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To celebrate the centenary of the most radical union in North America - The Industrial Workers of the World - this collection examines radical economics and the labor movement in the 20th Century. The union advocates direct action to raise wages and increase job control, and it envisions the eventual abolition of capitalism and the wage system through the general strike. The contributors to this volume speak both to economists and to those in the labor movement, and point to fruitful ways in which these radical heterodox traditions have engaged and continue to engage each other and with the labor movement. In view of the current crisis of organized labor and the beleaguered state of the working class—phenomena which are global in scope—the book is both timely and important. Representing a significant contribution to the non-mainstream literature on labor economics, the book reactivates a marginalized analytical tradition which can shed a great deal of light on the origins and evolution of the difficulties confronting workers throughout the world. This volume will be of most interest to students and scholars of heterodox economics, those involved with or researching The Industrial Workers of the World, as well as anyone interested in the more radical side of unions, anarchism and labor organizations in an economic context.
In the first part of the dissertation, we contribute to the field of Information Economics by discussing a specialist intermediary in the labor market; i.e., the public employment exchange. We devise a theoretical model in chapter II to establish a role of the agency in a skill-segmented market with supermodular match payoff values. In addition, participation cohort structure of the Indian public employment exchange system is evaluated using National Sample Survey of 2011-2012 and some policy implications are discussed in chapter III. The second part of the thesis make a contribution to the sibling literature in Labor Economics, excavating sibling gender influences on important labor market outcomes and interactions. In chapter IV, we use US data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID 1968-2011) to analyse sibling effects on occupational choices. In chapter V, family influences on employment status, marital status, educational outcomes, childhood home environments, gender beliefs, and job search is evaluated to document the impact of sibling gender on real wages using US data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79).
Chapter 1: It is a commonly held view that the quality of unemployed workers varies countercyclically. During economic downturns, firms raise standards for retaining workers---better workers are fired, so it is natural to expect an accompanying rise in the unemployment pool's quality. However, I present a model in which the reverse is true. Firms learn about employee quality over time and fire their lowest quality workers, but workers enter unemployment also via quitting. In equilibrium, the quality of the unemployment pool reflects a balance between flows of selective firings and of (relatively higher quality) quits. Although firms fire better workers during economic downturns, there are more of these firings at such times, and quits are no longer sufficient to balance the corresponding negative selection---the unemployment pool thus \textit{declines} in quality. I use the model to explore the dynamic consequences of this. Firms limit hiring in response, and even after the economy rebounds otherwise, hiring will not resume until the unemployment pool's quality recovers. This offers a possible contributing factor to jobless recoveries. Using CPS micro-data and JOLTS, I then provide empirical support for several testable implications of the model, focusing on direct evidence for the mechanism driving the decline in unemployment pool quality. The model is consistent with other, previously-observed empirical patterns as well, and it provides a tractable framework for dynamic analysis of labor markets with private learning during employment. Chapter 2: We consider a dynamic trading environment, where heterogeneous buyers and sellers are randomly paired in each period. Within each match, seller types become observable while buyer types remain private information, and sellers make take-it-or-leave-it offers. We first establish the existence of steady-state equilibrium where sellers offer prices that are continuous in their types. We then characterize properties of sorting under search frictions of varied strength, focusing on two extreme cases. With maximal search frictions---complete disregard for future payoffs---we demonstrate that log-supermodularity (log-submodularity) of the production function is a necessary and sufficient condition for positive (negative) assortative matching. Log-supermodularity (Log-submodularity) is stronger than the standard supermodularity (submodularity) sorting condition. The resistance to sorting comes from the fact that higher type sellers have stronger incentive to secure trade by lowering prices. At the other extreme, the incentive to secure trade grows inconsequential when search frictions vanish and hence the condition for positive (negative) sorting returns to supermodularity (submodularity). Chapter 3: We study the dynamics of a market where agents trade assets that are heterogeneous in quality, but publicly indistinguishable. All agents begin with only public knowledge of the aggregate asset pool composition, but each owner learns privately about the quality of an asset in her possession. Ownership entails a constant choice between (i) the value of retaining the asset (and its corresponding payoffs) and (ii) that of selling it on the market for a uniform price that reflects the instantaneous average quality of assets being sold. In turn, the market composition reflects not only those owners who have opted for (ii), but also owners selling for reasons unrelated to asset quality. Learning is gradual, so ownership can be understood as an optimal experimentation problem. Whereas an environment with public learning would entail symmetric timing of sales, private learning precludes this due to externalities sellers exert on other market participants. Instead, owners must spread sales over a broad time interval and, in turn, must experiment inefficiently. Qualitatively, price dynamics resemble those found in speculation-fueled ``panics'' of the sort often invoked to explain market breakdowns. After an initial period without movement, prices enter a steady decline. Eventually, the stock---and corresponding flow---of owners looking to sell due to poor asset performance grows thin. Prices stop falling and finally rise as the presence of adverse selection fades from the market.
