economic determinants and consequences of self reported work disability this paper examines the determinants of and behavioral responses to self reported work disability in samples of older men and women stratified by race strong support is found for the hypothesis that economic factors as well as poor health influence the probability that individuals report health conditions limit the amount or kind of work they do in particular lower expected wage rates significantly raise the probability of reporting work disablement controlling for health status and health related job requirements the empirical analysis also shows that only a part of the reduced labor supply of disabled individuals is attributable to health conditions the policy and methodological implications of these findings are discussed

simultaneity bias in the analysis of perceived job insecurity and subjective well being abstract the paper assesses perceived job insecurity as a determinant of current subjective well being and demonstrates that standard models may yield significantly downward biased estimates

analyzing the effects of insuring health risks on the trade off between short run insurance benefits vs long run incentive costs this paper constructs a dynamic model of health insurance to evaluate the short and long run effects of policies that prevent firms from conditioning wages on health conditions of their workers and that prevent health insurance companies from charging individuals with adverse health conditions higher insurance premia our study is motivated by recent us legislation that has tightened regulations on wage discrimination against workers with poorer health status americans with disability act of 2009 ada and ada amendments act of 2008 adaaa and that will prohibit health insurance companies from charging different premiums for workers of different health status starting in 2014 patient protection and affordable care act ppaca in the model a trade off arises between the static gains from better insurance against poor health induced by these policies and their adverse dynamic incentive effects on household efforts to lead a healthy life using household panel data from the psid we estimate and calibrate the model and then use it to evaluate the static and dynamic consequences of no wage discrimination and no prior conditions laws for the evolution of the cross sectional health and consumption distribution of a cohort of households as well as ex ante lifetime utility of a typical member of this cohort in our quantitative analysis we find that although a combination of both policies is effective in providing full consumption insurance period by period it is suboptimal to introduce both policies jointly since such policy innovation induces a more rapid deterioration of the cohort health distribution over time this is due to the fact that combination of both laws severely undermines the incentives to lead healthier lives the resulting negative effects on health outcomes in society more than offset the static gains from better consumption insurance so that expected discounted lifetime utility is lower under both policies relative to only implementing wage nondiscrimination legislation

the quantity and quality of life and the evolution of world inequality gdp per capita is usually used to proxy for the quality of life of individuals living in different countries welfare is also affected by quantity of life however as represented by longevity this paper incorporates longevity into an overall assessment of the evolution of cross country inequality and shows that it is quantitatively important the absence of reduction in cross country inequality up to the 1990s documented in previous work is in stark contrast to the reduction in inequality after incorporating gains in longevity throughout the post world war ii period health contributed to reduce significantly welfare inequality across countries this paper derives valuation formulas for infra marginal changes in longevity and computes a full growth rate that incorporates the gains in health experienced by 96 countries for the period between 1960 and 2000 incorporating longevity gains changes traditional results countries starting with lower income tended to grow faster than countries starting with higher income we estimate an average yearly growth in full income of 4 1 percent for the poorest 50 percent of countries in 1960 of which 1 7 percentage points are due to health as opposed to a growth of 2 6 percent for the richest 50 percent of countries of which only 0 4 percentage points are due to health additionally we decompose changes in life expectancy into changes attributable to 13 broad groups of causes of death and three age groups we show that mortality from infectious respiratory and digestive diseases congenital perinatal and ill defined conditions mostly concentrated before age 20 and between ages 20 and 50 is responsible for most of the reduction in life expectancy inequality at the same time the recent effect of aids together with reductions in mortality after age 50 due to nervous system senses organs heart and circulatory diseases contributed to increase health inequality across countries

estimating wage discrimination in the labor market if labor supply curves are not perfectly inelastic wage discrimination induces some minority workers to leave the labor force studies of discrimination that focus only on wage differentials overlook these disincentive effects on minority employment

