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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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 ...
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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.
...
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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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. ...
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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)/...
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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. ...
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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Has any research found that automation will decrease inequality?
A paper by IMF researchers (but not an official position of the IMF) has found that automation will lead to higher inequality under all scenarios they considered.
Even in the scenario where robots ...
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Articles about the economics of non-compete contracts
Today I read in a non-scientific article that Amazon requires some physical workers to sign non-compete agreements. I used to think that the idea behind allowing non-compete clauses in contracts is to ...
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Unemployment Rate Volatility
Is there a statistic that describes the “churn” in the unemployment rate i.e. how many became unemployed compared to how many found work?
I’ve heard of unemployment volatility (https://www....
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Burdett and Mortensen (1998), Equation (22), Integral by parts question
Suppose $F(x)$ and $H(x)$ are both cumulative prob dist functions on the support of $[b_0,b_1]$ and we know followings:
$$u(x|F)=\int_{b_0}^{x}\frac{m}{1+k[1-F(b)]} dH(b)$$
and from this
$$[1+k(1-...
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Lack of skilled IT workforce, but they do not raise wages
In my country, Portugal, many IT companies are always complaining in media regarding the lack of skilled IT workforce, but they do not raise wages. We have statistical data from the government that ...
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Ad-driven skills gap?
In a Business Insider piece I read that:
Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Center for American Progress, says he is "unusually unsympathetic to the evergreen skills gap critique."
"...
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Does labor mobility create a certain type of market failure?
Oxford professor Ewart Keep writes in a paper titled Market Failure in Skills (p. 3) that
For firms there is the
problem of investment in
staff who may leave taking
their skills with them.
...
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Labour Market: simple macroeconomic modeling
I just started reviewing macroeconomic modeling for an upcoming entry exam, and I'm not sure about my answers in this application:
Suppose that the economy of a country has a representative firm ...
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Why doesn't the concept of employee engagement work in practice? [closed]
The concept of employee engagement looks like an overwhelming obvious way of improving business performance, yet since the mid-nineties, and after spending billions on engagement improvement systems, ...
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Expectation augmented Phillips Curve
Currently studying Intro to Macroeconomics, and faced Expectations augmented PC. In my textbook it is not clear how expected inflation affects unemployment. My view so far, is that expected inflation ...
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Does a fall in the wage rate always reduce hours worked?
In the Neoclassical Labor-Leisure model, does a fall in the wage rate always reduce hours worked?
Or does it depend on whether the substitution or income effect dominates?
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Profit maximization question
Two firms are in a market together. They produce a product.
Total revenue from sales is $y=K+L$
K is the amount of capital
L is the amount of labor
These two firms each specialized in supplying ...
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How did we arrive to 40 hr work week?
I am interested in a (reasonably) quantified explanation of why the work week in most of the world is 40 hrs and not for example 20? How did we arrive to the number 40.
Another question is, and here ...
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Instrumental Variable Paper for Minimum Wage
I am trying to write a paper dealing with minimum wages and employment. I understand there is simultaneity bias between these two variables so I must come up with an instrument. Does anyone have any ...
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How to set a minimum wage
How does a country set an optimum minimum wage, i have went through loads of website but none of them give me a satisfied answer. For example, median of a country's income, percentage of GDP and such ...
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How is it economically responsible to destroy proprty which has value? [closed]
precursor: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/1851
How can it be economically responsible to destroy property which has value?
If a property is destroyed (which is the right of the property holder in most ...
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Economic impacts of Migration on the Labour Market
Many natives don't prefer foreigners taking their jobs, is it actually a bad thing for the countries economy?
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Real Business Cycle Theory
Which academic paper does this diagram come from? Need to know for citation purposes. Apparently its King and Rebelo (2005) but doesn't seem to be the case.
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Incomes of different professions [duplicate]
Doctors average salary is around \$110,000 a year, whereas NBA stars salary may well cross \$5,000,000 a season.
Why do sports players and television stars make more than doctors and politicians?
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Productivity issue
Could someone help with the following?
Company produces products of daily demand. It employs workers In number of 12 people (HER) Wages of workers. The costs of hiring and firing are 25 per employee, ...
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Productivity and wages in a task-based model
In a task-based model like the one developed in Acemoglu&Autor 2011 with two types of worker, can the low type have a higher wage with respect to the high type?
More specifically: if the ...
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The Shapiro-Stiglitz model. Why under full employment do unemployed workers find jobs instantly?
Under the Shapiro-Stiglitz model the No-Shirking Condition is:
$$w=\bar{e}+\left( \rho +\frac{\bar{L}}{\bar{L}-NL}b \right)\frac{\bar{e}}{q}$$
Where:
$\bar{e}=$ exerted effort by employees
$\rho=$ ...
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Interest rate Effects on labour supply
I was analysing, free of specificities, the effects of an increase in the real interest rate on labour supply in a two period setting. The obvious effect on leisure is the intertemporal substitution ...
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JK Galbraith Quote: How to interpret?
I came across a very thought-provoking quote by JK Galbraith concerning supply-side economics. The quote is as follows:
The poor don't work because they have too much money. The rich don't
work ...
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A confusion regarding search and matching model in Pissarides's "Equilibrium Unemployment Theory" book
I was studying chapter 1 of the book "Equilibrium Unemployment Theory" and I got confused about the way Pissarides has defined the probability of a firm not finding a worker in a short time interval $...
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How to find right MRP_L in this economic problem?
Economic problem from my textbook (here is my translation from Russian):
There is a firm that is both monopoly and monopsony. It's monopoly on market of its product and it's monopsony on labor market ...
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Would the military be more efficiant if they were unionized?
I hear about the extremely long work hours in the army. I understand it hardens them for readiness for combat situations. With the technology and increase of intelligence need to operate it would a ...
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Would an $8 National Minimum Wage Work in the US?
For those who advocate a \$15 minimum wage, would the benefits espoused also come from an \$8 minimum?
The reason I ask, is that it’s often said that the minimum wage needs to be updated as it was ...
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Why real wage equals marginal product of labor when return to scale is constant?
I can understand that real wage will equal MPL(marginal product of labor) when MPL is diminishing, because firms will employ more labor until MPL falls to real wage.
While, if MPL is constant, ...
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What is feminist economics?
Feminist economics? What kind of "field" is that?
Just the existence of such a field seems ridiculous to me...
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