employer initiated job terminations recent interest in pension reform and mandatory retirement has led to a considerable body of literature on job separation the analysis has however focused primarily on the employee s reasons for and reaction to job separation much less attention has been paid to the theoretical factors influencing the employer s decision to terminate a person s employment much of the debate centers on questions concerning the productivity of older workers representatives of the elderly not only argue that members of their constituency want to continue to work but that they are highly productive the implication is that if employers terminate older workers it must reflect employer discrimination against equally productive but older workers becker 1 however argues that the case for discrimination is weak competitive markets would lead to nondiscriminating firms driving out the discriminatory firms furthermore since employers will someday become old they are less likely to discriminate on the basis of age than other factors such as race or sex the implication is that if older workers are being terminated this must reflect that their productivities have dropped below their wages this paper explores the relationship between productivities and compensation paid by a nondiscriminatory employer who terminates older workers the analysis yields answers to the following questions at what point will a firm decide to terminate the employment of a person embodying the employer s investment in specific training if productivities vary with age how does the productivity of an older terminated worker compare with that of a younger worker have older workers passed their peak productivity years

hospital transaction prices and managed care discounting for selected medical technologies it is generally assumed that managed care has been successful at capturing discounts from medical providers but the implications have been a matter of debate critics argue that managed care organizations attain savings by reducing intensity of services while others have argued that savings are real and are a consequence of discounts per unit of care rather than reduced intensity because medical services tend to be bundled together into episodes of care separating out prices and quantities can be difficult given available data past studies focused on an average price for the aggregate hospital calculated from total revenue divided by the number of inpatient days or cases e g glenn a melnick et al 1992 emmett b keeler and melnick 1999 david dranove and richard ludwick 1999 caution that these methods provide approximations of actual prices and are subject to measurement error due to unobservable differences in service mix examining treatment episode for acute myocardial infarctions heart attacks david cutler et al 2000 infer that discounts attained by managedcare plans are only partly due to reductions in intensity here we employ data that enable us to observe transaction prices i e actual payments borne by the payer and received by the hospital for major procedures on an unbundled basis our analysis differs from previous studies in several important dimensions among these is the focus on pricing differences between various insurers and employers rather than differences within a single large insurer as a consequence we derive an empirical specification based on the bargaining framework due to john m brooks et al 1997 rather than their insurerbased model moreover to identify pure unit discounts we focus on the narrowly defined procedure like cutler et al we focus on coronary heart disease a leading cause of death we examine a major procedure used to treat this disease one that is costly and relatively common in bypass surgery more fully coronary arterial bypass graft or cabg healthy segments of artery are surgically inserted around the diseased arteries in 2002 about 344 000 cabg s were performed in the united states with expenditures exceeding 21 billion other economists have focused on these procedures to examine market phenomena such as the hospital s entry decision michael chernew et al 2002 or information diffusion dranove et al 2003 yet the pricing decision was not treated fully

firm size earnings and displacement risk rudolf winter ebmer analogous to the well documented firm size wage differential there also exists a differential in layoff risk according to firm size using austrian data i discuss several reasons for this puzzle including on the job training and workers heterogeneity if less stable and also less able workers select themselves into small unstable and low paying firms predicted layoff risk of workers can be used as a proxy for heterogeneity of workers and therefore be included in wage regressions doing this one half of the size earnings premium can be explained jel j31 j63 i introduction large employers pay more numerous empirical studies have documented this relationship 1 but they have not been able to explain it in a very careful study brown and medoff 1989 1056 look at ten possible reasons for this puzzle only to conclude our bottom line is that the size wage differential appears to be both sizable and omnipresent our analysis leaves us uncomfortably unable to explain it or at least the part of it that is not explained by observable indicators of labor quality neither compensating differentials for working conditions nor product market power or the threat of unionization were able to explain the size premium brown and medoff 1989 also found size effects for piece rate workers for unionized workers 2 and in longitudinal samples 3 where they controlled by first differencing for unobserved heterogeneity of the individuals given this wide interest in the effects of employer size on earnings very little research has been done concerning size differentials in turnover are the jobs in big firms not only higher paid but also more stable this would reinforce the puzzle of firm size once more anderson and meyer 1994 look at separation rates without distinguishing between quit and layoff and find highly decreasing turnover rates with firm size for permanent separations but no size effect on temporary separations 4 brown and medoff 1989 as well as others find quit rates to decline with firm size which speaks against compensating wage differentials arguments idson 1996 explicitly looks at the issue of long term employment relationships in large establishments which may be possibly due to the greater capacity of large employers to provide job mobility within the enterprise and the lower probability of business failure facing larger firms rebitzer 1986 argues that the observed higher job tenure in large plants is in a ccordance with labor market segmentation theory the aim of this article is to provide further evidence for a size layoff relationship using austrian data i try to consider several explanations for this regularity especially on the job training and the hypothesis of selective recruitment of workers into large and small firms following one hypothesis small employers attract less stable and capable employees a pattern that would cause only a spurious size layoff relationship on the other hand if workers with a relatively low stock of human capital sort themselves into relatively inefficient firms with unstable employment prospects then the size wage effect itself may be upwardly biased which was noted by mayo and murray 1991 the plan of the article is as follows section ii presents institutional details on wage bargaining and employment protection legislation in austria the data for the empirical study are discussed in section iii results for size wage and size layoff relationships are presented in section iv section v looks at the interaction between firm size layoff risk and wage determination section vi concludes ii wage bargaining institutions and job security legislation in austria wage bargaining in austria is very centralized even though only about 60 of workers are organized in unions bargaining outcomes are extended to all workers unionized or not a works council has to be established under the austrian labor law in all establishments employing at least five adult workers but usually the actual existence of a works council is positively determined by both firm size and firm age