job displacement relative wage changes and duration of unemployment using special cps data on displaced workers this article investigates the wage consequences of job displacement in a framework that emphasizes the effects of past job duration s and unemployment duration s on postdisplacement wages our model also attempts to take account of the simultaneity between unemployment duration and the postdisplacement wage it is found that duration strongly reduces subsequent earnings and that considerable overstatement of the loss in firm specific training investments is implied by conventional routes to measuring wage losses

the estimation of a joint wage hours labor supply model in this paper the standard cross sectional static model of labor supply is modified to make the wage endogenous and a joint wage hours model is estimated the econometric technique addresses the non linearity of the budget constraint by approximating the constraint by a series of discrete points the results show that the budget constraint is indeed nonlinear that hours affect the wage quadratically that true wage elasticities are lower as a result and that the model fits the hours distribution much better than the standard tobit model

real wages and unemployment in the big squeeze uk real wage growth has slowed down stagnated and recently turned sharply negative we document the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades showing that recent patterns represent a distinct break of trend that pre dates the onset of recession we explore whether unemployment has become a stronger moderating influence on real wage growth and report using aggregate economy wide and regional panel data that real wage unemployment sensitivities have become stronger in the period from 2003 onwards finally we offer some assessment of possible drivers of this increased sensitivity of real wages to unemployment

the distribution of economic losses among displaced workers a replication this paper estimates the impact of unemployment on earnings following re employment for a large and representative sample of british men 1984 94 unemployment incidence is found to have only a temporary effect an average earnings setback of 10 on

mind the gap please the changing nature of entry jobs in britain we examine wages in jobs taken by those out of work entry jobs and the characteristics of the individuals who fill them there are large entry wage gaps relative to other jobs more importantly real entry wages have fallen by around 20 log points relative to all other jobs since 1979 one quarter of this decline is accounted for by differences in individual and job characteristics and around 40 from an unexplained fall in the position of entry jobs in the wage distribution that entry wages differ from the stock of all wages should be incorporated into labour supply modelling

the risk and cost of job loss in canada 1978 2008 we assess the risk and cost of worker displacement in canada over the last three decades we show that neither the risk of job loss nor the short term earnings losses of displaced workers trended upwards during that period however short term earnings losses of workers displaced from manufacturing increased in recent years as a smaller proportion found a post displacement job in that sector in line with stevens 1997 and couch and placzek 2010 we find that high seniority workers and individuals with stable labour market attachment experienced five years after displacement earnings losses that ranged between 10 and 18 le risque et le cout d une perte d emploi au canada 1978 2008 on evalue le risque et le cout d un deplacement de travailleur au canada au cours des trois dernieres decennies on montre que ni le risque d une perte d emploi ni les gains perdus a court terme par les travailleurs deplaces n ont eu une tendance a la hausse au cours de cette periode cependant les pertes de gains a court terme des travailleurs deplaces dans le secteur manufacturier ont augmente au cours des annees recentes alors qu une proportion plus faible de ces deplaces ont retrouve un emploi dans ce secteur en coherence avec les resultats de stevens 1997 et de couch et placzek 2010 on decouvre que les travailleurs avec beaucoup de seniorite et les personnes avec un attachement stable au marche du travail ont enregistre cinq ans apres un deplacement des pertes de gains de l ordre de 10 a 18

the public private sector gender wage differential in britain evidence from matched employee workplace data this article shows that little of the gender earnings gap in the public and private sectors in britain are explained by differences in employee characteristics the differences in workplace characteristics however make a significant sizeable contribution it is shown that performance related pay and company pension schemes are associated with higher relative earnings in the private sector whilst increased provision of family friendly employment practices in the public sector is associated with higher relative earnings for women

nominal wage rigidity and the rate of inflation using the accurate and extensive data available in the uk new earnings survey this paper investigates the extent to which nominal wages are downwardly rigid and whether such rigidity interferes with necessary real wage adjustments when inflation is low despite the substantial numbers of individuals whose nominal wages fall from one year to the next we find that if long run inflation is one percent higher the number of individuals with negative real pay growth increases by around 1 4 percent this is controlling for the median and dispersion of the real wage change distribution

