Questions tagged [labor-economics]
Labor economics is the branch of microeconomics that studies labor markets and its peculiarities. Labor economists usually study topics such as career choice, returns to schooling, determinants of labor productivity, wages, gender and racial gaps.
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1answer
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Question on Human Capital Accumulation Model by Acemoglu/Autor
I was reading the lecture notes by Acemoglu and Autor on Labour Economics. https://economics.mit.edu/files/4689
I was able to understand equations 1.1 to 1.8 of the notes; however, I am unable to ...
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0answers
57 views
income effect and substitution effect
Question:Assume no non-labor income, Alice's labor supply function is $h(w) =\frac{w}{16}$. Her preferences are given by $u(c, l) =\sqrt{c}+3l$.
When the wage rate increases, Alice's labor supply ...
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2answers
5k views
Does recycling lead to fewer jobs?
Say I buy a glass bottle, I can either put it in the landfill or recycle it.
My understanding is, glass will breakdown into sand. (Not sure how well though, since we sometimes find glass from Roman ...
0
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2answers
606 views
The relationship between profit and wages
It seems obvious that an individual company increases their profits when they reduce wages or increase automation or some such.
But if wages fell universally because of this, wouldn't that decrease ...
2
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0answers
65 views
Why are there no minimum wage entry level IT jobs
In the UK, I have not seen any graduate level IT jobs offering a starting salary below £20,000. At the same time, about 10% of computer science graduates are unemployed six months after graduation. ...
3
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0answers
18 views
Are there any net benefits in reducing/increasing tourist-oriented retail business?
Hong Kong is currently experiencing a slump in foreign tourist-oriented retail sales. Shops selling jewellery, watches, infant formula or Chinese medicine experienced a 25-35% decline YoY in August.
...
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1answer
19 views
How do I adjust for heterogeneous labor markets when calculating the wage premium?
I have a dataset with mean and median wages for particular geographic areas around the United States. I am interested in calculating the wage premium between some areas. I can already do a simple ...
1
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0answers
36 views
Has contest theory ever been used to design real-world contests?
Contest theory, very much like auction theory, studies how people act in a contest and the properties of such a competition. There is a large literature that investigates different aspects of the ...
1
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1answer
218 views
Sign of income effect is ambiguous
When discussing the standard neoclassical model of labor supply, I have seen it is assumed that the sign of the income effect is ambiguous. Could anyone please explain this assumption, and more ...
1
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1answer
55 views
extensive vs intensive labor in US in recent decades
Total Hours worked is a mix of extensive (to work or not, the usual standard working week) and intensive (how many hours to work).
I'm interested in how this balance of extensive and intensive ...
1
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1answer
47 views
Why does trade depress relative wages?
I've read that increased trade tends to decrease relative wages of labor. What is the intuition behind this? Lower wages in labor imply lower demand for workers, but doesn't trade just encourage ...
0
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1answer
82 views
Does a trade union of YouTubers exist? [closed]
Would YouTubers see a sense in having a trade union?
For example, to establish policies how much the value of their contribution is.
The controversy here is, professional YouTubers make a bet for ...
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0answers
16 views
One Treated Unit That Becomes Untreated
Suppose I have a set of units $n_i, i = 1,...,N$. One unit was receiving a treatment $n_j = 1$ at times $t=1$ to $t=\tau$. All other units never received the treatment so $\forall t, n_i=0,i\neq j$. ...
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2answers
57 views
regression method for data that contain a number of observation for several years
I have a data set about 125 companies. For each company I have the salary and some other variables about the top 5 managers in each company.
One observation contains the top 5 managers in each one of ...
2
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1answer
38 views
Name of phenomenon where migrant workers receive decent wage but absolutely no chance of getting any government benefits
Not sure if the title reflects the question very accurately but my question is specific to the Gulf countries which have a huge population of migrant workers, like Saudi and UAE. So, let's say Raj is ...
0
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1answer
150 views
Could a "Japanese-style strike" work as it's supposed to? Under what conditions?
This is an urban legend, mostly believed in Spain and some countries in South America.
The legend is based on the premise that their way to make a strike would be to work much more than usual in some ...