outsourcing imports and labour demand this paper examines the effects of purchased services and imported intermediate materials on the labour demand for different skills in german manufacturing sectors we derive and estimate a factor demand system based on the generalised box cox cost function nesting both the normalised quadratic and the translog functional form we find that the impacts of output and capital growth are more important in explaining the demand for heterogeneous labour than substitution effects between labour and non labour inputs similarly the increasing use of both imported materials and purchased services is a consequence of output growth rather than input substitution

the impact of international outsourcing on unionization and wages evidence from the apparel export sector in central america it is often assumed that manufacturing workers in developing countries as recipients of outsourced jobs would achieve economic benefits and organizational power the author argues that job growth in developing countries through outsourcing to competing firms has often actually resulted in declining unionization and lower wage rates relative to traditional integrated manufacturing firms using time series data on union membership from 1980 2003 for honduras and el salvador as well as 2004 household survey data for el salvador he examines the determinants of unionization rates and wages in the manufacturing sectors he finds that that competitive outsourcing hurts labor at the plant level in three ways 1 it reduces labor s strike leverage by geographically dispersing the production process 2 it increases the threat of plant mobility by decreasing plant level investments and 3 it increases labor costs relative to total costs which creates an incentive for employers to keep wages low and unions out

why do big firms pay higher wages evidence from an international database abstract bigger firms pay higher wages this note reports tests of the hypothesis that this big firm premium bfp occurs because workers in big firms are more skilled we use the international adult literacy survey which gives richer skill measures than those typically available in labor market surveys to measure the bfp in nine countries with and without controls for worker skill the results show that the bfp is not as universal as is often suggested but in countries where it exists controlling for skills does little to reduce the size of the bfp

equilibrium unemployment with outsourcing and wage solidarity under labour market imperfections abstract we evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market where wages are determined by a monopoly labour union we find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion between the high and low skilled workers when the labour union adopts a solidaristic wage policy it will dampen this tendency further higher outsourcing will increase equilibrium unemployment among the high skilled workers whereas it will reduce it among the low skilled workers overall outsourcing will reduce economy wide equilibrium unemployment under the reasonable condition that the proportion of high skilled workers is sufficiently low

redundancy in an expanding labour market a case study of displaced workers from two manufacturing plants in southampton previous studies of redundancy have been derived from a restricted geographical base they have been predominantly concerned with workers made redundant by manufacturing firms in older industrial regions and have largely ignored redundancies in more buoyant labour market areas this paper examines the post redundancy experience of workers made redundant by two large manufacturing firms in southampton in the mid 1980s comparison with previous studies of redundancy in less prosperous labour markets in northern regions of the uk highlights contrasts in the proportions of workers finding alternative employment and in rates of pay working conditions and levels of job satisfaction the study also highlights the importance of gender in post redundancy experience another factor that has been neglected in previous studies

intra european imbalances adjustment and growth in the eurozone this paper considers the increase in the euro intra area imbalances since the late 1990s and their role in the current european debt crisis by focusing on the case study of italy and germany we argue that both macroeconomic the functioning of the euro area and microeconomic internationalization of production factors contributed to the creation of such imbalances when sovereign risk and currency risk emerged in the periphery coupled with austerity as a response to these risks both factors made the euro crisis worse the present zero sum game approach is very risky for the stability of the euro area policy coordination of some kind is needed this requires agreeing on well identified economic policy priorities taking full account of the different positions of the members in terms of growth external imbalances and competitiveness new policy priorities are thus required in the euro zone that put more emphasis on cooperative positive sum games in convergence and competitiveness

employment outcomes and plant closure in a post industrial city an analysis of the labour market studies of mg rover workers three years on this paper examines how the loss of 6300 jobs from the closure of mg rover mgr in the city of birmingham uk in april 2005 affected the employment trajectories of ex workers in the context of wider structural change and efforts at urban renewal the paper presents an analysis of a longitudinal survey of 300 ex mgr workers and examines to what extent the state of local labour markets and workers geographical mobility as well as the effectiveness of the immediate policy response and longer term local economic strategies may have helped to balance the impacts of personal attributes associated with workers employability and their reabsorption into the labour markets it is found that the relative buoyancy of the local economy the success of longer run efforts at diversification and a strong policy response and retraining initiative helped many disadvantaged workers to find new jobs in the medium term however the paper also highlights the unequal employment outcomes and trajectories that many lesser skilled workers faced it explores the policy issues arising from such closures and their aftermath such as the need to co ordinate responses to retain institutional capacity to offer high quality training and education resources to workers and where possible to slow down such closure processes to enable skills to be retained and reused within the local economy

