learning and wage dynamics we develop a dynamic model of learning about worker ability in a competitive labor market the model produces three testable implications regarding wage dynamics 1 although the role of schooling in the labor market s inference process declines as performance observations accumulate the estimated effect of schooling on the level of wages is independent of labor market experience 2 timeinvariant variables correlated with ability but unobserved by employers such as certain test scores are increasingly correlated with wages as experience increases and 3 wage residuals are a martingale we present evidence from the nlsy that is broadly consistent with the model s predictions

do labor market policies have displacement effects evidence from a clustered randomized experiment this article reports the results from a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the direct and indirect displacement impacts of job placement assistance on the labor market outcomes of young educated job seekers in france we use a two step design in the first step the proportions of job seekers to be assigned to treatment 0 25 50 75 or 100 were randomly drawn for each of the 235 labor markets e g cities participating in the experiment then in each labor market eligible job seekers were randomly assigned to the treatment following this proportion after eight months eligible unemployed youths who were assigned to the program were significantly more likely to have found a stable job than those who were not but these gains are transitory and they appear to have come partly at the expense of eligible workers who did not benefit from the program particularly in labor markets where they compete mainly with other educated workers and in weak labor markets overall the program seems to have had very little net benefits

measuring program impacts on earnings and employment do unemployment insurance wage reports from employers agree with surveys of individuals this article attempts to determine whether wage records reported by employers to state unemployment insurance ui agencies provide a valid alternative to more costly retrospective sample surveys o

essays on duopoly competition with asymmetric firms is profit maximization always an evolutionary stable strategy abstract we propose both a well mixed and spatially structured evolutionary game to analyze the competitive behavior of retail firms in duopolistic markets firms from two different populations high low efficiency compete and the available strategies are i profit or ii revenue maximization under bounded rationality assumptions firms can update their behavior through dynamic learning mechanisms in addition to a replicator dynamics approach we develop an agent based model to increase realism and to capture possible spatial effects on firms strategic behavior a convergence between the methods is observed and given specific conditions revenue maximization may corresponds to an evolutionary stable strategy ess

on the job specific training and efficient screening employment relationships are governed by short term incomplete contracts and typically involve on the job screening and firm specific training this article studies a dynamic employment relationship with these features and identifies a potential conflict between the employer s twin objectives to screen and train the worker when the training technology is quite productive the employer may have to sacrifice from worker performance during the screening process the article thus offers an explanation for why firms may invest suboptimally on training which complements the standard inappropriable rents explanation based on ex post mobility of young employees

skilled immigration and the employment structures of u s firms we study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of us firms using matched employer employee data unlike most previous work we use the firm as the lens of analysis to account for greater heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions are driven by firms themselves e g the h 1b visa ols and iv specifications show rising overall employment of skilled workers with increased skilled immigrant employment by the firm employment expansion is greater for young natives than for their older counterparts the departure rates for older workers relative to younger workers appear highest for those in stem occupations

is subsidized employment cost effective for welfare recipients experimental evidence from seven state demonstrations this paper examines the benefits and costs of training and subsidized employment provided to welfare recipients in demonstration programs in seven states a classical experimental design is used to estimate the effect of these demonstrations on earnings and welfare benefits over 33 months following program entry both effects are substantial and in some cases long lived when combined with data on program costs these findings indicate that while not always cost effective for taxpayers subsidized employment for welfare recipients does convey positive net benefits to participants and to society as a whole

the economic case for low carbon development in rapidly growing developing world cities a case study of palembang indonesia where costs or risks are higher evidence is lacking or supporting institutions are less developed policymakers can struggle to make the case for low carbon investment this is especially the case in developing world cities where decision makers struggle to keep up with the pace and scale of change focusing on palembang in indonesia this paper considers the economic case for proactive investment in low carbon development we find that a rapidly growing industrial city in a developing country can reduce emissions by 24 1 in 2025 relative to business as usual levels with investments of usd405 6 million that would reduce energy expenditure in the city by usd436 8 million emissions from the regional grid could be reduced by 12 2 in 2025 relative to business as usual trends with investments of usd2 9 billion that would generate annual savings of usd175 million these estimates understate the savings from reduced expenditure on energy subsidies and energy infrastructure the compelling economic case for mainstreaming climate mitigation in this developing country city suggests that the constraints on climate action can be political and institutional rather than economic there is therefore a need for more effective energy governance to drive the transition to a low carbon economy

