workforce

This paper analyzes the nature of the organizational change implied in outsourcing, comparing it to mergersacquisitions and downsizing. Next, it identifies some critical aspects of the transition management process which, when dealt with effectively, may enhance the success of outsourcing. The theoretical analysis is contrasted with findings from an empirical study on outsourcing in the Netherlands.

The Work Environment Index (WEI) captures these differences and provides a basis for evaluating how well each state does in creating an economy that supports its working population. The purpose of this article is to detail the construction of the WEI and to explain the design of the Index. This paper serves as a technical companion to the report Decent Work In America: The 2005 Work Environment Index.

This paper investigates regional public-private wage differentials in Italy. Following the recent wave of reforms that significantly changed wage setting and employment relations in both sectors - increasing decentralisation in collective bargaining and enforcing a "privatisation" of public sector employment contracts - the authors present new estimates of the public-private wage gap by geographical location.

The first biennial State of Working Illinois report sets out to provide sound data as the basis for making the crucial policy decisions needed for the state to respond productively to the changing economic structure of the state.

The paper investigates the changes in job creation and destruction flows considering a very disaggregate level of analysis. The authors explore the issue using a unique database on the population of firms in Trentino (a North-Eastern Province of Italy) from 1991 to 2001.

Using a formal model of innovation the authors dentify conditions where the innovation benefits of job-hopping exceed the costs from reduced incentives to invest in human capital. These conditions likely hold for computers, but not in most other settings.

This paper tests whether school-to-work (STW) programs are particularly beneficial for those less likely to go to college in their absence——often termed the ““forgotten half”” in the STW literature. The empirical analysis is based on the NLSY97, which allows us to study six types of STW programs, including job shadowing, mentoring, coop, school enterprises, tech prep, and internships/apprenticeships.

To analyze the low R&D utilization/low growth equilibria, the author sets up an endogenous growth model in which firms set fair wages and which allows for an analysis of changes in the utilization rate of R&D workers. Results indicate that the rise in under utilization and the fall in growth per human capital to be consistent with the increase in the demand for higher education.

This paper presents new evidence on the role of gender segregation within industry, occupation, establishment, and occupation-establishment cells in explaining gender wage differentials of full-time salaried workers in Spain during 1995 and 2002. Using data from the Spanish Wage Structure Surveys, the authors find that the raw gender wage gap decreased from 0.26 to 0.22 over the course of seven years.

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of US-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all US-born workers in general. The authors introduce such a production function, making the crucial assumption that US and foreign-born workers with similar education and experience levels may nevertheless be imperfectly substitutable, and allowing for endogenous capital accumulation.