policy review section in this policy review section gerry stoker of the institute of local government studies presents a critical review of the role of urban development corporations udcs in comparing the experience of the udcs consideration is given to the varying nature of the land and property market in each udc area to the relationship with local authorities and other local bodies and the regeneration strategies pursued by the udcs this is followed by an assessment of the impact of the udcs in economic social and political terms in the second article john britton of the university of toronto examines the theoretical case for interventionist public policies to assist the innovation process in small and medium sized enterprises these arguments are supported by a review of the experience of various national support programmes introduced in the uk in particular the manufacturing advisory service introduced in 1978 and the design advisory service launched in 1982

firm size wage differentials in the netherlands an unsolved problem in modern labor economics is the positive relation between the size of the firm in which a worker is employed and his wage one line of research that has been developed quite recently in this field is the application of endogenous switching regression models in this paper we utilize such a model to investigate firm size wage differentials in the netherlands the principal findings are that larger firms pay higher returns on schooling whereas smaller firms tend to reward iq combined with the finding that high iq workers are sorted into the largest firms the results are consistent with a model of job screening furthermore we find that employed sons of self employed fathers are more likely to work in small firms and that wage prospects for all types of workers are indeed most favorable in larger firms

does manufacturing extension matter an evaluation of the industrial technology extension service in new york abstract building on pioneering state programs in the 1980s new federal initiatives call for a significant expansion in the scale and scope of manufacturing extension efforts in the united states this article presents an evaluation of one effort to spur industrial modernization the industrial technology extension service ites in new york state based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis the evaluation suggests that the ites program has had a favorable impact on many companies with respect to cost reductions and increased productivity the article discusses some of the difficult methodological issues in evaluating these types of programs and includes a series of recommendations on strengthening future evaluations to yield more definitive results

international outsourcing and factor prices with multistage production we develop a dual representation of the technology of international fragmentation for an industry using 2 factors in a continuum of stages we then derive a generalised factor price frontier which incorporates an endogenous adjustment of the margin of fragmentation using this frontier in a 2 2 general equilibrium model we investigate the role of outsourcing in the adjustment to a decline in the final output price of the multistage industry and the attendant factor price effects we also explore the implications of an improved technology of international fragmentation on the margin of fragmentation and on domestic factor prices

is there a wage premium for volunteer oss engagement signalling learning and noise abstractvolunteer based open source production has become a significant new model for the organization of software development economics often pictures this phenomenon as a case of signalling individuals engage in the volunteer programming of open source software oss as a labour market signal resulting in a wage premium yet this explanation could so far not be empirically tested this article fills this gap by estimating an upper bound composite wage premium of voluntary oss contributions and by separating the potential signalling effect of oss engagement from other effects although some 70 of oss contributors believe that oss involvement benefits their careers we find no actual labour market premium for oss engagement the presence of other motives such as fun of play or altruism renders oss contributions too noisy to function as a signal

offshoring tasks and the skill wage pattern the paper investigates the relationship between offshoring wages and the occupational task profile using rich individual level panel data our main results suggest that when only considering within industry changes in offshoring we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low skilled workers though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision however when allowing for cross industry effects of offshoring i e allowing for labor mobility across industries negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers occupations a higher degree of interactivity and in particular non routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring

the labour market effects of offshoring of small and medium sized firms micro level evidence for germany small and medium sized enterprises smes are the economic powerhouse of many oecd countries perhaps most prominently so in germany yet the labour market dynamics caused by the internationaliza

do stronger age discrimination laws make social security reforms more effective supply side social security reforms to increase employment and delay benefit claiming among older individuals may be frustrated by age discrimination we test for policy complementarities between supply side social security reforms and demand side efforts to deter age discrimination specifically studying whether stronger state level age discrimination protections enhanced the impact of the increases in the social security full retirement age fra that occurred in the past decade the evidence indicates that for older individuals who were caught by the increase in the fra benefit claiming reductions and employment increases were sharper in states with stronger age discrimination protections

employer size wage effects evidence from matched employer employee survey data in the uk this paper employs a random sample of matched employer employee data from the uk to test seven possible explanations for the positive relationship between employer size and pay individual wage equations show a large employer size wage premium we then control for a range of establishment level variables based on seven hypotheses typically advanced to explain this premium each establishment level factor reduces the wage premium but a sizeable premium nonetheless remains in adjudicating on these hypotheses we find a strong association between the internal labour market and the employer size wage premium this finding supports the theory that the employer size wage effect may be due to the higher costs of turnover or monitoring in larger firms however we find contrasting effects for public versus private sector establishments

payer type and the returns to bypass surgery evidence from hospital entry behavior in this paper we estimate the returns associated with the provision of coronary artery bypass graft cabg surgery by payer type medicare hmo etc because reliable measures of prices and treatment costs are often unobserved we seek to infer returns from hospital entry behavior we estimate a model of patient flows for cabg patients that provides inputs for an entry model we find that ffs provides a high return throughout the study period medicare which had been generous in the early 1980s now provides a return that is close to zero medicaid appears to reimburse less than average variable costs hmos essentially pay at average variable costs though the return varies inversely with competition