anonymity or distance job search and labour market exclusion in a growing african city we show that helping young job seekers signal their skills to employers generates large and persistent improvements in their labour market outcomes we do this by comparing an intervention that improves the ability to signal skills the job application workshop to a transport subsidy treatment designed to reduce the cost of job search in the short run both interventions have large positive effects on the probability of finding a formal job the workshop also increases the probability of having a stable job with an open ended contract four years later the workshop significantly increases earnings job satisfaction and employment duration but the effects of the transport subsidy have dissipated gains are concentrated on individuals who generally have worse labour market outcomes overall our findings highlight that young people possess valuable skills that are unobservable to employers making these skills observable generates earnings gains that are far greater than the cost of the intervention

superstars and mediocrities market failure in the discovery of talent a basic problem facing most labor markets is that workers can neither commit to long term wage contracts nor can they self nance the costs of production i study the eects of these imperfections when talent is industry speci c it can only be revealed on the job and once learned becomes public information i show that rms bid exces sively for the pool of incumbent workers at the expense of trying out new talent the workforce is then plagued with an unfavorable selection of individuals there are too many mediocre workers whose talent is not high enough to justify them crowding out novice workers with lower expected talent but with more upside potential the result is an ine ciently low level of output coupled with higher wages for known high talents this problem is most severe where information about talent is initially very imprecise and the complementary costs of production are high i argue that high incomes in pro fessions such as entertainment management and entrepreneurship may be explained by the nature of the talent revelation process rather than by an underlying scarcity of talent jel d30 j31 j6 m5

powering or de powering future vehicles to reach low carbon outcomes the long term view 1930 2020 abstract government in uk has long sought to influence both new vehicle fuel efficiency and to encourage domestic car production sixty years of data on the change in car characteristics and fuel economy are analysed vehicle specific power has doubled in that time and sales of vehicles have grown preferentially in larger engine classes new cars sold over the period 1970 2000 have a sale price of 150 per bhp at year 2000 prices a new theory is proposed that the primary driver for increased power of vehicles and hence co2 production is the increase in sale price necessitated by uneconomic production of steel vehicles in mature markets the standard fuel test cycle shows inverse fuel efficiency relationship with weight and with vehicle power primary co2 reduction targets such as the kyoto agreement are dimensioned as outputs of energy use per unit time power secondary targets such as the acea voluntary agreement of 140 g km in 2008 based on energy per unit distance efficiency failure to focus policy on the key variable of vehicle power has allowed power to continue to increase and inhibit fuel efficiency from meeting the voluntary agreement targets this power loophole in europe is likened to the emergence of light trucks in response to cafe standards in usa new body materials offer the prospect of profitable car production consumer satisfaction and large reductions in co2 new policy directions are proposed as a result of the failure of the acea voluntary agreement and the real importance of achieving annual co2 reduction including via cars 21

social employment of welfare recipients in belgium an evaluation in belgium welfare agencies receive a subsidy to employ welfare recipients for a period sufficiently long to entitle them to unemployment benefits we investigate the effect of this programme on the exit rate from welfare we propose a grouping iv estimator of the programme effect that eliminates selection bias the estimator is consistent even if the selection into the programme depends on the average unobserved characteristics of welfare recipients in a region and in a welfare duration interval without correction for selectivity we find that the programme reduces welfare dependence but after correction this conclusion is reversed

information in online labour markets online labour markets are virtual platforms that solve information problems to enable gains from trade in remote labour services they make employers and workers aware of each other and allow them to communicate contract and produce remotely recent research suggests however that organizing production to include remote work remains challenging because employers and workers in these markets continue to lack information that is less easily communicated employers appear unable to accurately anticipate the full costs and benefits to them of using the market prior to entry and continue to have difficulty evaluating worker applications even when experienced in these markets information is particularly incomplete when wage arbitrage opportunity is greatest