Monographic compilation of essays in labour economics - covers labour demand and labour supply in the USA civil service, economic models of collective bargaining during labour disputes, economic analysis of job satisfaction, costs of job searching, etc. Diagrams, graphs, references, statistical tables. Festschrift comay yp 1939-1973.
Prominent economists discuss internal labor markets, the dynamics of immigration, labor market regulation, and other key topics in the work of Michael J. Piore. In Economy in Society, five prominent social scientists honor Michael J. Piore in original essays that explore key topics in Piore's work and make significant independent contributions in their own right. Piore is distinctive for his original research that explores the interaction of social, political, and economic considerations in the labor market and in the economic development of nations and regions. The essays in this volume reflect this rigorous interdisciplinary approach to important social and economic questions. M. Diane Burton's essay extends our understanding of internal labor markets by considering the influence of surrounding firms; Natasha Iskander builds on Piore's theory of immigration with a study of Mexican construction workers in two cities; Suzanne Berger highlights insights from Piore's work on technology and industrial development; Andrew Schrank takes up the theme of regulatory discretion; and Charles Sabel discusses theories of public bureaucracy.
This dissertation contributes to theoretical and empirical studies in microeconomics, with a focus on evaluating policy relevant problems to provide new insights into questions. Within labor economics, I strive to understand the labor market returns to skills, taking into consideration the business cycle. In the first chapter, I investigate how the labor market returns to cognitive skills and social skills vary during recessions. In the second chapter, I examine the short-, medium and long-term career outcomes of college graduates as a function of economic conditions at graduation and both cognitive and social skills. In the third chapter, within information economics, I study how asymmetric information and demand uncertainty influence pricing strategies through learning. In Chapter 1, I examine how labor market returns to cognitive skills and social skills vary with the business cycle over the past 20 years, using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Exploiting a comparable set of cognitive and social skill measures across survey waves, I show that an increase in the unemployment rate led to higher demand for cognitive skills in the 2000s. High unemployment also sorted more workers into information use intensive occupations that require computer skills in the 2000s, but it sorted more workers into routine occupations in the 1980s and 1990s. This evidence suggests that recessions accelerate the restructuring of production toward routine-biased technologies. I also find that the returns to social skills increase during periods of high unemployment, though only in terms of the likelihood of full-time employment for experienced workers. Furthermore, an increase in unemployment increases the social skill task intensity of a worker's occupation in the 2000s, while it shows the contrary in the 1980s and 1990s.
The distinguished contributors in this volume provide a variety of essays, which are written in honor of Emmanuel Drandakis. These essays fall into four uniform areas of economics: economic growth, general equilibrium, labor economics and game theory and applications. The editors focus on a select set of issues that stand high on the agenda of academic research. They provide fresh insights and approaches to the analysis of these issues, and thus open up wider avenues for our understanding of the dilemmas posed for theory and policy. Readers are offered new empirical evidence on such thorny social problems as, for example, unemployment, the intergenerational transmission of human capital and the response of wages to price and endowment changes.
This dissertation is composed of three essays examining problems of incomplete information in the context of environmental and labor economics. The first essay studies regulation of firms that engage in hazardous activities under uncertainty. A theoretical model is developed for three cases: manager's attitudes toward uncertainty are (1) risk averse, (2) risk loving, and (3) ambiguity averse. Ambiguity aversion is modeled using the smooth model of decision making. We show that uncertainty averse attitudes induce over-investment in precaution that reduces hazard. Our main result is in stark contrast to previous findings in which uncertainty causes firms to invest less in precaution. The second essay studies a job market signaling game between firms and three types of workers with heterogeneity in productivity and costs of working and acquiring education. Workers choose to enter the job market or not and if they enter whether to receive a productivity enhancing education or not. This is observed by the firm and acts as a signal to the firm but not the government. The government imposes a constant wage tax and rebates the revenue in lump sum transfers. We provide conditions on wages for ten possible sustainable equilibria that depend on productivity, costs, the tax rate, and transfers. The third essay extends the job market signaling game from chapter 2 between a representative firm and three types of workers with heterogeneity in productivity and costs of working and costs of acquiring education. Workers choose to enter the job market or not, and whether to receive a productivity enhancing education or not. Monopsonist firms choose wages to maximize profit. The government chooses linear taxes on wages and profits and rebates the revenue in lump sum transfers to maximize utilitarian social welfare function composed of the utility of the workers. Policy may offset the labor market power of the firm The optimal tax policy includes effective negative wage tax rates for workers and a positive profit tax rate which is facilitated through positive transfers to workers that includes a "basic income".