workforce

For a number of OECD countries, the deterioration of labour market outcomes for less-skilled workers since the early 1980’s has coincided with a steady decline in union membership, according to the authors. Findings indicate that globalisation has indeed contributed to deunionisation.

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey is a new data source of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that estimates monthly vacancies, hires, and separations. It has quickly become a useful tool for studying the labor market. This chapter summarizes its aggregate and micro-level evidence, including the relations of vacancies and worker flows to unemployment and other measures of labor market conditions.

According to the report, the first national and most comprehensive analysis to date of tenured and tenure track faculty in the “top 50” departments of science and engineering disciplines shows that females and minorities are significantly underrepresented. The data demonstrate that while the representation of females in science and engineering PhD attainment has significantly increased in recent years, the corresponding faculties are still overwhelmingly dominated by White men.

Richard Florida stated that it is not (only) job opportunities or urban amenities which attract creative high-educated people to cities but, rather, tolerance and aesthetics. The authors have tested this hypothesis in a cross section of Dutch cities. The authors conclude that the tolerance/creative class nexus empirically fails to materialize for the Netherlands.

The author documents changes in Europes international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe.

The authors analyze the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Contrary to workers fears, the authors fixed effect and random trend estimates imply little effect of domestic privatization, except for a slight negative effect in Russia, and they provide some evidence of positive foreign effects on both wages and employment in all four countries.

This paper presents quantitative estimates of the effects of technological change on the composition of production and non-production workers in manufacturing in the United States for the period 1950 – 1995. The paper separates the effects of relative wage change, biased technological change and changes in sectoral composition and estimates the effect of upward pressure on relative pay exerted by biased technological change.

In this paper, the authors show on the example of Austria and Poland that with the new international division of labour emerging in Europe Austria, the high income country, is specializing in the low skill intensive part of the value chain and Poland, the low income country, is specializing in the high skill part. As a result, skilled workers in Austria are losing from outsourcing, while gaining in Poland. In Austria, relative wages for human capital declined by 2 percent during 1995-2002 and increased by 41 percent during 1994-2002 in Poland.

According to data from the OCDE, almost one third of the total quantity of on-the-job training is worker-provided. The aim of this paper is to study, in a labor market characterized by frictions, the effects of technological progress on the optimal worker-provided on-the-job training.

This article discusses the factors driving recent trends in labor force participation. Given that participation rates started to turn around in 2005, there is less concern about long-run trends than there was in the beginning of the year. Nonetheless, the experience in recent years has been unusual.