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0answers
120 views
What is the trade-off between? Consumption and Leisure or Income and Leisure?
When first presenting the utility function and its arguments, textbooks typically start by stating that utility is a function of consumption and leisure. See for example https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/...
0
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1answer
161 views
Change in the marginal utility of leisure with respect to a change in consumption
I am reading a paper that derives a theoretical retirement model. There is a utility function and a budget constraint forming an optimal control problem. The solution to this problem states that
\...
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0answers
11 views
How is matching theory used in context of Marriage market difference in terms of which is used in context of labour and housing market?
I am looking for an overview as most of the introduction to matching talks about the work done in the Marriage market, Job Matching which is axiomatic. Then while looking at Labour and housing market ...
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1answer
28 views
Has there been an applications of search and matching theory in the Neoclassical Growth Model?
Specifically, I am looking for the standard neoclassical growth model, but the labour decision is based on either search or matching theory instead of a Walrasian labour mechanism.
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1answer
55 views
How are you supposed to calculate overhead expenses?
I'm doing a college assignment (creating a software product) in Computer Science and have been given a template for the part of the report about economics. At one moment it states the following:
<...
1
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1answer
30 views
Is it better for low-income people to live in the countryside where it's cheap or in the city where there are more services?
Supposing someone is struggling to pay the rent in an urban area, and they don't have anything tying them down to any one place, would it make sense to move to a rural area where the rent is much ...
3
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2answers
102 views
Does migration exacerbate (albeit delay) the problem of aging, economically-inactive populations in Western societies?
As a layman, I've always understood that there is a general consensus amongst economists that "immigration is economically beneficial" to rich Western countries (like Britain) who have aging ...
3
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0answers
43 views
Asymmetric Nash Bargaining
The Nash bargaining solution selects the unique solution to the maximization problem $\max_{s_1, s_2 } (s_1 - d_1) (s_2 - d_2)$ such that the solution satisfy the following axioms :
Invariance
...
1
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1answer
29 views
How exactly does removing labor market rigidities reduce structural unemployment and increase potential output in an economy?
Here I want to focus primarily on the potential benefits of labor market reforms such as a reduction in job security and trade union power and not their controversies. I wish to learn a few thoroughly ...
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1answer
686 views
Maximization problem FOC and Euler equation
Can someone please help me with the Lagragian and the derivation of the following objective function ? Beneath I provide the objective function, the constraint and the Euler equation that results from ...
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1answer
38 views
Looking for help with Solow Model Question [closed]
The question is this:
Suppose there is a production function of $Q=F(K, L)=\sqrt{K}\sqrt{L}$. Suppose that MPC=0.8 and the labor force is growing at a rate of 0.05 per year. Also labor force ...
4
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1answer
94 views
Search and matching model: effect of hiring cost on wage curve
What effect does the hiring cost have on the wage bargaining outcome (wage curve)?
In Cahuc, Carcillo, and Zylberberg: Labor Economics, they derive the following wage curve:
$$w = z + (y-z) \frac{\...
1
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0answers
10 views
Have any economics papers used unified cure models?
Does anyone know if there are unified cure models (aka split population models) in time-until-employment studies that combine the mixture cure approach with the promotion time approach as described in ...
1
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1answer
51 views
DMP Search Model - Terminology
In the most basic Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) model we have the variable $V$ which represents the present discounted value of expected profits from a vacant job. The corresponding Bellman ...
1
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1answer
29 views
How to account income from the informal sector?
Some context here.
I'm from India and over here around 80% of the public work in the informal unaccounted sector.
Yesterday, the main opposition party said that if they're elected, they'd compensate ...
3
votes
1answer
104 views
Does brain drain really affect a nation's growth trajectory?
Take India as an example. India has been losing most of its bright minds to the west. India also ranks low in development. I would like to get a definitive answer to this cause-effect type question.
...
3
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3answers
469 views
Cobb-Douglas production function, given $w$ get $r$ regardless of input levels. Why?
There is a market economy with technology given by:
$$Y = K^\alpha L^{1-\alpha} \tag{1}$$
Firms behave competitively and input prices are:
$$r = \alpha K^{\alpha-1}L^{1-\alpha} = \alpha(\frac{L}{K})...
