a review of the recent empirical literature on displaced workers this article reviews the empirical literature on job displacement job displacement is widespread and strongly countercyclical tending to peak during economic downturns but concentrated in indus

the microeconomic foundations of measuring bracket creep and other tax changes we derive a measure of the bracket creep induced inflation tax based on an income compensation function that recognizes that consumers substitute among deductible and nondeductible goods as the incentives to consume the goods change over time the measure of the inflation tax is decomposed into a convenient function of marginal tax rates and the change in expenditures on tax deductible goods relative to nondeductible goods that are required to maintain a fixed level of utility tentative estimates suggest that the inflation tax as a percentage of constant utility income during the 1970s averaged about 1 percent per year

lasting or latent scars swedish evidence on the long term effects of job displacement recently improved swedish register data have made it possible to remedy many weaknesses of previous research on displaced workers using linked employer employee data we identify all workers displaced in 1987 due to an establishment closure and follow them over both a predisplacement period of 4 years and a postdisplacement period stretching until 1999 we find that the displaced workers suffer both earnings losses and worsened labor market position not only during a transitory period of adjustment but also in the longer run these longer run effects seem to be driven by an increased sensitivity to subsequent macroeconomic shocks

the effects of changes of the job offer arrival rate on the duration of unemployment generally it is acknowledged that changing the job offer arrival rate has two opposite effects on unemployment duration for a basic job search model sufficient conditions on the wage offer distribution have been derived ensuring that one of the effects dominates however these are not satisfied for the popular families of wage offer distributions here i show that the conditions can be weakened at virtually no cost the set of distributions satisfying the new conditions is considerably larger than the set previously established in particular it includes all wage offer distribution families that are popular in structural empirical research

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

income taxation labor supply and the theory of income based cost of living indices abstract this paper derives theoretically exact formulas for income and expenditure based cost of living indices that are implied by a model of utility maximization in the presence of taxation and a goods leisure decision the derived income based cost of living indices not only allow for substitutions among goods and leisure as the incentives to consume them change as do the expenditure based indices but also explicitly incorporate the effects of bracket creep and the tax deductibility of leisure into the value of the indices numerical estimates of three income based measures of the cost of living suggest that bracket creep eroded substantially the purchasing power of u s households during the 1970s

reservation wages expected wages and unemployment we model unemployment duration reservation and expected wages simultaneously for individuals not in work where wage expectations are identified via an exogenous policy shock the policy shock increased expected wages which were found to be positively associated with reservation wages

labour market externalities and regional growth in sweden the importance of labour mobility between skill related industries boschma r eriksson r h and lindgren u labour market externalities and regional growth in sweden the importance of labour mobility between skill related industries regional studies this study investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows in particular it tests for the importance of labour mobility across so called skill related industries between 435 four digit industries within 72 swedish functional regions 1998 2002 both the fixed effect models and generalized method of moments gmm estimates demonstrate that a strong intensity of intra regional labour flows between skill related industries impacts positively on regional productivity growth but less so on employment growth labour mobility between unrelated industries tends to dampen regional unemployment growth while a high degree of intra industry labour flows is only found to be associated with rising unemployment

engel curves and systems of demand functions abstract the functional forms of the engel curves implied by several popular complete systems of demand functions are discussed among the systems are those generated by generalized quadratic indirect utility the translog system the generalized leontief system etc the linear and quadratic expenditure systems and deaton and muellbauer s pigl and aids a new system which can produce the engel curves of all these systems as special cases is suggested the different engel curves are tested against data from a norwegian survey of consumer expenditure this is done both in a complete system of engel curves for eight commodities and commodity by commodity