long run effects of youth training programs experimental evidence from argentina we study the effect of a job training program for low income youth in cordoba argentina the program included life skills and vocational training as well as internships with private sector employers participants were allocated by means of a public lottery we rely on administrative data on formal employment employment spells and earnings to establish the effects of the program in the short term 18 months but also exceptionally for programs of this type in latin america and in developing countries in general in the medium term 33 months and in the long term 48 months the results indicate sizable gains of about 8 percentage points in formal employment in the short term about 32 higher than the control group although these effects dissipate in the medium and in the long term contrary to previous results for similar programs in the region the effects are substantially larger for men although they also seem to fade in the long run program participants also exhibit earnings about 40 higher than those in the control group and an analysis of bounds indicates that these gains result from both higher employment levels and higher wages the detailed administrative records also allow us to shed some light on the possible mechanisms underlying these effects a dynamic analysis of employment transitions indicates that the program operated through an increase in the persistence of employment rather than from more frequent entries into employment the earnings effect and the higher persistence of employment suggest that the program was successful in increasing the human capital of participants although the transient nature of these results may also reflect better matches from a program induced increase in informal contacts or formal intermediation jel j08 j24 j68 o15

inefficient hiring in entry level labor markets hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities if this information is public workers obtain its benefits if workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them firms will hire too few inexperienced workers i determine the effects of hiring workers and revealing more information about their abilities through a field experiment in an online marketplace i hired 952 randomly selected workers giving them either detailed or coarse public evaluations both hiring workers and providing more detailed evaluations substantially improved workers subsequent employment outcomes under plausible assumptions the experiment s market level benefits exceeded its cost suggesting that some experimental workers had been inefficiently unemployed

testing for asymmetric employer learning recent evidence suggests that employers acquire more precise information about a worker s productivity the more time he or she spends in the labor market the following question arises is learning symmetric that is do all employers have the same information about workers productivity or is learning asymmetric that is does the current employer have superior information about workers productivity this article develops a learning model with endogenous mobility that nests both learning hypotheses it then proposes new tests for asymmetric employer learning overall learning appears to be mostly symmetric except possibly when the employees involved are college graduates

a theory of wage dynamics a dynamic equilibrium model of long term implicit labour contracts under incomplete but symmetric information is developed workers are assumed to be risk averse and of unknown ability or productivity risk neutral firms learn as do workers about each worker s productivity by observing the worker s output over time it is shown that equilibrium contracts provide for wages which never decline with age and increase only when the worker s market value increases above his current wage in addition to characterizing the equilibrium wage contract we also derive some of its implications for the behaviour of aggregate wages across various groups of workers these implications explain some findings in the recent empirical literature on ageearnings profiles in particular our model can explain why earnings may be positively related to experience even after controlling for productivity as some empirical studies have indicated

dividing the costs and returns to general training data from the national longitudinal survey of youth indicate that the employer often pays the explicit costs of not only on site training but also off site general training although few of these costs appear to be passed on to workers in the form of a lower wage while in training completed spells of general training paid for by previous employers have a larger wage effect than completed spells of general training paid for by the current employer a model where contract enforcement considerations cause employers to share the costs and returns to purely general training can explain these findings

job assignments signalling and efficiency this article analyzes a model in which information about a worker s ability is only directly revealed to the firm employing the worker other firms however use the worker s job assignment as a signal of ability three results recur throughout the analysis first wage rates tend to be more closely associated with jobs than with ability levels second there is frequently an inefficient assignment of workers to jobs i e even when a firm has complete information about a worker s output third the severity of this inefficiency tends to be negatively correlated with the level of firm specific human capital in the economy

why do firms train theory and evidence this paper offers a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for the general training they receive the superior information of the current employer regarding its employees abilities relative to other firms creates ex post monopsony power and encourages this employer to provide and pay for training even if these skills are general the model can lead to multiple equlibria in one equilibrium quits are endogenously high and as a result employers have limited monopsony power and provide little training while in another equilibrium quits are low and training is high using microdata on german apprentices we show that the predictions of our model receive some support from the data

do wage subsidies provide a stepping stone to employment for recent college graduates evidence from a randomized experiment in jordan abstract this study examines the impact of a randomized experiment in jordan in which female community college graduates were assigned to receive a wage subsidy voucher the wage voucher led to a 38 percentage point increase in employment in the short run but the average effect is much smaller and no longer statistically significant after the voucher period has expired the extra job experience gained as a result of the wage subsidy does not provide a stepping stone to new jobs for these recent graduates which appears to be due to productivity levels not rising above a binding minimum wage