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1answer
70 views
Factor-augmenting technologies (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2018c)
In that paper, they consider the following production function:
$Y = F(A_KK,A_LL)$.
Where:
K denotes capital, L is labor, and $A_K$ and $A_L$ denote capital-augmenting
and labor-augmenting ...
1
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0answers
21 views
How is labor demand measured?
For instance, in the introduction of this paper (first paragraph), talking about Figure 1, they say that labor demand is measured as the real wage bill normalized by population.
Is it common to ...
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1answer
120 views
What is the relation between the trade deficit and the outsourcing of jobs?
To make it easier, let's imagine USA exports nothing and imports nothing (or the exports have the same value with the imports = 0 trade deficit = the country exports the same amount of jobs as it is ...
0
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1answer
85 views
Elasticity of substitution between leisure in two periods
This is a basic question, but I am new to macro models. The question is from Romer's text.
Assume a household only has one member and has no initial wealth, and the household lives for two periods. ...
0
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1answer
38 views
Is there any reliable data on what % of the UK population currently earn less than £17,300 annually?
According to the Living Wage Foundation the "real living wage" in the UK is £9 an hour
Which assuming a 37 hour week & rounding to the nearest whole GBP amounts to £17,375
Formula used ((9*37)/...
3
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3answers
176 views
Reference request: Gender wage gap / Minority wage gap
Disclaimer: I am neither a social scientist nor an economist. I hope the ESE is the right place to ask this question.
Disclaimer 2: I do not intend to spark an ideologically driven discussion here. ...
2
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0answers
80 views
What predictions do economic models make for an economy where 50% of the population earn less than the cost of living? [closed]
These are the admittedly somewhat disparate pieces of information gleaned from separate sources that the question arose from.
According to The living wage foundation the real cost of living in the UK ...
2
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1answer
71 views
reference request: models of how racism or sexism affects decision making
My background is more in statistics and applied math, so I am not familiar with the breadth of decision making models from economics. However, I am working on a project that involves decision making ...
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0answers
24 views
Best financial model to proportionally distribute the company's income to all employees?
I'm planning to start a project of something "innovative". And among some of the parts of the project that I'm thinking about, it's in the term of how money (profits) should be distributed.
The truth ...
0
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1answer
37 views
Macroeconomic models with labor-replacing capital?
I am reading article http://public.gettysburg.edu/~tlin/research/robots-main.pdf "A New Keynesian Model with Robots: Implications for Business Cycles and Monetary Policy" and I wonder how actual this ...
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3answers
58 views
Why do stricter emission limits cost jobs?
I live in Germany and as most people know the car industry is very important in our country. Currently, there is a discussion about stricter emission limits for cars in the European Union. The car ...
1
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1answer
62 views
Hours worked increases with wage
So I have been given a utility function = $ 48 R + Ry -R^2$ where $R$ represents leisure hours and $y$ represents labour income. $y=rl$, $r$ is wage rate and $l$ is labour hours. Find hours worked ...
2
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0answers
48 views
How can the number of hairdressers in the UK be up 50% since 2010?
In this recent article, The Economist argues that one of the reasons behind the anaemic recent wage growth in Britain is that the recent job growth has been concentrated in lower-productivity jobs and ...
4
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2answers
139 views
How do Marxists account for fiat money?
LTV predicts that fiat currency, which requires zero labor to produce, should have zero value. Empirically, fiat currency does not have zero value. How do Marxists account for this. The to responses I ...
4
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2answers
285 views
Empirical explanation on divergence between productivity and wages since the 70s
There is a well know graph, that shows a tight link between productivity and wages, until the 70s, and a break of the link since:
There's a lot of possible explanations for this, I keep hearing more ...
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2answers
55 views
Does it make economic sense for only some universities in a certain area to pay their sports scholars?
Apparently
‘Athletic scholarships are common in the United States, but in many countries they are rare or non-existent.’
But are there countries where there are some universities that offer sports ...
1
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0answers
60 views
labor share and growth
Is there a link between the level of the labor share and growth?
In standard models growth is the rate of (labor augmenting) technical progress and labor force. So does that mean if the labor share ...