wage discrimination against handicapped men and women the extent of discrimination against handicapped men and women is estimated in this paper observed wage differentials are corrected for selectivity bias the results indicate that almost one third of the wage differential for men and close to one half for women can be attributed to discrimination interestingly handicapped women are also subjected to sex discrimination

hourly earnings in the united states another look at unionization schooling sickness and unemployment using psid data this paper makes use of panel data to consider the effects of unionization schooling sickness and unemployment on individual earnings our results may be summarized as follows the unionization effect is around 15 20 this measure is consistently estimated controlling for both fixed individual attributes and serially uncorrelated measurement error sickness has little immediate impact but there is some indication that after 4 years earnings have fallen permanently by around 8 consequent on a 10 week spell of sickness a spell of unemployment on the other hand leads to a sharp fall in earnings but this effect decays rapidly leaving the possibility of a small permanent impact finally controlling for all fixed individual attributes we are unable to pin down the schooling effect with any accuracy owing to the absence of instruments that are both valid and effective within the data set

job tenure in britain 1975 1992 the authors examine eighteen years of a large cross section to build up a picture of job tenure in britain they look for changes in the distribution of job tenure over a turbulent period for the u k labor market the authors find some change in the mean job tenure a decrease in elapsed tenure of about 10 percent between 1975 and 1992 these are important changes but they do not support the view that the dramatic changes in the labor market technology and competition have spelled the end of jobs for life copyright 1996 by royal economic society

job insecurity and wages this paper examines whether subjective expectations of unemployment are reliable indicators of the probability of becoming unemployed and investigates their association with wage growth we find that workers fears of unemployment are increased by their previous unemployment experience and by the unemployment experiences of a close friend and are associated with other objective indicators of insecure jobs we then show that unemployment fear predicts future unemployment above and beyond observed objective variables high fears of unemployment are found to be associated with significantly lower levels of wage growth for men but to have no significant link with wage growth for women

working in family firms paid less but more secure evidence from french matched employer employee data the authors study compensation packages in family owned and nonfamily owned firms using french matched employer employee data they first show that family firms pay on average lower wages part of this wage gap is attributable to low wage workers sorting into family firms and high wage workers sorting into nonfamily firms however they also find evidence that company wage policies differ according to ownership status so that the same worker is paid differently under family and nonfamily firm ownership in addition family firms are characterized by lower job insecurity as measured by lower dismissal rates family firms also appear to rely less on dismissals and more on hiring reductions than do nonfamily firms when they downsize the authors show that compensating wage differentials account for a substantial part of the inverse relationship between the family nonfamily gaps in wages and job security

health time allocation and work empirical evidence from turkey abstractthis article investigates the relationship between health status and time allocation decisions of individuals although many studies address impacts of health on labour supply few studies

disentangling the effect of arthritis on earnings a simultaneous estimate of wage rates and hours worked poor health affects both wage rates and hours of work here we develop a procedure for examining the separate impact of a specific chronic disease arthritis on wages and hours worked and then translate these results into earnings our methodology provides a consistent approach for measuring how a specific chronic disease affects total earnings as well as its component parts we find that arthritis affects wage rates and hours worked differently and the pattern of these effects differs considerably between men and women

missing work is a pain the effect of cox 2 inhibitors on sickness absence and disability pension receipt abstract how does medical innovation affect labor supply we analyze how the availability of cox 2 inhibitors pharmaceuticals used for treating pain and inflammation affected the sickness absence and disability pension receipt of individuals with joint pain we exploit the market entry of the cox 2 inhibitor vioxx and its sudden market withdrawal as exogenous sources of variation in drug use using norwegian administrative data we find vioxx s entry decreased quarterly sickness absence days among individuals with joint pain by 7 12 percent the withdrawal increased sickness days by 12 16 percent and increased the quarterly probability of receiving disability benefits by 6 15 percent

