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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King-Plosser-Rebello Preferences: Scale leisure
KPR preferences are given by
$$ U(c, l) = \frac{\left(cv(l)\right)^{1-\sigma}-1}{1-\sigma}$$
with concave increasing $v$ and $c$, $l$ denoting consumption and leisure. In the limiting case of $\...
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Has Stack Overflow been economically beneficial to programmer productivity?
Has Stack Overflow an overall positive impact on programmers productivity?
On one side, it takes time and effort to ask and answer questions -- thus decreasing productivity.
On the other side, ...
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Why life expectance is growing faster than retirement age? - source needed
Need sources of information about "Why is life expectancy growing faster than retirement age?"
Is there any literature about "why the increased quality of life and medicine in rich countries doesn’t ...
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Labour Productivity Growth and Reallocation of Labour
Using a shift-share methodology, labour productivity growth can be arise from productvity growth within a sector (within effect) or reallocation of labour to sectors with higher productivity (...
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Instrumental variables for minimum wage
I was wondering if there is a classic instrument for minimum wage as there is for schooling or other variables. If so, how does it fares with respect to most established designs like spatial ...
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Does working abroad cause less unemployment? Or is it actually harmful (directly or opportunity cost)?
This question is from subjective origins but is (supposed to be) objective.
The context of this question arises from people in third world countries going abroad to work. Often they are seen as money-...
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Reject worker after match
In the DMP family of labor models, we typically have $V$ denoting a vacancy and $J$ denoting the value of a job. $V$ typically becomes 0 through free entry.
Say a firm get matched with a worker of ...
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DMP: Two Labor Markets
Consider the following extension of the standard DMP model, in which we have two labor markets with different returns, indexed $i$. The markets are completely separated and firms and workers can only ...
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Reasons for the recent rise in long-term unemployment
Kroft et al document the raise of long-term unemployed in the US during the recent crises. This is an impressive figure from their paper:
They show that the raise does not come from compositional ...
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Data: Vacancies in the US before 2005
Shimer (2005) says
These [separation shocks] introduce an almost perfectly positive correlation between unemployment and vacancies, an event that essentially never been observed in the United ...
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Separation shock and business cycles
In the context of the Diamonds-Mortensen-Pissarides models, there was a reasoning why a separation shock cannot fit business cycles. I think it was brought forward by Shimer, but I could be wrong.
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Consumption of the unemployed
I am wondering how the consumption of the unemployed varies over the business cycle. We know that wages of people getting fired in busts are higher than wages of people in booms (Mueller 2012), so ...
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Unemployment: Human Capital Deterioration
I am looking for Macro-Labor models that include deterioration of human capital. The mechanism is simple: The longer you were unemployed, the more human capital you are losing.
However, this is ...
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Why is collective bargaining by a group of employees not the same thing as price-fixing?
Employees sell their labor for wages. If a critical mass of employees get together and demand higher wages, how is this not the same thing as a critical mass of merchants illegally fixing the price of ...
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Wage regressions: Nominal versus real wage
I'm wondering do I need to convert nominal wages to real wages when running wage equations using panel data sets? My dependent variable is log of wage and I'm looking at returns to education across ...
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Is Firing Costly in the US?
I suppose that it doesn't cost most firms much to get rid of cheap labor, and that high wage workers typically have contracts that imply high compensations in case of firing.
But what about the ...
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Impact of government subsidy on labour supply
If the government pays a certain amount $b>0$ to every person who is not working, what is the impact of this subsidy on labour supply? How does it alter the reservation wage? Is your answer ...
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Should minimum wage be regulated for developing countries
I live in a developing country, where unemployment is at roughly 25%. There is a large divergence in population whereby skilled workers are typically active within in the manufacturing, finance, ...
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What would happen if the entire world switched to the 4-day work week? [closed]
What would happen if the entire world switched to the 4-day work week?
Specifically would someone's quality of life drop significantly in a developed or a non-developed country?
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What is the difference between intensive margin and extensive margin in labor economics?
What is the difference between intensive margin and extensive margin in labor economics, or general RBC model, where we talk about labor-hours supplied changing with extensive margin or intensive ...
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Has the natural rate of unemployment decreased with modern travel and the Internet?
The natural rate of unemployment is a combination of structural unemployment and frictional unemployment.
Structural unemployment is caused by a surplus of labor at a given wage in a given area.
...
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What has caused the recent 25% unemployment rate in Spain?
The unemployment rate in Spain has recently been fluctuating around 25%.
What has caused this?
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Does Craigslist Reduce Unemployment?
If a substantial (though admittedly I have no idea how large) part of the natural rate of unemployment is caused by the job search, do more efficient means of communication create more efficient labor ...
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Guvenen et al: Earnings
Guvenen et al look at earnings shocks over time, and try to argue whether these are compatible with standard career-ladder models with normal shocks.
However, their data is no real shocks, it is time ...
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Extensive Labor Margin and Full Insurance
Extensive margin models use Rogerson (1988) style lotteries in order to simplify the savings problem under non-full-insurance.
However, one could still write down the model in that style but instead ...
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Graduate Level Textbook on Labor Economics and Macro-Labor
What would be good textbooks at the graduate level that deal with Labor Economics and Labor-Macro (As in, Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, Shimer Puzzle etc)?
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Distribution of Wages
Is there any paper that looks at the distribution of wages? I'd like to see how many workers are in each percentile of labor income. I know that you could compute it using CPS or US tax data, but I ...
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Stimulus Effect of the Minimum Wage
In the question about the minimum wage found here, I have heard several times that an increase in the minimum wage can, as one of several competing effects, "boost the economy" by increasing the ...
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Employment Volatility and the Relevance of Aggregate Wage Rigidity
The Mortensen-Pissarides (MP) framework of search labor is the thing in analyzing (equilibrium) unemployment over the business cycle. Shimer showed that the lack of hires is the big margin that ...
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Under what conditions is a monopoly undesirable?
First of all, I realize that "undesirable" is an ambiguous term. So, to clarify, when is a monopoly undesirable under the following metrics?
Pareto efficiency
Reduces consumer surplus
Social Welfare (...
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Whatever happened to efficiency wage theories?
Older macroeconomics texts give much space to efficiency wage explanations of how unemployment could coexist with wages in equilibrium higher than the reservation wage of workers.
However, there ...
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Unemployment and the Frisch-Elasticity
There is the long debate on the Frisch-Elasticity being the driver of unemployment over the business cycle.
One argument against the voluntary-unemployment mechanism of RBC models is that if we ...
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How do Marxist economists solve the Diamond-Water Paradox?
For class surveying different economic systems, I read a book on Marxism and its core beliefs. As I read, I came to learn that the Marxist view of economics depends heavily on the Labor Theory of ...
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Unemployment and the Minimum Wage---what are the main counter-arguments to Card and Krueger?
Card and Krueger's paper (AER 1994, "Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania") uses a difference-in-difference identification strategy to ...
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