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

how destructive is creative destruction effects of job loss on job mobility withdrawal and income we analyze short and long term effects of worker displacement our sample consists of male workers displaced from norwegian manufacturing plants we find that displacement increases the probability of leaving the labor force by 31 the drop out rate from the labor force is particularly high in the first years following displacement the average earnings effects for those who remain in the labor force are moderate a 3 loss relative to non displaced workers after seven years splitting displaced workers on within and between firm movers we find that the estimated earnings loss is entirely driven by between firm movers who experience a 3 6 loss transfers to other plants within multi plant firms upon displacement are quite common our results support the view that human capital is partly firm specific and partly industry specific we find no evidence suggesting that human capital is plant specific

preference based indices with subsidized commodities and income dependent prices abstract the user cost of publicly provided services is sometimes income dependent high income earners pay more a true cost of living index which includes income dependent prices is suggested it is shown that the corresponding laspeyre index does not only exceed the true index but it exceeds it by no less than in the case of no income dependent price

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

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

functional form of engel curves for foodstuffs abstract employing individual household expenditure data for six foodstuffs we test five three parameter and four two parameter engel curves against a more general form all two parameter functions must be rejected including working s function it appears that a transformation of the budget share is in order to capture the observed curvature

the impact of direct taxes on the cost of living in this paper we define a cost of living index including direct taxes we show its relationship to the traditional index and demonstrate how nonconsumption costs are properly treated we then define a fixed weight approximation a tax and price index tpi using federal state local and social security tax rates for 1967 85 we construct annual tpi series based on household data we find that inclusion of direct taxes has sizable impacts on the estimated rate of inflation partitioning our household sample we find that recognition of taxes significantly alters inflation rate differentials estimated using consumption prices alone

working through knowledge pools labour market dynamics the transference of knowledge and ideas and industrial clusters this article explores a prominent cluster in the swedish capital stockholm and its surrounding region the ict information and communications technology cluster in particular the article focuses on the issue of the extent to which labour market and labour mobility are the most likely channels for local and extra local sources of knowledge and ideas thus the article positions itself against a growing literature that focuses on rather diffuse and vague notions that knowledge and innovation reside in the air or in the buzz of urban life instead the underlying hypothesis is that in many sectors and industries such things as a cosmopolitan street life or accidental face to face encounters play relatively little part in the flow of experiences knowledge and innovation rather it is in the workplace that these exchanges and flows are located and it is thus through labour mobility that intracluster exchanges occur the article tests such ideas in relation to the ict cluster and the stockholm region using a uniquely detailed time series data set the data set used is based on official taxation and civil registration records and contains complete details on everything from education to career changes to income levels for every individual resident in sweden the detail of the individual records and the complete nature of the data set mean that it offers a unique possibility to examine on a large scale the micro dynamics of individuals in the labour market and in clusters the data are used to examine whether there have existed over time higher levels of labour market mobility in clusters as opposed to the rest of the urban economy the article empirically verifies the idea that labour market mobility is significantly higher in the cluster than in the rest of the urban economy

labour work and regional resilience recent political and economic events have thrown into question several assumptions about how regional economies work and for whom for regional studies the result is a wave of policy relevant empi

statistical models for zero expenditures in household budgets household budget surveys are an important source of data on consumer s expenditure not just for individual consumers but also for estimating national aggregates however it is a widespread finding that for certain commodities most notably tobacco and alcohol the estimate from the household survey falls short of the known consumption total calculated with some confidence from data on production imports exports and excise duties for example in the british family expenditure survey with which we shall largely be concerned total tobacco expenditure was underestimated in 1976 by 21 percent see kemsley redpath and holmes 1980 p 51 much of this understatement together with that on alcohol is thought to occur because of the design of the survey which excludes many persons amongst whom consumption of such items is thought to be atypically high e g prisoners hoteliers and their residents merchant seamen even so the possibility remains that some of the understatement is due to various types of misreporting by households included in the survey in this paper we consider a model in which the standard tobit specification tobin 1958 is supplemented by the operation of a simple binary censor the tobit model is essentially a linear regression model in which non positive observations of the dependent variable are replaced by zero we take this specification as our starting point but add a second censoring process that randomly replaces a fraction of the observations generated by the tobit model bv zeroes the combined model can serve as a representation of several types of

unemployment durations and local labour market conditions abstractunemployment durations vary across local authority districts in the uk we explore the extent to which this variation is explained by differences in local labour demand as opposed to compos

