Wages And Employment Across Skill Groups

For some time, it has been debated whether a lack of wage flexibility is at the roots of the high and persistent unemployment in West Germany. In the presence of a skill bias in labor demand, which increases the relative de mand for more highly skilled labor over time, there only seems to exist the choice between higher wage inequality or higher unemployment rates. This study scrutinizes whether and in what way this line of thought is consis tent with empirical findings for West Germany. The analysis ranges from extensive descriptive evidence on wage trends to the estimation of a struc tural model of wage bargaining. As the most important database, I use the IAB-Beschiiftigtenstichprobe from 1975 to 1990. This study was accepted as a Habilitation thesis by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Konstanz in October 1998. The only major change relates to appendix B on the block bootstrap procedure now summarizing the main aspects of the method. I am very grateful to my advisor Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Franz for his support, encouragement, and inspiration. From 1993 to 1997, he ran the Center for International Labor Economics at the University of Konstanz in such a way that it provided a fruitful environment for empirical research in labor economics. I am also indebted to Prof. Dr. Winfried Pohlmeier and to Prof. Dr. Gerd Ronning for undertaking the task to evaluate my Habilitation thesis.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.

The American economy is in danger of leaving its low-skilled workers behind. In the last two decades, the wages and employment levels of the least educated and experienced workers have fallen disastrously. Where willing workers once found ready employment at reasonable wages, our computerized, service-oriented economy demands workers who can read and write, master technology, deal with customers, and much else. Improved education and training will alleviate this problem in the long run, but educating the new workforce will take a substantial national investment over many years. In the meantime, we face increasingly acute questions about how to include low-skill workers in today's economy. Generating Jobs takes a hard look at these questions, and asks whether anything can be done to improve the lot of low-skilled workers by intervening in the labor market on their behalf. These micro demand-side policies seek to improve wages and employment levels—either by lowering the costs of hiring low-skilled workers through employer subsidies, or by raising wage levels, benefit levels, or hours of employment, or by providing employment via government jobs. Although these policies are not currently popular in the U.S., they have long been used in many countries. Generating Jobs provides a clear-eyed assessment of this history, and asks if any of these policies might be applicable to the current problems of low-skilled workers in the United States. The results are surprising. Several recently touted panaceas turn out to be costly and ineffective in the American labor market. Enterprise zones, for instance, are an expensive way of moving jobs into areas of high unemployment, costing as much as $60,000 per job. Similarly, job-sharing, which has had uneven success in Europe, turns out to be ill-suited to conditions in the U.S., where wages are relatively low and workers need to work long hours to maintain income. On the other hand, a number of older, less flashy policies turn out to have real, if modest, benefits. Wage subsidies have increased employment among qualifying workers, and public employment policies can increase the number of workers from targeted groups working during the program. While acknowledging that many solutions are counterproductive, this definitive review of active labor market policies shows that many programs can offer real help. More than any rhetoric, Generating Jobs is the best guide to future action and a serious response to those who claim that nothing can be done.

There is little doubt that significant income inequality persists across as well as within countries, and that wage differential exists between male and female workers across the industries and within establishments. The differences in earnings not only affect the well-being of the current generation but also have major long-term impacts on health, education and skill formation of future generations. Although an important goal of a country is to improve the well-being of their workers, the ways to achieve this goal may differ. This book presents recent research on labor economics, addressing issues such as gender wage gap, regional wage disparity, inter-and intra-industry wage inequality, the wage effects of immigration and the effects of wage negotiations in organizations. There are three parts in this book. Part A contains five chapters addressing the issue of gender wage gap. Part B also contains five chapters on regional studies to show the effects on wage, skill formation and the correlation between public and private sector employments. Part C focuses on wage negotiations in organizations. The book provides several important insights into many contemporary labor market issues.

This paper uses a life-cycle framework to document new stylized facts about the nexus between job polarization and earnings inequality. Using quarterly labor force data for the UK over the period 2000-2018, we find clear life-cycle profiles in the probability of being employed within each occupation type and wages earned therein. Cohort plots and econometric analysis suggest that labor market outcomes and prospects have gradually worsened for the young. These adverse trends are particularly significant for low-skill women: estimated cohort effects point to a fall in wages within each occupation as well as a lower propensity of being employed in abstract-task occupations. We also find evidence of general occupational downgrading in the UK, with more educated workers taking up fewer high-skill occupations than they did in the past. Our analysis informs the policy debate over appropriate measures needed to reduce skill mismatches and alleviate labor market transitions.

Maxwell presents the results of her groundbreaking survey of 405 employers, which queried them about jobs requiring no more than a high school education and no more than one year of work experience. These data allow her to establish the link between skills and low-skilled jobs and to reveal the current state of the labor market facing low-skilled workers. The data also highlights the knowledge and skills that employers require in low-skilled jobs and the abilities that individuals who apply for those jobs bring to the table.

This joint OECD-ILO report provides a comparative analysis of case studies focusing on improving skills use in the workplace across eight countries. The examples provide insights into the practical ways in which employers interact with government services and policies at the local level. They highlight the need to build policy coherence across employment, skills, economic development and innovation policies, and underline the importance of ensuring that skills utilisation is built into policy development thinking and implementation. Skills utilisation concerns the extent to which skills are effectively applied in the workplace to maximise workplace and individual performance. It involves a mix of policies including work organisation, job design, technology adaptation, innovation, employee-employer relations, human resource development practices and business-product market strategies. It is often at the local level that the interface of these factors can best be addressed.

Labor markets in the UK have been characterized by markedly widening wage inequality for lowskill (non-college) women, a trend that predates the pandemic. We examine the contribution of job polarization to this trend by estimating age, period, and cohort effects for the likelihood of employment in different occupations and the wages earned therein over 2001-2019. For recent generations of women, cohort effects indicate a higher likelihood of employment in low-paying manual jobs relative to high-paying abstract jobs. However, cohort effects also underpin falling wages for post-1980 cohorts across all occupations. We find that falling returns to labor rather than job polarization has been a key driver of rising inter-age wage inequality among low-skill females. Wage-level cohort effects underpin a nearly 10 percent fall in expected lifetime earnings for low-skill women born in 1990 relative to those born in 1970.