workforce

Employment rates in Puerto Rico range from 55 to 65 percent of U.S. rates during the past thirty years. This huge employment shortfall holds for men and women, cuts across all education groups, and is deeper for persons without a college degree. The shortfall is concentrated in the private sector, especially labor-intensive industries that rely heavily on less educated workers.

The author estimates of separation rates and job-finding rates for the past 50 years, using historical data informed by detailed recent data. The separation rate is nearly constant while the job-finding rate shows high volatility at business-cycle and lower frequencies.

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effects of the Italian reform of 1990 on worker and job flows. The authors find that the increase in dismissal costs decreased accessions and separations for workers in small relative to big firms, especially in sectors with higher employment volatility.

The model developed in this paper explains differences in the division of labour across firms as a result of computer technology adoption. The authors find that changes in the division of labour can result both from reduced production time and from improved communication possibilities.

Corporate governance literature argues that board diversity is potentially positively related to firm performance. This study examines the relationship in the case of women in top executive jobs and on boards of directors using data for the 2500 largest Danish firms observed during the period 1993-2001.

Over the past 30 years, the share of adult populations with college degrees increased more in cities with higher initial schooling levels than in initially less educated places. This tendency appears to be driven by shifts in labor demand as there is an increasing wage premium for skilled people working in skilled cities. In this paper, the authors present a model where the clustering of skilled people in metropolitan areas is driven by the tendency of skilled entrepreneurs to innovate in ways that employ other skilled people and by the elasticity of housing supply.

Recent concerns about the transfer of U.S. services jobs to overseas workers have deepened long-standing fears about the effects of trade on the domestic labor market. But a balanced view of the impact of trade requires that we consider jobs created through the production of U.S. exports as well as jobs lost to imports. The authors explore the relationship between trade and job creation in the United States.

The objective of this paper is to identify high employment industries in Australia, Japan and the U.S using input-output analysis. It is found that the high and low employment generating industries in 1980 and/or 1990 are almost the same as those in 1997.

This paper studies the effects of international outsourcing on individual transitions out of jobs in the Danish manufacturing sector for the period 1992-2001. Estimation of a single risk duration model, where no distinction is made between different types of transitions out of the job, shows that outsourcing has a clear significant positive effect on the job separation rate, but the effect corresponds to a limited number of lost jobs.

This article documents and analyses gross job flows and their determinants in Estonia over the years 1995-2001, using a database containing the population of officially registered firms in Estonia (all in all 52,000). Results show that job creation and job destruction rates have been rather high in Estonia and are comparable to the levels documented for the US.