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Workforce and Demographic Profile of Berrien, Cass, and Van Buren Counties
Get PDFThe Whirlpool Corporation, located in Benton Harbor Charter Township, asked the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research to develop a dashboard of indicators portraying the current and future (where possible) “economic” health of the region
Estimated Cost of Tuition-Free College in Illinois
Get PDFThis memo estimates the cost of two possible program designs for a statewide college scholarship program for the State of Illinois. These assumptions and associated cost estimates, once approved or revised, will form the basis for the next stage of this project, which is assessing the economic impact of tuition-free college in Illinois
The Future of Work, Entrepreneurship, and Access to Opportunity
No full textPanelists discuss how technology is changing the nature of work and entrepreneurship
A Model of Occupational Licensing and Statistical Discrimination
Get PDFWe develop a model of statistical discrimination in occupational licensing. In the model, there is endogenous occupation selection and wage determination that depends on how costly it is to obtain the license and the productivity of the human capital that is bundled with the license. Under these assumptions, we find a unique equilibrium with sharp comparative statics for the licensing premiums. The key theoretical result in this paper is that the licensing premium is higher for workers who are members of demographic groups that face a higher cost of licensing. The intuition for this result is that the higher cost of licensing makes the license a more informative labor market signal. (This is a similar insight to Spence 1973). The predictions of the model can explain, for example, the empirical finding in the literature that occupational licenses that preclude felons close the racial wage gap among men by conferring a higher premium to black men than to white men (Blair and Chung 2018). Moreover, we show that in general the optimal cost of licensing is nonzero: an infinitely costly licenses screens out all workers, while a costless license is no screen at all
Wage Posting or Wage Bargaining? A Test Using Dual Jobholders
No full textThis paper examines the behavior of dual jobholders to test a simple model of wage bargaining and wage posting. We estimate the sensitivity of wages and separation rates to wage shocks in a worker’s secondary job to assess the degree of bargaining versus wage posting in the labor market. We interpret the evidence within a model where workers facing hours constraints in their primary job may take a second, flexible-hours job for additional income. When a secondary job offers a sufficiently high wage, a worker either bargains with the primary employer for a wage increase or separates. The model provides a number of predictions that we test using matched employer-employee administrative data from Washington State. In the aggregate, wage bargaining appears to be a limited determinant of wage setting. The estimated wage response to improved outside options, which we interpret as bargaining, is precisely estimated, but qualitatively small. Wage posting appears to be more important than bargaining for wage determination overall, and especially in lower parts of the wage distribution. Observed wage bargaining takes place mainly among workers in the highest wage quartile. For this group, improved outside options translate to higher wages, but not higher separation rates. In contrast, for workers in the lowest wage quartile, wage increases in the secondary job lead to higher separation rates but no significant wage increase in the primary job, consistent with wage posting. We also find evidence in support of the hours-constraint model for dual jobholding. In particular, work hours in the primary job do not respond to wages in the secondary job, but hours and separations in the secondary job are sensitive to wages in the primary job due to income effects