reputation transferability in online labor markets online workplaces such as odesk amazon mechanical turk and taskrabbit have been growing in importance over the last few years in such markets employers post tasks on which remote contractors work and deliver the product of their work online as in most online marketplaces reputation mechanisms play a very important role in facilitating transactions since they instill trust and are often predictive of the employer s future satisfaction however labor markets are usually highly heterogeneous in terms of available task categories in such scenarios past performance may not be an accurate signal of future performance to account for this natural heterogeneity in this work we build models that predict the performance of a worker based on prior category specific feedback our models assume that each worker has a category specific quality which is latent and not directly observable what is observable though is the set of feedback ratings of the worker and of other contractors with similar work his

incorporating nonmarket time into benefit cost analyses of social programs an application to the self sufficiency project abstract benefit cost analysis is used extensively in the evaluation of social programs often the success or failure of these programs is judged on the basis of whether the calculated net benefits to society are positive or negative almost all existing benefit cost studies of social programs count entire increases in income accruing to participants in a social program as net benefits to society however economic theory implies that the conceptually appropriate measure of the impact of a government program on any group of individuals is the net change in their surplus or economic rent rather than the net change in their income for example if a social program causes increases in income by increasing work hours then the lost nonmarket time that accompanies these increases has value that needs to be counted as a cost when assessing the merits of that program in this paper we develop a methodology for incorporating lost nonmarket time into benefit cost analyses of social programs we apply our methodology to the self sufficiency project ssp an experimental welfare to work program tested on a pilot basis in two provinces in canada during the 1990s we find that if losses in nonmarket time are ignored ssp yields a substantial positive net benefit to society however if losses in nonmarket time are taken into account the net societal benefits are greatly reduced even becoming negative in certain instances we conclude that future benefit cost analyses of social programs must take effects on nonmarket time into account in order to give a more accurate picture of the net benefits of the program

what happens to the effects of government funded training programs over time this paper applies meta analytic techniques to evaluations of voluntary training programs to investigate whether impacts of government funded training programs on earnings grow or deteriorate over time for adult men and youth we find some evidence that after initially increasing earnings impacts diminish over time for adult women in contrast the evidence suggests that earnings impacts initially grow and then remain undiminished given the scarcity of impact estimates for more than three years we recommend that future studies measure these impacts for a longer period of time until this is done cost effectiveness assessments of training programs should allow for the possibility that at least for adult women earnings impacts might remain stable over time

job creation through infrastructure investment in the middle east and north africa in the next 10 years or so the infrastructure sector has the potential to generate significant employment this paper estimates annual job creation of about 2 0 million in direct jobs and 2 5 million in direct indirect and induced infrastructure related jobs just by meeting the infrastructure investment needs of about 6 9 percent of gross domestic product about us 106 billion for the middle east and north africa region on average the breakdown in expected needs is 11 percent in developing oil exporters 6 percent in oil importing countries and 5 percent in the gulf cooperation council oil exporters needs are particularly high in electricity and roads while important infrastructure job creation will not resolve the region s unemployment problem alone and its job creation potential varies greatly across countries moreover the current ability to finance and hence meet the infrastructure needs varies significantly across countries oil importers are likely to fall short under business as usual scenarios in a region in which the public sector is the main source of infrastructure financing fiscal choices will thus matter to job creation through infrastructure but there are more challenges including the governance of job creation and the proper targeting and costing of subsidies for job creation and the re training programs needed managing expectations will also matter as infrastructure jobs will help but will not solve the region s unemployment and underemployment problems

does standardized information in online markets disproportionately benefit job applicants from less developed countries abstract we examine trade in services between employers from developed countries dcs and workers from less developed countries ldcs on an online platform for contract labor we report evidence that 1 dc employers are less likely to hire ldc compared to dc workers even after controlling for a wide range of observables 2 workers with standardized and verified work history information are more likely to be hired and 3 information on verified work history disproportionately benefits ldc contractors the ldc premium also applies to additional outcomes including wage bids obtaining an interview and being shortlisted in addition the evidence suggests that informational limits to trade may be addressed through a variety of market design approaches for instance an online monitoring tool substitutes for verified work history information