rent sharing and collective wage contracts evidence from german establishment level data using german establishment level data this article analyses whether wages respond to firm specific profitability conditions particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the extent of rent sharing varies with collective bargaining coverage in this context two conflicting hypotheses are tested the first one asserts that unions exploit their bargaining power at the firm level and appropriate a larger share of rents than the bargaining parties in uncovered firms the second one states that unions favour a compressed intra industry wage structure and suppress the responsiveness of wages to firm specific profitability conditions the empirical analysis provides strong support for the second hypothesis while pooled ordinary least squares pols estimates yield positive estimates of the rent sharing coefficient in covered establishments dynamic panel data estimates accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of rents point to a rent sharing coefficient of zero

human capital and information this paper examines the issue of the establishment size wage effect it analyzes a cross section for the year 1979 with information on 607 individuals and the 60 private sector establishments where they work it discusses four theories of the establishment size wage effect and uses empirical proxies to test them it shows that when a dummy variable on computer access in the establishment is introduced as a regressor the establishment size variable is an insignificant regressor this result and other evidence supports the contention that the establishment size coefficient captures the effect of unobserved human capital accumulation

will most of us be working for giant enterprises by 2028 abstract various economic theories yield quite opposite predictions about the changing size of enterprises and establishments and the purpose of this essay is to present some stylized facts to begin to resolve some of these theoretical confusions the estimates for this purpose cover a period of almost four decades they show that average establishment size has decreased since the late 1960s that the number of establishments per enterprise has leveled off since the early 1980s and that the average size of enterprises reveals an undulating pattern with a sharp upturn at the end of the century due to the impact of the merger wave considerable attention is paid to the causal factors underlying these changes particular in reference to the conflicting theoretical evidence

services outsourcing and innovation an empirical investigation we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing domestic outsourcing profits and innovation using plant level data we find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing of services but the magnitude is smaller this makes intuitive sense as international outsourcing allows more scope for exploiting international factor price differentials therefore giving the establishment higher profits and more scope to restructure production activities towards innovation we also find that international outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability as predicted by theory while this is not true for domestic sourcing the results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis

premiums to employment in larger establishments evidence from peru abstract examination of the employer size wage effect for males in urban peru suggests the following higher wages in larger establishments do not merely compensate for higher worker quality or inferior working conditions size differences in the use of rising wage tenure profiles cannot provide a market clearing explanation for the employer size wage effect unless workers are extremely impatient thus larger employers appear to pay premiums unionization explains none of the premiums and minimum wage compliance explains at best a small fraction shirking based efficiency wage explanations for premiums are implausible because peruvian job security legislation greatly inhibits dismissals in larger establishments explanations meriting further research involve the use of high wages to reduce turnover and to improve productivity enhancing morale

job loss and the regional incidence of redundancies in the current recession industrial change is a two sided process it both creates new plants production methods and jobs and displaces others at present in operation but the two sides of this process rarely coincide in time or space and in britain over the past fifteen years or so the develop ment path of the economy has been increasingly dominated by displacement effects whether measured in terms of output exports investment or employment there has been a cumulative weakening of the contribution of manufacturing to the national economy an unprecedented de industrialisation although opinions differ over the precise causes of this persistent industrial decline it is clear that the british economy has become caught in a process of declining external competitiveness which is both a consequence and a cause of a deteriorating economic environment characterised by low profits the holding back of new investment and insufficient job opportunities blackaby 1978 hughes 1981 cambridge economic policy group 1982 it is the absolute decline in industrial employ ment sustained now for some sixteen years and accelerated by the current recession that is one of the worrying features of this deindustrialisation from a peak level in 1966 total industrial employment has declined by over four million of which three million is accounted for by jobs lost in manufacturing during the 1970s there were some increases in service employment especially in the public sector which offset the decline in manufac turing jobs but that offsetting trend came to a halt towards the end of the decade over the period 1966 81 service employment increased by just over one million so that the loss of four million jobs in industry has been primarily reflected not by jobs created else where in the economy but by an increase in the army of unemployed of nearly three million industrial unemployment is now more than ten times what it was in 1966 this decline in the demand for labour has been characterised by a number of cyclical phases over the last decade or so cycles in the rate of capital accumulation appear to have become more marked and to have been accompanied by pronounced swings in the financial balance of a large number of firms and industries much of the labour displacement that has occurred during these crises has been concentrated in a single year within the four or five year cycle as in 1967 1971 1975 and in the current recession in 1980 with out doubt this latest downturn is the most severe of the post war period an economic col lapse that has been sharply intensified by the tory government s pursuance of restrictive monetarist policies to combat inflation and a laissez faire approach to the supply side of