reservation wages and their labor market effects for black and white male youth this paper presents an empirical analysis of self reported reservation wages for unemployed young black and white males the results show that young blacks seek wages which are comparable to those of young whites in absolute terms but which are higher relative to what is available on the demand side of the market these relatively higher reservation wages of young blacks contribute to their unemployment durations and somewhat to their subsequently received wages changes in reservation wages may thus help to explain the trends in wages and employment of young blacks in recent years

the relationship between unemployment spells and reservation wages as a test of search theory the theory of stationary job search predicts that controlling for other factors that affect the probability of leaving unemployment duration and reservation wages are likely to be positively associated the paper tests this prediction for british cross sectional data from 1982 using an estimating equation implied by search theory simultaneity is crucial in the evaluation of this prediction with single equation and instrumental variable estimates differing markedly perhaps surprisingly given the extreme paucity of both job interviews and offers in the sample the main finding is that reservation wages play a significant role in the determination of duration

which types of relatedness matter in regional growth industry occupation and education abstractwhich types of relatedness matter in regional growth industry occupation and education regional studies this paper provides a conceptual discussion of relatedness which suggests a focus on individuals as a complement to firms and industries the empirical relevance of the main arguments is tested by estimating the effects of related and unrelated variety in education and occupation among employees as well as in industries on regional growth the results show that occupational and educational related variety are positively correlated with productivity growth which supports the conceptual discussion put forth in the paper in addition related variety in industries is found to be negative for productivity growth but positive for employment growth

returning to work regional determinants of re employment after major redundancies abstractusing matched employer employee data on roughly 429 000 workers made redundant from large plant closures or major downsizing in sweden between 1990 and 2005 this paper analyses the role of the regional industry mix specialization related and unrelated variety in the likelihood of returning to work the results show that a high presence of same or related industries speeds up the re employment process while high concentrations of unrelated activities do not the role of related activities is particularly evident in the short run and in regions with high unemployment consequently the prospect of successful diversification is enhanced in regions with related industries

an empirical investigation of returns to search using data on search and choice behavior from a local automobile market we estimate monetary returns to search in terms of lower prices resulting from additional time invested in price search for our analytical framework we adapt a model developed in the job search literature to the problem of consumer search this framework is especially useful for illuminating the relationship between time spent searching the outcome of search and demand and supply side variables our results indicate that for this particular sample of buyers marginal returns to search are broadly consistent with what one might expect if consumers balance costs and benefits of search and that potential gains from additional search for lower car prices do not appear to be large for most consumers our study highlights many of the methodological difficulties involved in estimating returns to search including isolating returns to different outcomes of search and sensitivity of results to model specification and sampling error we deal with these problems by trying to isolate time spent searching for price from other uses of search time by deriving our model used in estimation from a specific conceptual framework and by extensive specification testing

unemployment dynamics and labour market tightness an empirical evaluation of matching function models the implications of matching function models for the relationship between labour market tightness and the transition probability into employment are summarized these implications are then tested using monthly data for three canadian provinces british columbia ontario and quebec testing methods use flexible regression techniques so as to reduce the effect of any extraneous restrictions the results show rough concordance between theoretical assumptions and empirical facts evidence of non linearity in the estimated relationships favours a search theoretic model of labour markets over one based on queues and some quantitative results offer guidance to those using calibrated search models in theoretical analysis

spatial externalities relatedness and sector employment growth in great britain bishop p and gripaios p spatial externalities relatedness and sector employment growth in great britain regional studies this paper examines the impact of externalities on employment growth in sub regions of great britain by estimating ordinary least squares ols and maximum likelihood spatial models at the two digit level for 23 sectors issues arising from relatedness sector differences competition cross boundary spillovers and spatial autocorrelation are explicitly addressed results indicate that specialization has a generally negative impact on growth whilst the impact of diversity is heterogeneous across sectors and strong local competition has a typically positive impact the results question the merits of policies primarily aimed at promoting regional specialization and suggest that diversity local competition and sector heterogeneity are important policy issues bishop p et gripaios p les effets externes geographiques la connectivite et la croissance de l emploi sectoriel en grand