shareholder value capitalism have had seemingly contradictory effects on managers and managerialism in the united states economy financial critiqu

using spatial econometrics to analyze local growth in sweden lundberg j 2006 using spatial econometrics to analyse local growth in sweden regional studies 40 303 316 the paper investigates factors that determine the average income growth and net migration rates in swedish municipalities during 1981 99 the main issue is to test the hypothesis that conditional on a set of other possible determinants of regional growth the growth rate in one municipality is affected by the growth rates in its neighbouring municipalities the hypothesis of conditional convergence is also tested a positive correlation is found between net migration rates in neighbouring municipalities which suggests that net migration tends to spillover to neighbouring municipalities when it comes to average income growth the results indicate spatial dependence in the error terms during the 1980s however there is no clear evidence in favour of the hypothesis of conditional convergence instead the results predict conditional divergence between municipalities located in the stockholm reg

further evidence on returns to schooling by establishment size stolzenberg 1978 has argued thatfor white male employees the effect of schooling on logearnings is greater in larger establishments we replicate stolzenberg s study using the 1979 current population survey this survey includes information on establishment size and provides a much larger sample size to work with our results do not indicate a positive establishment size schooling interaction to the contrary when stolzenberg s 1978 model specification is used ourfindings suggest that the interaction may be negative we explore the sources of this discrepancy and are skeptical of the conventional wisdom that returns to schooling increase with establishment size

net migration and state labor market dynamics existing empirical estimates of net migration models are not identified because they lack an explicit measure of expected future conditions i find that using actual one period ahead net migration at the state level to control for expectations reduces the strength of the relationship between current wages and net migration by more than one third i use the case of michigan to show how existing empirical models mischaracterize the response of migration to shocks that are expected to be transitory i add migration to a labor market model and simulate responses to permanent and transitory demand shocks

can we sterilize theory and evidence under managed floating as under the bretton woods system central banks have intervened heavily in the foreign exchange market as before they have often attempted to divorce their intervention activities from their money supplies through offsetting operations in domestic financial markets an official purchase of foreign exchange can be sterilized through a corresponding openmarket sale of domestic securities the transaction which is equivalent to an official forward sale of domestic currency leaves relative money supplies unchanged but alters the relative supplies of foreign and domestic currency bonds available to the public regardless of the exchange rate regime sterilized intervention may be viewed as an attempt to attain independent exchange rate and money stock targets in the short run for this to be possible bonds denominated in different currencies must be imperfect substitutes in private portfolios if feasible sterilization may or may not be useful in attaining the long run objectives of the central bank

do increases in energy efficiency improve environmental quality and sustainability governments world wide increasingly see energy efficiency as an important aspect of sustainability however there is a debate in the literature as to whether the impact of improved energy efficiency on reducing energy use might be partially or more than wholly offset through rebound and backfire effects this paper clarifies the theoretical conditions under which such effects would occur and explores their likely significance using a computable general equilibrium cge model of the scottish economy we find that for scotland a general improvement in energy efficiency in the production sectors of the economy initially produces rebound effects that eventually grow into backfire energy use ultimately increases in response to an efficiency gain and the ratio of gdp to co2 emissions falls the economic factors underpinning rebound effects are straightforward energy efficiency improvements result in an effective cut in energy prices which produces output substitution competitiveness and income effects that stimulate energy demands however the presence of strong rebound or even backfire does not mean that efficiency enhancing policies are irrelevant rather it suggests that such policies operating alone are insufficient to generate environmental improvements the implication is that a co ordinated portfolio of energy policies is required

does firm size matter anymore the new economy and firm size wage effects researchers have long known that large firms pay higher wages than small firms for workers with similar measured characteristics however an agreed upon explanation for this firm size wage effect fswe has not been reached recent changes in the economy provide new leverage for testing competing theories for the effect while questions about the existence and nature of the new economy provide new motivation for exploring this topic this study uses the 1988 2003 current population survey and finds that the fswe has declined by about one third over the study period examining the competing explanations for the fswe this study finds that while the sorting of workers by traits unions and industry factors all contribute to some portion of the effect in cross section they fail to explain why it has declined over time market power explanations also fail to find support shifts in organizational structures particularly a decline of internal labor markets appear to best fit the results these findings