why do temporary help firms provide free general skills training the majority of u s temporary help supply ths firms offer nominally free unrestricted computer skills training a practice inconsistent with the competitive model of training i propose and test a model in which firms offer general training to induce self selection and perform screening of worker ability the model implies and the data confirm that firms providing training attract higher ability workers yet pay them lower wages after training thus beyond providing spot market labor ths firms sell information about worker quality to their clients the rapid growth of ths employment suggests that demand for worker screening is rising

a cost benefit analysis of the random assignment uk employment retention and advancement demonstration this article presents a cost benefit analysis of britain s employment retention and advancement era demonstration which was evaluated through the first large scale randomized control trial in the uk era used a combination of job coaching and financial incentives in attempting to help long term unemployed men and low income lone parents sustain employment and progress in work once they were employed using both administrative and survey data era s effects on benefits and costs were estimated through impact analyses which exploited the experimental design the findings indicated that era was cost beneficial for long term unemployed adult men but not for lone parents the key findings appear robust to sensitivity tests uncertainty as implied by the ses of the estimated impacts was addressed through a monte carlo analysis an approach seldom previously used in cost benefit analyses of social programs

hiring preferences in online labor markets evidence of a female hiring bias online labor marketplaces facilitate the efficient matching of employers and workers across geographical boundaries the exponential growth of this nascent online phenomenon holds important social and economic implications as the hiring decisions made on these online platforms implicate the incomes of millions of workers worldwide despite this importance limited effort has been devoted to understanding whether potential hiring biases exist in online labor platforms and how they may affect hiring outcomes using a novel proprietary data set from a leading online labor platform we investigate the impact of gender based stereotypes on hiring outcomes after accounting for endogeneity via a holistic set of job and worker controls a matched sample approach and a quasi experimental technique we find evidence of a positive hiring bias in favor of female workers an experiment was used to uncover the underlying gender specific traits that could influence hiring outcomes we find that the observed hiring bi

review on fuel economy standard and label for vehicle in selected asean countries abstract sustainable supply of energy at affordable prices is vital to ensure the human development asean is committed pursuing for a clean and green region with fully established mechanisms for sustainable development to ensure the protection of regional environment resources and the high quality of people s life nowadays energy use in the transportation sector represents an important issue in asean countries therefore it is believed that the introduction of fuel economy standards and labels is the key to save energy in this sector fuel economy standards and labels are relatively cheap measure to influence consumer behaviour and to induce car manufacturers to produce more efficient vehicles fuel economy standards and labels for vehicle are being implemented in many countries around the world to save fuel consumption and mitigate co2 emission this paper is a review on fuel economy standard and labels for vehicle in some selected asean countries such as singapore indonesia malaysia philippines thailand and vietnam it has been found that singapore is the leading country in asean that has implemented fuel economy standards and labels moreover it has been found that the implementation of cleaner fuels standard play a crucial role in protecting public health and the environment from transportation sector emissions the most common alternative fuels used in asean are biodiesel ethanol methanol propane hydrogen and natural gas

the labor market effects of credit market information we exploit a natural experiment to provide one of the first measurements of the causal effect of negative credit information on employment and earnings we estimate that one additional year of negative credit information reduces employment by 3 percentage points and wage earnings by 1 000 in comparison the decrease in credit is only one fourth as large negative credit information also causes an increase in self employment and a decrease in mobility further evidence suggests this cost of default is inefficiently borne by those most creditworthy among previous defaulters received april 5 2017 editorial decision september 2 2017 by editor andrew karolyi authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

techno economic analysis and environmental impact of fuel economy labels for passenger cars in indonesia abstract in indonesia the transportation sector is the third largest energy consuming sector 28 after the industrial and residential sector transport energy consumption is mostly driven by the road sub sector in order to reduce fuel consumption and emissions production in the transportation sector fuel economy labels for passenger cars have been introduced globally labelling could play an important role in consumers vehicle purchasing decisions between similar vehicles that have different fuel efficiency ratings currently indonesia does not have fuel economy labels however it is expected that fuel economy labels will be implemented in the near future due to the growth of passenger cars and the increasing demand for oil this study is to calculate potential techno economic analysis and emissions reduction when implementing fuel economy labels for passenger cars in indonesia it has been found that fuel economy labels will save a significant amount of fuel economical benefits and emissions reduction in this country