Collective labor supply with many consumption goods

We extend Chiappori??s (J Polit Econ 100:437?C467, 1992) standard, ??collective?? model of labor supply to the case of several consumption goods. We show that more robust estimates obtain. Moreover, individual demands for each commodity, although unobservable, can be recovered up to an additive constant. In particular, the impact of changes in wages, non labor income or distribution factors on individual consumption patterns can be identified even though no individual consumption is observed.     

Public enterprise and the rise and fall of labor share

Developed economies experienced a rise and fall in labor share (LS) in the postwar period. We present a novel explanation of these trends – public enterprise employment. We document a link between it and both LS and wage compression in 15 developed nations. We then build a model that shows how overstaffing public enterprises can increase LS and reduce wage inequality. Overstaffing directly increases public enterprise LS and indirectly increases private sector LS by reducing available labor. We examine several public enterprise reforms. Consistent with the model’s predictions, reforms reduce public enterprise LS permanently and private sector LS temporarily.     

Organizational perspectives on digital labor market intermediaries

Dramatic changes in organizational forms and employee-employer relationships have coincided with a proliferation of labor market intermediaries. Often digital and internet-based, these new hiring technologies assist organizations in recruiting and screening potential job candidates. We identify three types of digital labor market intermediaries (dLMIs): connectors, curators, and comminglers. We examine the use of dLMIs through the lens of organizational theory, focusing on implications for organizational efficiency, power, and equity. dLMI use is patterned but variable across different organizations and has unintended outcomes that defy efficiency expectations. It poses new constraints for job seekers while allowing organizations and intra-organizational groups to negotiate institutional pressures and power imbalances. Finally, dLMI use appears to reproduce pre-existing inequalities among different types of employees.     

Social norms, inequality and child labor

This paper theoretically analyzes a situation wherein adults’ decisions on child labor are affected not only by materialistic utility but also by a social norm against child labor. The adult thus faces a tradeoff; on the one hand, household income rises if she sends her child to work. On the other hand, the adult suffers disutility from violating the social norm in so doing. We also suppose that the extent of disutility falls as more other adults have their children work. We then explore how the total amount of child labor in an economy changes as adults’ labor efficiencies rise or become more unequal. Our analysis reveals that a more equal distribution or rises in adults’ labor efficiency help decrease child labor only under certain conditions.     

Privatization of refuse removal and labor costs

We examine the labor-cost savings associated with privatization by comparing earnings and employment trends of public and private sector refuse workers. Findings suggest that high union earnings for workers in the public sector are a source of labor-cost savings in the refuse industry. Evidence on job changers does not indicate that earnings for this group of workers are a compensating differential. Metropolitan area employment findings suggest that municipalities are less likely to use union refuse workers in the public sector when a relatively small percentage of area residents belong to a union. The authors thank Jacqueline Agesa, Keith Bender, Maria Crawford, and Richard Perlman for valuable suggestions. Research assistance from Eric Blackburn is greatly appreciated.     

Cross‐national variations in the division of household labor

Using data from the International Social Justice Project, we describe the division of household labor in married couple households using a sample of 13 nations (N= 10,153). We find significant differences in the division of household labor based upon respondents’ nations of residence. We find support for the time availability approach; households where the wife is employed outside the home for pay are more likely to respond that husbands perform at least half of the household labor. We also find support for the relative resources approach; in households where wives’ education equals or exceeds that of their husbands, husbands are more likely to perform half of the household labor. We find little support for the economic dependence approach. We suggest that future cross‐national research should place individuals in context to determine why there are nation differences in the reported division of household labor.     

Conceptualizing international labor migration: a structuration perspective

"This article applies the theory of structuration to international labor migration using case study material from the Philippines. It first provides a brief review of the functional and structural approaches to understanding labor migration and the theoretical impasse that has been created between them. It then reviews several attempts to resolve this impasse, including systems and networks approaches; these solutions are rejected on theoretical and empirical grounds. We suggest that migrant institutions may be a more appropriate mid-level concept than households or social networks to articulate various levels of analysis. We develop this concept in the context of the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens and attempt to apply this to the Philippines, concluding that this framework is eminently suited for further research on international labor migration."     

The supply of volunteer labor: the case of hospitals

Little is known about the labor market for volunteers, but even less is known about the supply of volunteers to particular industries. This article examines the supply of volunteer labor to one industry, hospitals, and the choices that volunteers make among hospitals with different ownership attributes. Survey data of volunteers at four hospitals located in Madison, Wisconsin, are used to estimate the importance of a number of factors influencing people's willingness to volunteer at hospitals. We found that job opportunities in the labor market and tax rates affect the supply of volunteers. We also found that volunteers are not indifferent to the type of hospital at which they volunteer; a federal government hospital, a nonprofit state-owned teaching hospital, and other nonprofit hospitals were not perfect substitutes in the eyes of individual volunteers in our study.     