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

managed care s price bargaining with hospitals research has shown that managed care mc slowed the rate of growth in health care spending in the 1990s primarily via lower unit prices paid however the mechanism of mc s price bargaining has not been well studied this article uses a unique panel dataset with actual hospital prices in massachusetts between 1994 and 2000 to examine the sources of mc s bargaining power i find two significant determinants of price discounts first plans with large memberships are able to extract volume discounts across hospitals second health plans that are more successful at channeling patients can extract greater discounts patient channeling can add to the volume discount that plans negotiate

service offshoring and firm employment abstract major technological advances have recently spurred a new wave of offshoring in services which used to be non tradable should service workers in developed countries worry about their jobs trade theory has given a nuanced answer to this question suggesting that efficiency gains from offshoring may counteract direct job losses which leaves the predicted net effect ambiguous this paper investigates the employment effects of service offshoring in a newly combined and exceptionally detailed panel dataset covering almost the entire universe of german firms service imports over the years 2001 2013 it exploits firm specific export supply shocks by partner countries and service types as an instrumental variable to find that service offshoring has increased firm employment in line with the canonical trade in tasks model the employment gains are greater in firms with higher initial levels of service offshoring

contrasting experience of recession and spatial restructuring british shipbuilders plessey and metal box peck f w and townsend a r 1984 contrasting experience of recession and spatial re structuring british shipbuilders plessey and metal box reg studies 18 319 338 trends in aggregate economic indicators in the recent recession conceal marked variations in the experience of different industrial corporations within the meso economic sector in the uk this paper demonstrates such variations by comparing the nature of employment decline in three major uk corporations british shipbuilders plessey and metal box despite similar employment profiles since 1977 these three corporations have experienced very different trends in output productivity and profitability suggesting that their respective job losses have occurred for different reasons the origins of these job losses are examined in detail concentrating in particular on the regional incidence of major redundancies and closures the conclusion summarizes the factors which influence job loss and suggests extending the analysis to wider groups of

continuity and evolution in an old industrial region the labour market dynamics of the rise and fall of northern rock dawley s marshall n pike a pollard j and tomaney j continuity and evolution in an old industrial region the labour market dynamics of the rise and fall of northern rock regional studies the northern rock mortgage bank was a high profile casualty of the credit crunch in 2007 an evolutionary geographical political economy approach demonstrates that northern rock s growth and decline was shaped by its location in an old industrial region and echoes the historical position of the peripheral region in the spatial division of labour a longitudinal investigation focuses on the labour market dynamics of northern rock s rapid growth and decline on the north east of england the northern rock case highlights the enduring occupational structure of the region s labour market and shows how older industrial regions suffer from a process of occupational disadvantage that restricts their ability to adapt to economic change

offshoring along the production chain recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad we replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps in our model cost savings from offshoring fluctuate along the production chain and moving unfinished goods across borders causes transport costs we show that in such a setting firms may refrain from offshoring even if relocating individual steps would be advantageous conversely small variations in model parameters may lead to a large increase in offshoring activities

the hospital physician interaction in u s hospitals evolving payment schemes and their incentives abstract unlike the case in several european countries where physicians are salaried employees of the hospital in the u s physicians are independent agents who are granted admitting privileges by their affiliated hospitals hospitals and physicians bill separately for their components of inpatient care and patients or insurers compensate them separately this has raised questions about the degree of efficiency and cooperation between the agents in the first part of this paper we review previous models that examined this interaction under cost based and prospective reimbursement in the second part we consider an experimental mechanism price bundling in which payers allow a single payment for an episode of care leaving the physician and the hospital to negotiate over how the fee should be split modelling this as a nash bargaining game we cast doubt on the notion that price bundling can ensure cooperation and efficiency from the perspective of the players and suggest other incentives that may have led hospitals to participate in the experiment

hospital insurer bargaining an empirical investigation of appendectomy pricing employers increased sensitivity to health care costs has forced insurers to seek ways to lower costs through effective bargaining with providers what factors determine the prices negotiated between hospitals and insurers the hospital insurer interaction is captured in the context of a bargaining model in which the gains from bargaining are explicitly defined appendectomy was chosen because it is a well defined procedure with little clinical variation our results show that certain hospital institutional arrangements e g hospital affiliations hmo penetration and greater hospital concentration improve hospitals bargaining position furthermore hospitals bargaining effectiveness has diminished over time and varies across states

the changing urban and regional system in the united kingdom cooke p 1986 the changing urban and regional system in the united kingdom reg studies 30 243 251 the uk space economy has been subject to important structural shifts of late the north has a disproportionately large amount of old capital stock and associated industry and labour shedding in response to international competition has been massive the south is increasingly the location for newer more buoyant economic activity but there are localities within each area which do not conform to the stereotype research on localities enables the finer grained impact of economic restructuring to be more clearly understood preliminary findings from a representative set of seven uk localities suggest that significant change is taking place in the structure of local labour markets the organization of work local social structure politics and policies being pursued locally many of the processes characterizing spatial development in the 1960s and 1970s such as decentralization in manufacturing services

migration and employment after an economic shock regional characteristics and migration patterns this study addresses the migration dynamics of workers after their workplace has closed it analyses to what extent migration responses differ between regions with different characteristics for ind