husband s health and wife s labor supply this paper examines the labor supply response of the wife to deterioration in the husband s health unlike past cross sectional studies responses over time are directly examined through the use of longitudinal data the empirical results suggest that the magnitude and direction of the response depend crucially on the attractiveness of transfers which the family may qualify for when the husband s health deteriorates when no transfers are available the wife increases her market work in order to replace the lost earnings of the husband however as transfers become more attractive the wife begins to reduce her labor supply enabling her to spend more time at home caring for her husband

measuring wellbeing performance of carbon emissions using hybrid measure and meta frontier techniques empirical tests for g20 countries and implications for china abstract a quantitative measure of performance that integrates national level carbon emission profiles with key parameters of social and economic wellbeing can provide an effective management tool for policy interventions this paper constructs non parametric evaluation and decomposition models using hybrid measure and meta frontier techniques the proposed models are employed to estimate the wellbeing performance of carbon emissions wpce and identify the sources of wpce inefficiency empirical analyses based on the group 20 g20 countries for the 2000 2015 period shows the worst performance is in the brics country group i e brazil russia india china and south africa known for rapid growth whereas the developed and the developing economies of the g20 group show positive trajectories of performance as for china its performance measure of wpce was the lowest among the g20 indicating significant potential for further improvement the analysis also highlights the role of managerial failure as the primary driver of inefficiency more important than technological inefficiency in explaining efficiency loss within the g20 countries this critical finding the relevance and importance of managerial capability suggests the need for a high level of attention to governance and managerial capacity to ensure continued improvements in performance on carbon emissions and human wellbeing a lesson to be drawn from this study is that china s policies to promote a low carbon economy can benefit from increased priority given to low carbon technological innovation for the energy system transition and enhancement of environmental governance and managerial capacity to achieve a long term sustainability

labor market discrimination against hispanic and black men h ispanic american men have lower average wage rates than white non hispanics in 1975 the average white non hispanic male wage earner in the united states earned 5 97 an hour mexican men earned 4 31 72 as much as white non hispanics puerto rican men earned 4 52 76 as much and cuban men earned 5 33 89 as much as white non hispanics by way of comparison black men s average wages in 1975 were 4 65 78 of the white male wage several possible reasons for the hispanics lower wages come to mind among them are age and education geographic location immigration language difficulties and discrimination for example as shown in table 1 mexicans and puerto ricans are younger on average than the white non hispanic population and earnings tend to rise with age hispanics have lower average levels of education than white non hispanics and wages are positively associated with education many mexican americans live in the southwest where prices are relatively low moreover hispanics are more likely to be recent immigrants and to lack fluency in english than white non hispanics and so to be at a disadvantage in the labor market in addition there is a widespread belief that hispanics suffer from employment discrimination and cannot obtain the wages that their human capital would command if they were non hispanic whites how much of the wage differentials described above are due to each of these factors and to other inter group differences in wage related characteristics in particular how much impact does labor market discrimination have on the average hispanic man s wage and how does this compare with discrimination against blacks this paper provides answers to these questions a few other efforts have been made to analyze the relative earnings of hispanic and white nonhispanic men using 1960 and 1970 census data fogel 1966 poston and alvirez 1973 poston alvirez and tienda 1976 long 1977 and gwartney and long 1978 we use more recent data from the 1976 survey of income and education this data set enables us to measure wage rates more accurately and to specify the wage function more completely than does the census unlike previous analysts in estimating the wage function we take account of possible selectivity bias due to the distinction between average wage offers and average observed wages thus we hope to obtain a more accurate and up to date measure of labor market discrimination against hispanic men section ii explains the method used to separate the minority white non hispanic wage differential into the portions due to differences in average characteristics and the portion due to differences in unobserved factors and discrimination taking into account the possibility of selectivity bias in the observed wage sample section iii describes the data used in the study and the specification of the wage equation the breakdown of the observed wage differentials into components due to differences in participation in the wage and salary sector local price levels average characteristics and discrimination are presented in section iv section v summarizes our findings and discusses their implications for efforts to improve the economic situation of hispanics in the united states

