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Work Organization and High-Paying Jobs
Get PDFHigh-paying factory jobs in the 1940s were an engine of egalitarian economic growth for a generation. Are there alternate forms of work organization that deliver similar benefits for frontline workers? Work organization varies by type of complexity and degree of employer control. Technical and tacit knowledge tasks receive higher pay for signaling or developing human capital. Higher-autonomy tasks elicit efficiency wages. To test these ideas, we match administrative earnings to task descriptions from job postings. We then compare earnings for workers hired into the same occupation and firm, but under different task allocations. When jobs raise task complexity and autonomy, new hires’ starting earnings increase and grow faster. However, while half of the earnings boost from complex, technical tasks is due to shifting worker selection, worker selection changes less for tacit knowledge tasks and very little for adding high-autonomy tasks. We also study which employers provide these jobs: frontline tacit knowledge tasks are disproportionately in larger, profitable manufacturing and retail firms; technical tasks are in newer health and business services; and higher-autonomy jobs are in smaller and fast-growing firms. These results demonstrate how organization-level allocations of tasks can undergird high-paying jobs for frontline workers
Employment Following a Criminal Record
No full textSubstantial research suggests that lowering the barriers to employment following a criminal record could help break the reincarceration cycle (Visher, Winterfield, and Coggeshall 2005; Kolbeck, Bellair, and Lopez 2022). The State of Ohio introduced a certification program titled Certificates of Qualification for Employment (CQE) in 2012 as a tool to signal rehabilitative status. Although such certification programs exist in 16 states, much less is known about their rehabilitative effects. By leveraging individual-level CQE petition records, we implement a judge-IV estimation strategy to uncover the causal effect of obtaining a CQE on subsequent crime
The Tale of the Two New Asian Tigers: Comparative Development of Selected Provinces of China and India since 1980
Get PDFPlace Distress and Job Growth: Are Recent Job Growth Trends Significantly More Favorable for Distressed Counties?
Get PDFThis paper examines whether recent job growth trends have become more favorable toward counties with greater baseline economic distress. Job growth trends are “competitive job growth,” which is defined as growth that exceeds what would be expected based on how a county’s industries are growing nationally. Baseline county distress is measured by the county’s “prime-age employment rate,” the employment to population ratio for 25–54-year-olds. The core findings are fourfold. First, for the most distressed counties, job growth trends have become more favorable since 2019, compared to the 2001–2007 and 2007–2019 periods. The timing of this recent improvement is consistent with a possible influence of recent federal policies. Second, for the least distressed counties, job growth trends have become less favorable in post-2019 growth and 2007–2019 growth compared to the 2001–2007 period. The timing suggests these trends are probably due not to recent federal policies but rather to other economic forces such as rising costs in some less distressed counties. Third, similar trends are also evident for industry groups such as manufacturing and high-tech, again industries which recently have been targeted by federal policies. Fourth, these recent trends toward greater job growth in more distressed counties are modest in size, in the sense that they are insufficient to significantly lower employment rate gaps between more distressed counties and the national average