earnings and caste an evaluation of caste wage differentials in the nepalese labour market abstractthis paper examines the sources of wage differentials among castes in nepal a country which had until 1963 an age old caste based social division of labour we use an extended oaxaca decomposition model with occupation and firm size augmenting the conventionally used measures of human capital endowments our results indicate that caste wage differentials in nepal are large and that human capital endowments and lack of access to better paying occupations and larger firms have a significant impact furthermore we find mixed evidence that the government policy of affirmative action has narrowed down the caste wage differential

bargaining power fear of disagreement and wage settlements theory and evidence from u s industry the paper develops and estimates a theoretical model of wage determination and union nonunion wage differentials in order to overcome the institutional ctiticisms of the formal bargaining literature the paper generalizes the nash zeuthen harsanyi model by linking the solution to the institutional concepts of bargaining power and fear or cost of disagreement and by making the outcome depend not only on endogenous but also on exogenous factors an operational specification of bargaining power and fear of disagreement allows the model to be estimated with data covering twelve companies and trade unions during the period from mid 1950 s to the late 1970 s while giving limited support to the nashzeuthen harsanyi solution the empirical analysis indicates that the bargaining outcome usually deviates from the nash zeuthen harsanyi point and in accordance with the institutionalist claim that it varies significantly with exogenous factors contrary to the traditional labor economics view the results do not support the general conclusion that the bargaining solution lies on the marginal revenue product curve of labor instead the relevant coefficients suggest that for many firms and unions the outcome might be better characterized by the efficient contract vertical contract curve

the value of consumer choice and the decline in hmo enrollments i introduction and overview health insurance contracts may restrict consumers choice of medical provider in order to minimize moral hazard for example consumers who are insured for their marginal healthcare expenses have no incentive to enforce price discipline on their own in this case insurers may impose this discipline by restricting consumers choice of medical provider to those who offer competitive prices 1 this practice known as selective contracting sc may have other benefits as well including channeling consumers to efficient providers and achieving other efficiencies associated with partial vertical integration sc has been utilized by insurers both in the united states and abroad 2 however it is not a universal feature of health insurance contracts in part this is because reducing the choice set of medical providers imposes costs on consumers to the extent that consumers assign option value to choice capps dranove and satterthwaite 2003 for example sc was widely employed in the united states by health maintenance organizations hmos and other insurers in the 1990s and appears to have been an important cost control mechanism cutler mcclellan and newhouse 2000 robinson and phibbs 1989 however most private u s health insurers moderated their use of sc during the past decade at the same time that healthcare costs accelerated anecdotally a consumer and regulatory backlash against provider choice restrictions forced insurers to expand choice and largely abandon the practice blendon et al 1998 vita 2001 simultaneously hmo enrollments declined the purpose of this article is to explore the economic tradeoffs of sc with a particular focus on directly measuring the value that consumers assign to choice in medical markets i am interested in assessing whether the magnitude of any utility loss from choice restrictions can be offset by volume based price discounts that insurers may receive from hospitals my results bear on the larger question of whether an economic linkage can be drawn between consumers demand for choice and their apparent rejection of what is called tightly managed care they also have implications for many healthcare reform proposals that necessarily imply restrictions on the consumers choice sets i analyze health plan s sc of hospitals in the state of florida between 1999 and 2003 hospital sc restricts consumer choice in multiple ways including their choice of hospital in addition hospital choice restrictions imply restrictions over the use of specific physicians 3 i start by constructing hospital networks for each of a set of plan choices and then estimate a discrete choice model of health insurance demand conditional on each plan s restricted network for these purposes i use the capps dranove and satterthwaite 2003 measure of sc disutility that focuses on the option value of choice i employ several different discrete choice estimators to estimate the model including models with plan metropolitan statistical area msa fixed effects designed to control for unobserved plan attributes this provides me with estimates of disutility resulting from choice restrictions subsequently i project the estimated plan effects onto an instrumented value of plan price in order to estimate the price elasticity and also convert my disutility estimates into dollars my results show that consumers associated restrictive hospital networks with plan disutility during each of the years of the study period with choice elasticities that range from 0 10 to 0 32 in pooled estimates greater effects are obtained in 2003 using models where i allow the estimates to vary by year using my instrumental variables methodology to recover unbiased price coefficients i show that consumers associated a one standard deviation reduction in the size of a plan s hospital network with a reduction in plan value of between 62 and 118

redundancies labour turnover and employment contraction in the recession a regional analysis martin r l 1984 redundancies labour turnover and employment contraction in the recession a regional analysis reg studies 18 445 458 the rapid decline of the british economy during the current recession has generated considerable interest in the geography of employment contraction and the regional incidence of redundancy in this paper it is argued that regional variations in the impact of redundancy need to be viewed in relation to the other labour turnover flows that contribute to net employment loss estimates of gross labour turnover flows suggest that there have been wide differences amongst the regions in the proportion of total discharges accounted for by redundancies furthermore there is evidence that regional specific rates of redundancy are related to 1 the pace of decline in a region 2 the average rate of national job turnover in the region and 3 the extent to which such natural turnover declines as employment opportunities diminish and unemployment rises the implication is