worker flows job flows and unemployment in a matching model abstract standard matching models of unemployment generate far too little volatility in unemployment and vacancies relative to the variation in the shock variables shimer 2005 showed that in us data the vacancy to unemployment ratio is about 26 times more volatile than the standard model predicts he identified the flexibility of wages as the key issue and triggered a heated debate on possible improvements of the core model to accommodate these empirical facts in this paper we first document shimer s facts for the uk and find them to be qualitatively similar to us facts we then develop and calibrate a model based on the mortensen and pissarides approach that increases the volatility of the v u ratio 20 fold compared to the standard framework the key features of our model relate to the job creation decision by firms and the search options of workers we allow these to search whilst employed and firms to re advertise jobs that have been quit from this leads us to use a different job creation process whereby potential vacancies or job ideas arise at a finite rate per period over a range of idiosyncratic productivities calibrating the model to uk data we show that it delivers volatility in unemployment and vacancies much closer to though still not as large as that observed for the uk whilst retaining the standard wage determination process

arthritis and the earnings of men an analysis incorporating selection bias abstract arthritis is a chronic and crippling disease which affects the work effort and earnings of more than 14 million working age victims this paper examines the effects of arthritis on the earnings of men aged 18 to 64 arthritis has large and significant effects on earnings most models incorporating selection bias have examined groups with lower labor force participation rates than prime age males but significant selection bias is found here when selection bias is considered the estimated absolute effects of arthritis are increased and the percentage of the gap between arthritic and non arthritic males explained by arthritis as opposed to other factors increases this study is unusual in identifying the effects of a single disease on earnings

a picture of job insecurity facing british men this paper considers three aspects of the job insecurity facing british men in the last two decades the probability of becoming unemployed the costs of unemployment in terms of real wages losses and the probability that the continuously employed will experience substantial real wage losses the first of these has not risen in the last two decades the second has risen by around 50 percent and the third has risen particularly for the top skill groups

the income losses of displaced workers abstract we use a new matched worker firm dataset for the united kingdom to estimate the income loss resulting from firm closure and mass layoffs we track workers for up to nine years after the displacement event and the availability of predisplacement characteristics allows us to implement difference in differences estimators using propensity score matching methods income losses during the first five years after the displacement event are in the range 18 35 percent per year for workers whose firm closes down and 14 25 percent for workers who exit a firm which suffers a mass layoff these losses are largely due to periods of nonemployment which is consistent with previous work from europe but contrasts with that from the united states

inequalities in life expectancy and the global welfare convergence abstract becker et al 2005 maintain that including life expectancy gains in a welfare indicator result in a reduction of inequality between 1960 and 2000 twice as great as when measured by per capita income we discuss their methodology and show it determines the convergence result we use an alternative methodology based on fleurbaey and gaulier 2009 which monetizes differences in life expectancy between countries at each date rather than life expectancy gains we show that including life expectancy has no effect on the evolution of world inequality