occupations and the structure of wage inequality in the united states 1980s to 2000s occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the united states in the 1980s and 1990s we address this deficiency by assessing occupation level effects on wage inequality using data from the current population survey for 1983 through 2008 we model the mean and variance of wages for each occupation controlling for education and demographic factors at the individual level to test three competing explanations for the increase in wage inequality 1 the growth of between occupation polarization 2 changes in education and labor force composition and 3 residual inequality unaccounted for by occupations and demographic characteristics after correcting for a problem with imputed data that biased kim and sakamoto s 2008 results we find that between occupation changes explain 66 percent of the increase in wage inequality from 1992 to 2008

designing tax policy in federalist economies an overview abstract the emerging economic federations of the european union russia and south africa along with the established federations in australia canada and the united states confront the task of designing the institutions for federal fiscal policy this paper reviews the literature on the design of tax policy in federalist economies we conclude that taxation by lower level governments can lead to significant economic inefficiencies and inequities the usual assignment view of federalis recommends central government policies for example resident based taxation or grants in aid to correct these failures these recommendations assume that the central government will act as a benevolent social planner the political economy view of federalism suggests that this assumption is in error and that additional federalist institutions must be considered alternative legislative structures and constitutional rules are considered

the international monetary system forty years after bretton woods review essay in may 1984 a distinguished group of central bankers and economists gathered for a conference at bretton woods to consider the evolution of the world monetary system that was born at that location forty years earlier this volume contains nine essays with accompanying discussion on issues of performance and reform of current international monetary arrangements these papers deal with problems facing the industrialized and the lessdeveloped countries and assess the institutions that have been set up to accommodate these problems the major accomplishments of the original bretton woods conference were of course the establishment of the system of payments based on fixed exchange rates and the organization of the world bank and the international monetary fund as the order developed in the late 40 s and early 50 s each central bank saw it as its duty to intervene in foreign exchange markets to ensure an essentially fixed parity of their currency with respect to the dollar the role of the u s was to guarantee the dollar price of gold at 35 an ounce the system has been called a dollar standard because the dollar played the role of a reserve currency one of the paradoxes of the system as robert triffin pointed out in the early 60 s is that in order to produce a continuing and rapid enough expansion of world reserves the u s had to run balance of payments deficits yet continued deficits by the u s threatened the convertibility of the dollar into gold as it happened the system of fixed parities broke down in the early 70 s not because of a lack of reserves but because a glut of dollars made the bretton woods dollar exchange rates untenable the system eventually evolved into one in which most of the industrialized countries currencies more or less are determined by the market while the currencies of most second and third world countries are pegged to a major currency the floating period has been

equality for whom organizational policies and the gender gap across the german earnings distribution work establishments are critical for the creation and maintenance of gender inequality organizational practices most notably those that formalize personnel systems or target gender inequality are often assumed to have uniform effects on inequality across the wage hierarchy this assumption has eluded careful empirical scrutiny the authors estimate unconditional quantile regressions with a unique german linked employer employee data set to assess whether formalized human resource practices female friendly diversity measures and the availability of workplace child care facilities affect wage inequality differently across the wage distribution while these policies reduce gender inequality in general they do so more strongly near the bottom of the earnings distribution policies that formalize personnel systems and explicitly promote female employees are particularly advantageous to women in low wage jobs these results suggest that gender policies have a more subtle effect on earnings inequality than

examining the employer size wage premium in the manufacturing retail trade and service industries using employer employee matched data economists have long sought to understand why large employers pay higher wages than small employers despite decades of study and analysis researchers have been unsuccessful in fully accounting for the employersize wage premium one problem has been insufficient data most empirical efforts to examine the size related wage premium rely on worker level data that contain little information about a worker s employer or firm level data that lack information on the characteristics of a firm s workforce although more recent attempts exploit newly developed employer employee matched data kevin t reilly 1995 troske 1999 most matched data sets cover only limited segments of the population thus raising doubt about the generality of the findings in this paper we use the recently created new worker establishment characteristics database nwecd to examine the employer size wage premium unlike other matched data sets the nwecd contains information on workers and employers in all sectors and regions of the econ