post unification wage growth in east germany following monetary union with west germany in 1990 the real wage of east german workers rose 83 i use the german socio economic panel data to investigate the determinants of wage growth and assess whether they are consistent with efficient restructuring although job changing rates were initially high the share of wage growth that accrued to movers was little higher than in the west suggesting that the incentives to move were too low for 1990 to 1991 the biggest gainers were low wage workers generally and women and the less educated specifically for 1991 to 1996 the biggest gainers were women and the better educated

outsourcing and optimal nonlinear taxation a note this paper concerns optimal taxation and outsourcing if the government has a direct instrument for taxing outsourcing the policy rules for marginal income taxation remain as in the standard model

risk aversion and trade union membership if trade unions provide only their members with insurance against income variations as a private good this insurance will provide a stronger incentive for more risk averse employees to become union members using data from the german socio economic panel soep and various direct measures of individual risk attitudes we find robust evidence of a positive relationship between risk aversion and the likelihood of union membership for full time employees this association is particularly strong for males and in west germany

the cyclical sensitivity of regional employment and unemployment differentials gordon i r 1985 the cyclical sensitivity of regional employment and unemployment differentials reg studies 19 95 110 this paper examines inter regional variations in the cyclical sensitivity of employment and unemployment in the uk over the past thirty years it shows that the patterns for employment and for unemployment are quite different the cyclical sensitivity of unemployment is greatest in the high unemployment regions while that for employment is greatest in the more industrial regions it is argued that the primary reason for differences in the sensitivity of unemployment is not demand side factors but cyclical variations in labour mobility between regions lower mobility in periods of high unemployment reduces the effectiveness of inter regional supply adjustments and increases the variance of unemployment rates

whose job goes abroad international outsourcing and individual job separations this paper focuses on the adjustment costs of globalisation by studying the effects of international outsourcing on individual transitions out of jobs in the danish manufacturing sector for the period 1990 2003 a competing risks duration model that distinguishes between jobto job and job to unemployment transitions is estimated outsourcing is found to increase the unemployment risk of low skilled workers but the quantitative impact is modest outsourcing is also found to reduce the job change hazard rate for all education groups thus the paper provides evidence for small adjustment costs of globalisation

work characteristics firm size and wages a positive wage firm size relationship is well documented in the empirical literature in industrial organization and labor economics firm size seems to proxy various unobserved determinants such as job satisfaction monitoring costs more complex technologies and worker participation in monopoly profits it is generally argued that the greater the possibility of controlling for these latent factors the less likely that a significant size effect will appear this paper attempts to distinguish firm size from other wage determinants for a rich data source for west germany and demonstrates the persistence of the size premium

differences and changes in wage structures preface introduction and summary richard b freeman lawrence f katz 1 a comparison of changes in the structure of wages in four oecd countries lawrence f katz gary w loveman david g blanchflower 2 international differences in executive and managerial compensation john m abowd michael l bognanno 3 the gender earnings gap some international evidence francine d blau lawrence m kahn 4 international wage curves david g blanchflower andrew j oswald 5 the changing structure of male earnings in britain 1974 1988 john schmitt 6 real wages employment and wage dispersion in u s and australian labor markets robert g gregory francis vella 7 labor markets and economic growth lessons from korea s industrialization 1970 1990 dae il kim robert h topel 8 wage differentials in italy market forces institutions and inflation christopher l erickson andrea c ichino 9 the swedish wage structure the rise and fall of solidarity wage policy per anders edin bertil holmlund 10 getting together and breaking apart the decline of centralized collective bargaining richard b freeman robert s gibbons 11 earnings inequality in germany katharine g abraham susan n houseman 12 a comparative analysis of east and west german labor markets before and after unification alan b krueger jorn steffen pischke contributors author index subject index

job loss and the regions how important is redundancy meager n 1984 job loss and the regions how important is redundancy reg studies 18 459 467 the paper argues that the common emphasis when comparing job losses between regions or industries etc on net employment decline and on redundancy as the major component of it may be misplaced and may conceal important differences between the regions or industries compared the argument is illustrated with data from a local labour market motherwell and with official data on the british regions it is shown in particular that when considered as a component of gross employment change redundancy may not dominate job loss future work should therefore concentrate to a greater extent on gross changes and on non redundancy methods of job loss

the effects of market structure and bargaining position on hospital prices ppos and hmos have gained widespread acceptance due in part to the belief that excess capacity and competitive market conditions can be leveraged to negotiate lower prices with health care providers we investigated prices obtained in different types of markets by the largest ppo in california our findings indicate that greater hospital competition leads to lower prices furthermore as the importance of a hospital to the ppo in an area increases the price rises substantially our testing of alternative methods for defining hospital geographic markets reveals that the common practice of using counties to define the market leads to an underestimate of the price increasing effects of a merger

globalization outsourcing and wage inequality there is considerable debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic fortunes of less skilled workers one issue that has become lost in the current discussion is how firms respond to import competition and how these responses in turn are transmitted to the labor market in previous work we have argued that outsourcing by which we mean the import of intermediate inputs by domestic firms has contributed to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor in the united states if firms respond to import competition from low wage countries by moving non skill intensive activities abroad then trade will shift employment towards skilled workers within industries in this paper we extend our previous work by combining new import data from the revised nber trade database with disaggregated data on input purchases from the census of manufactures we construct industry by industry estimates of outsourcing for the period 1972 1990 and reexamine whether outsourcing has contributed to an increase in relative demand for skilled labor our main finding is that outsourcing can account for 31 51 of the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor that occurred in u s manufacturing industries during the 1980s compared to our previous estimate of 15 33 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

