workforce

This paper examines the inflow and outflow of workers to different industries in Georgia during the information technology (IT) boom of the 1990s and the subsequent bust. According to the findings, workers in the software and computer services industry were much more likely to have been absent from the Georgia workforce prior to the boom but were no more likely than workers from other industries to have exited the workforce during the bust.

In this paper, the authors investigate the degree of congruence between three definitions of informality based on employment contract registration, social security protection, and the characteristics of the employer and employment using Brazilian household survey data for the period 1992 to 2001.

Using a simple production game, the authors investigate whether public firms perform better when they increase the power of their workers’ incentive schemes. In a laboratory experiment, subjects choose between a ‘public firm’ and a ‘private firm’ with team and individual incentives, respectively. When exposed to individual incentives, workers in the public firm increase effort in one parametrisation, but show a decrease in another.

According to the author, unionism in the United States is contagious; it spills out of coal mines and steel mills into other establishments in the neighborhood, like hospitals and supermarkets. The geographic spillover of unionism is documented here using a newly constructed establishment level data on unionism that is rich in geographic detail. A strong connection is found between unionism of health care establishments today and proximity to unionized coal mines and steel mills from the 1950s.

The Commonwealth’s legislature is currently considering a proposal that would increase the state minimum wage in two steps over the next two years to $8.25 per hour by 2007. Advocates on both sides of the issue have each released a report on the bill’s likely economic impacts. In this report, the author reviews the arguments on both sides of the issue. In doing so, the author discusses
and critiques, where applicable, the evidence presented in the two reports that have been issued on either side of the debate.

The author analyzes the impact of human capital on local employment growth for the case of West Germany (1977-2002). Findings reveal robust evidence that skilled cities grow faster than unskilled ones, but the need not indicate localized human capital externalities are at work.

According to the study, between 2000 and 2005, Ohio lost 204,308 jobs. This represents a loss of 3.8 percent of all employment in Ohio in just a five year period. The loss resulted in an aggregate loss in Ohio quarterly payroll earnings of $633 million.

This report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzes the long-term upgrading of skills in the U.S. manufacturing workforce since the peak of manufacturing employment in the early 1980s. The authors quantify the growth in high-skill manufacturing jobs and show that skill upgrading has been occurring across industries, even in those experiencing employment losses, and in all parts of the country, even in regions where employment losses have been severe.

This paper generates a pattern of technology adoption endogenously, and shows that it causes the wages of some workers to fall. A dynamic extension shows that workers without transferable skills become worse off throughout the period of transition to the modern technology.

The author finds that young college graduates are two to five times more likely than less educated workers to reside in a state with high labor demand at the time they entered the market. Among college graduates, cross-state migration by college graduates equalizes the wage impact of early career labor demand shocks in their home states.