differences in the returns to education for males by disability status and age of disability onset author affiliation kevin hollenbeck w e upjohn institute 300 south westnedge avenue kalamazoo mi 49007 usa e mail hollenbeck upjohninstitute org jean kimmel department of economics western michigan university kalamazoo mi 49008 4023 usa e mail jean kimmel wmich edu corresponding author acknowledgment this paper is a substantially revised version of a paper that was first presented at the january 2001 assa meetings held in new orleans louisiana and then circulated as upjohn institute working paper no 01 72 the authors thank our discussant robert haveman for his excellent suggestions andrew houtenville for generous assistance with the disability literature doug kruse for input and data assistance above and beyond the call of duty and noyna debburman jason preuss and yuanlei zhu for their skillful research assistance additionally we are very appreciative to claire black and sue berkebile for their superb assistance in preparation of the manuscript finally we thank our journal editor plus two anonymous journal referees 1 introductionin 1990 the u s congress passed the americans with disabilities act ada legislation perceived as a hallmark in the quest by individuals with disabilities for equal access to labor market opportunities numerous studies have been published in recent years assessing the outcomes to date of this legislation and much debate continues regarding its success or failure in improving labor market outcomes however the ada is only one means of addressing labor market difficulties faced by individuals with disabilities because its primary intent is to expand the number of employment opportunities via employer accommodation the ada may be characterized as a demand side intervention 1 numerous education training and rehabilitation programs operate on the supply side of the labor market one example of increased attention on supply side programs may be seen in the workforce investment act of 1998 this sort of disability management model program has the goal of enhancing the skills and knowledge of workers with disabilities to increase their productivity and employability 2 the returns to education for the population with disabilities is indicative of the potential efficacy of such supply side interventions if the rates of return to formal education are large then it might be argued that there is an underinvestment in such interventions if the rates are low then expanding this human capital intervention as a way to improve employment or earnings may not be indicated formal educational attainment and its differential effects by disability status and age of onset are the focus of this paper for an individual with a work limiting condition the age of onset of this condition plays a role in education choices and employment a priori one might expect that among the population with disabilities those with early onset of the disability are the most able to adjust human capital investments and obtain job matches that minimize the potentially negative labor market impacts of the disabling condition see loprest and maag 2003 however the early onset of the disability might hinder human capital investment or affect its quality many studies and data sets have been used to document the disparities in employment related outcomes between people with and without disabilities and many nice summaries exist in the literature 3 depending on the data used and the definition of disability 4 approximately 8 15 of individuals of working age have disabilities in general individuals with a disability report lower employment rates lower levels of educational attainment and lower wages additionally many researchers have reported a post ada decline in employment rates although the cause of this trend is not clear and might be related to a worsening in recent years of disability severity amongst the population reporting disabilities or the trend might be confounded by changes in the labor force participation rates among the disabled

an equilibrium theory of learning search and wages we propose an equilibrium theory of learning from search in the labor market which addresses the search behavior of workers the creation of jobs and the determination of wages as functions of labor market histories in the model each worker has incomplete information about his job finding ability and learns about it from his search outcomes the theory formalizes a notion akin to discouragement over each uninterrupted unemployment spell unemployed workers update their beliefs about their job finding abilities downward and reduce their desired wages one contribution of the paper is to integrate learning from search into an equilibrium framework by inducing endogenous heterogeneity in workers beliefs learning from search provides a novel explanation for a set of related empirical observations about the labor market including unemployment duration dependence and wage dispersion another contribution is to apply lattice theoretic techniques to analyze learning from experience which is useful because learning generates convex value functions and in principle multiple solutions to a worker s optimization problem

international comparisons of living standards by equivalent incomes we propose a measure of living standards for international comparisons based on gdp per capita the measure incorporates corrections for international flows of income labor risk of unemployment healthy life expectancy household demography and inequalities the method for comparing populations that differ in some non income dimension consists of computing the equivalent variation of income that would make each population indifferent between its current situation and a reference situation with respect to the non income dimension this is applied to 24 oecd countries the obtained ranking of countries differs substantially from the gdp ranking

are workers permanently scarred by job displacements this paper investigates whether workers suffer lasting scars following job displacements using david t ellwood s 1982 terminology scars represent persistent effects whereas blemishes are transitory adjustments which dissipate over time more precisely dislocated individuals are defined as scarred if they continue to earn less or to be unemployed more than their nondisplaced counterparts even after the conclusion of a several year adjustment period