structural reforms and labor market outcomes international panel data evidence this paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro level labor market outcomes including the unemployment rate the average wage index and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates together these outcome variables capture the overall health of the labor market and the aggregate welfare of workers yet there seems to be no other comprehensive empirical investigation in the existing literature of the impact of structural reforms at the cross country macro level on labor market outcomes other than the unemployment rate data were collected from a variety of sources including the world bank world development indicators the international monetary fund international financial statistics and the international labor organization key indicators of the labor market the resulting dataset covers up to 88 countries the majority being developing for 10 years on either side of structural reforms that took place between 1960 and 2001 after documenting the average trends across countries in the labor market outcomes up to 10 years on either side of each country s structural reform year the authors run fixed effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions to account for the likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor market outcomes overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor unlike related literature the paper does not find conclusive evidence on unemployment redistributive effects in favor of workers along the lines of the stolper samuelson effect may be at work

winners and losers a micro level analysis of international outsourcing and wages our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries outsourcing activities from input output tables this approach avoids prob lems such as aggregation bias potential endogeneity bias and poor skill definitions that commonly hamper industry level studies we find that outsourcing has had a marked impact on wages applying two alternative skill classifications we find evidence that a 1 percentage point increase in outsourcing reduced the wage for workers in the lowest skill categories by up to 1 5 while it increased wages for high skilled workers by up to 2 6 this result is robust to a number of different specifications jel classification f16 j31 gagnants et perdants une analyse micro economique de la sous traitance internationale et des salaires ce memoire etudie le lien entre la sous traitance internationale et les salaires a l aide de donnees d un grand panel de menages qu on combine avec des donnees au niveau des industries sur les activites de sous traitance de celles qui en font obtenues des tableaux interindustriels cette approche evite les problemes qui habituellement polluent les etudes au niveau de l industrie biais d agregation biais d endogeneite potentielle mauvaises definitions des habiletes on decouvre que la sous traitance a un effet sur les salaires a l aide de differentes formes de classification des habiletes il appert qu un point de pourcentage d augmentation dans la sous traitance reduit les salaires des travailleurs dans les categories d habilete les plus basses de 1 5 alors qu il accroit les salaires de travailleurs specialises de 2 6 ce resultat est robuste et avere meme quand on utilise diverses specifications

do smaller firms pay less in the caribbean the case of trinidad and tobago this article constitutes the first study of the employer size wage effect for a caribbean country namely the republic of trinidad and tobago using a rich micro level data set we estimate the firm size wage premium in an empirical model of wage determination despite exploring a variety of theories samples estimation techniques and tests we find that consistent with the empirical literature larger firms in trinidad and tobago pay higher wages than smaller firms for equally productive workers

outsourcing and the skilled unskilled wage gap abstract within the context of a product variety model this paper examines the impact of outsourcing of skill intensive tasks on the skilled unskilled wage gap outsourcing affects the wage gap through direct as well as indirect channels while outsourcing decreases the effective wage of skilled workers in the services sector owing to inter sectoral labour mobility its overall impact on the equilibrium skilled wage is positive through an increase in the size of external economies in the industrial sector outsourcing can reduce the unskilled wage in overall terms outsourcing of skill intensive tasks increases the skilled unskilled wage gap

large firms and within firm occupational reallocation abstract this paper considers the equilibrium interaction between within firm and across firm reallocation in the presence of labor market frictions while a sizable literature has investigated frictional labor markets it has ignored within firm mobility nonetheless every year a sizable fraction of workers switch occupations without changing firms employees in large firms can sample from a larger selection and across firm mobility is replaced by within firm mobility bringing together within and across firm reallocation along with labor market frictions naturally accounts for the observed differences in worker flows and wages across firms of different sizes

redistributive income taxation under outsourcing and foreign direct investment this paper deals with optimal income taxation under international outsourcing and fdi we show how the joint effect of outsourcing and fdi on the optimal marginal income tax rates depends on whethe

offshoring the nature of tasks and occupational stability empirical evidence for germany using a large administrative data set of individual employment histories for germany this paper studies the relationship between offshoring and the individual risk of leaving the occupation moreover a rich data set on tasks performed in occupations is used to better characterise the sources of worker vulnerability both material and service offshoring are on average not associated with an increase in occupational outflow rates however this association depends on the nature of tasks performed in the occupation higher intensities of interactive and in particular non routine tasks are associated with a larger decrease or a smaller increase in the occupational hazard rate

labour turnover in uk manufacturing a model of quits is constructed and combined with a labour demand function to produce a model of layoffs these are combined to provide an explanation of separations the main feature of this is the explicit incorporation of the interactions between quits and layoffs a linear approximation and a structural form are estimated on uk manufacturing data for 1965 82 it is shown that the most important determinant of separations is the state of demand in the labour market with some structural factors having a minor role to play