The current state of the labor queue: National and regional Evidence

We employ vector autoregressive techniques to determine the current state of the labor queue. Unemployment rate differentials have narrowed in recent years, potentially due to a change in the queue ordering, though a tight labor market and a stable queue would yield similar results. We find no evidence that the queue ordering has changed, which brings into question the resiliency of gains made by minority groups. We employ the same techniques to reveal the state of the queue across geographic regions and find that substantial differences exist across regions, implying variation in the relative labor force status of demographic groups.     

Gender and racial earnings differentials in academic labor markets

This study estimates earnings differentials across racial and gender groups among college faculty, and decomposes these differentials into the components attributable to differences in individual and institutional characteristics and that which remains unexplained. We find that white females earn approximately 4 percent less than white males; black males earn 7.4 percent more; black females earn one percent more; Hispanic males earn 2.7 percent more; Hispanic females earn 1.7 percent less; and Asian males earn 7.7 percent more than comparable white males. We also find a significant earnings penalty for being a naturalized citizen or noncitizen versus an U.S.-born citizen.     

The effect of unionization on labor productivity: Some additional evidence

Following Brown and Medoff (1978), a number of studies have investigated the effect of unionization on labor productivity using a log-linear, Cobb-Douglas model of technology. To derive this model, a first-order Taylor-series approximation to the intrinsically nonlinear unionization variable is made; the resulting linear equation is estimated with generalized least-squares (GLS) techniques. We demonstrate that this approximation introduces a bias that necessarily results in an overstatement of the absolute value of the exact union productivity effect. We illustrate the magnitude of this bias by comparing GLS estimates of the linear Brown-Medoff model with GLS estimates of the exact, nonlinear relationship, using aggregate time-series data from the private domestic sector of the U.S. economy.     

International competition and the labor market prospects of union and nonunion workers

We investigate the relationship between international competition and the labor mar-ket prospects of a representative sample of British workers. Our analysis, which sets out the first explicit test of both the wage and employment implications of increased international competition, highlights an interesting asymmetry with competition neg-atively affecting the wage, but not the employment, prospects of unionized workers and the employment, but not the wage, prospects of nonunion workers. We have benefited from discussions with Monojit Chatterji, Michael Devereux, Lisa Grobar, Alan Man-ning, Chris Milner, and Ian Walker. Helpful comments were also received from seminar participants at the Universities of Aberdeen, City, Keele, and Loughborough. We are grateful to Daniel Kwok for excellent research assistance. The normal disclaimer applies.     

The labor supply of military wives in the US

Despite a slight increase in the labor force participation rate of women age 18–55 in the U.S. between 1990 and 2010, the labor force participation rate of military wives in this age cohort fell from 63 to 57?%. The goal of this paper is twofold: to document and analyze the labor force participation of military wives between 1990 and 2010, using the U.S. Census and American Community Survey data, and to compare the relationship between migration and labor force participation for military and non-military wives. We find that the primary suspects to explain the widening gap are the repeated migration for military wives, and the deepening of the recession.     

Japanese labor relations: A view from organized labor

Donald F. Ephlin retired in June 1988 as vice-president and director of the General Motors Division of the UAW. He has also directed the UAW’s Ford Division, where he led the union’s bargaining team in negotiations over job security, profit sharing, and worker participation in management. Mr. Ephlin has served as a regional director of the UAW in New England, as an administrative assistant to former UAW president Leonard Woodcock, and as a member of the Presidential Commission on Industrial Competitiveness and the U.S. Department of Labor Task Force on Economic Adjustment and Worker Dislocation. He is now a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.     

Ideas versus ideology: The origins of modern labor economics

Starting with its early twentieth century origins, the development of Labor Economics is traced to the present. We describe an intellectual revolution in which an earlier tra-dition that focused primarily on the institution of the labor union has been replaced by a perspective that emphasizes the various roles played by labor markets in an eco-nomic system. That earlier tradition contained very significant ideological elements, whereas its successor deals much more with the world of ideas. In the course of the debate, which still continues, ideas triumphed over ideology and created modern Labor Economics.     

Child-custody reform and the division of labor in the household

We investigate whether the adoption of joint-custody laws affects the amount of time that married mothers and fathers devote to market and household work. Our findings suggest that custody reform induces a reallocation of time within marriage, with mothers working more in the market and fathers working more in the home. However, fathers lower their labor-force-participation rates in response to custody reform. The patterns in the data are most easily reconciled with models that emphasize shifts in bargaining power to one household member, which is likely the father in the case of joint-custody reform.     

The returns to seniority in academic labor markets

Although earnings and seniority are believed positively related in most labor markets, the earnings of academics were thought to be an exception to this rule. Using the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty, from 1993, we find that earnings and seniority are positively related once adequate controls for past labor market mobility are included among the regressors. In particular, we find that individuals who are currently tenured at their initial job have the steepest seniority profile of any group we examined. We also find a handsome premium paid to individuals who are hired-with-tenure. These results suggest a market characterized by competitive “raiding” of top faculty.