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

the displacement and multiplier effects of regional selective assistance a computable general equilibrium analysis this paper uses a hybrid approach to simulate the effects of regional selective assistance rsa for scotland this combines industrial survey estimation of the direct impacts and computable general equilibrium cge modelling of the system wide effects the results are compared to those derived using the method currently adopted in official evaluation studies of rsa and other regional regeneration policy instruments the cge approach captures capacity labour market displacement and migration effects ignored in existing studies simulation identifies the conditions under which these effects are likely to be quantitatively important a partir d une facon hybride cet article cherche a simuler pour l ecosse l impact des primes regionales une estimation des effets directs a partir d une enquete aupres de l industrie se voit allier a la modelisation des effets generalises par une analyse d equilibre general sur ordinateur on compare les resultats a ceux qui proviennent des methodes employees actuellement

ownership and corporate wage policy the signal and its strength abstractwe argue that identification and proper specification of ownership links among firms is an important factor and is affecting firm performance on different dimensions we focus on the corporate wage policy where we show that firms with same stockholders have similar average labour costs after controlling for standard factors of the wage equation moreover we propose new measures of stockholders ability to influence firms decision signal and its strength the signal measures stockholder s preferences over a given corporate policy while the strength function describes stockholder s ability to influence a firms corporate policy

the dynamics of u s internal migration in this paper we have theoretically derived a net migration equation and estimated it using time series data for 51 u s regions over the period 1971 1988 the results indicate that the dynamic response of net migration is stable and is significantly related to stock equilibrium changes induced by amenity differentials relative employment opportunities relative real wages and industry composition excerpt

growing apart the changing firm size wage premium and its inequality consequences wage inequality in the united states has risen dramatically over the past few decades prompting scholars to develop a number of theoretical accounts for the upward trend this study argues that large firms have been a prominent labor market institution that mitigates inequality by compensating their low and middle wage employees with a greater premium than their higher wage counterparts large u s firms reduced overall wage dispersion yet broader changes to employment relations associated with the demise of internal labor markets and the emergence of alternative employment arrangements have undermined large firms role as an equalizing institution using data from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we find that in 1989 although all private sector workers benefited from a firm size wage premium the premium was significantly higher for individuals at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution compared to those at the higher end between 1989 and

the rise of finance and firm employment dynamics this article sheds light on the ongoing employment stagnation in the united states by investigating the links between the rise of finance and firm employment dynamics during the 1982 2005 period i argue that the rise of finance marginalized the role of labor in revenue generating and sharing processes which led to employment stagnation among the largest nonfinancial firms in the united states evidence suggests that increasing investment in financial assets depresses the workforce size the growing dependence on debt reprioritizes the order of distribution heightening the need for workforce reduction the increasing rewards for shareholders generate a downsize and distribute spiral in which labor expense becomes a primary target of cost cutting strategies further analysis indicates that production and service workers are more vulnerable to shifts associated with the rise of finance than managers and professionals

a political economic analysis of labor migration and income redistribution we present a two country political economic model of income redistribution with internationally mobile labor migration can be exogenous and or endogenous i e determined by labor income differentials political influence is determined by the size and homogeneity of the groups where the latter can be affected by immigration we show that immigration can increase the transfers to and the income of the mobile group we also investigate the possibility of migration regulation tax transfer policy competition and coordination and finally coordination of regulation policies it is shown that the selection of any of those regimes will depend on the particular distribution of political influence among the relevant social groups in the two countries