Upjohn Research
Not a member yet
3819 research outputs found
Sort by
The Labor Supply Curve Is Upward Sloping: The Effects of Immigrant-Induced Demand Shocks
Get PDFWhat is the effect of immigration on native labor-market outcomes? An extensive literature identifies the differential impact of immigration on natives employed in jobs that are more exposed to immigrant labor (supply exposure). But immigrants consume in addition to producing output. Despite this, no literature identifies the impact on natives employed in jobs that are more exposed to immigrant consumption (demand exposure). We study native labor market effects of supply and demand exposures to immigration. Theoretically, we formalize both measures of exposure and solve for their effects on native wages. Empirically, we combine employer-employee data with a newly collected data set covering electronic payments for the universe of residents in Norway to measure supply and demand exposures of all native workers to immigration induced by EU expansions in 2004 and 2007. We find large, positive, and persistent effects of demand exposure to EU expansion on native worker income
Abundance Strategies Should Promote Abundant Jobs in Distressed Places
No full textA prominent recent policy debate is about “abundance policies”: policies to make it easier to build housing or infrastructure, deliver government services more quickly and more efficiently, and expedite the public funding of the most innovative and socially impactful research. In this essay, I argue that abundance advocates often mistakenly ignore or have a negative attitude toward “place-based policies.” These place-based policies would seek to increase employment rates, particularly in good jobs, in two types of distressed places that lack abundant job opportunities: distressed local labor markets and distressed neighborhoods. Both the goals and means of place-based policies fit into the abundance paradigm, which prioritizes economic growth and embracing new things. The goals of place-based policies are to expand the overall economic “pie” in the United States by extending better job opportunities to people who reside in places that currently lack such opportunities. The means of place-based policies requires embracing new industries and new types of jobs in distressed places. This essay gives some specific examples of place-based policies that can improve job opportunities for people in distressed places. These problems in distressed places are not addressed by the usually-emphasized “abundance policies,” such as building more housing in booming places. But including place-based policies in the “abundance perspective” requires acknowledging that most people do have strong ties to the familiar people, landscapes, and institutions of their home place. The ties to the familiar have some tension with the abundance perspective of embracing change. The challenge of place-based policies that build abundance is to preserve what is valuable in a place while sufficiently embracing the new such that the place can renew its competitiveness. But abundance advocates must recognize the abundance that people want includes availability of good jobs where they already live and in communities that they value
Migration and U.S. Labor Market Effects of the Mexican Drug War
No full textWe estimate the effect of the Mexican drug war on Mexico-to-U.S. migration and the resulting effects on population, employment, and wages in U.S. labor markets. Our empirical strategy compares U.S. counties differentially connected to Mexican municipalities through historical migration networks, using drug violence triggered by close municipal elections in 2007–2008 as a source of exogenous variation. Over the following decade, migrants fleeing the violence—the vast majority of whom are undocumented—cause native-born U.S. workers’ employment rates to increase and unemployment rates to fall, while wages do not change. Employment gains are largest for natives without a college degree. Employment effects fade after a decade
Beyond Unemployment: An Investigation of Social Policies to Empower Workers in a Changing World of Work
No full textThis dissertation analyzes social policies aimed at supporting unemployed workers, scrutinizing consequences of such policies on facilitating access to training, employment, and in improving wages, health, and well-being amidst a changing world of work. Central to the research are two field experiments at scale (chapters 2 and 3), designed in collaboration with implementation partners, uniquely leveraging high-quality administrative records and extensive survey data collected over three years. Chapter two tests the idea of guaranteed employment in a natural context by carefully evaluating a job guarantee scheme, which highlights the psychosocial value of employment. Social programs of this kind often suffer from incomplete take-up, which is investigated in the third chapter. It demonstrates that low-cost interventions can meaningfully decrease non-participation in job training by reducing associated social stigma. Both evaluations are based on combinations of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to separate out direct effects, anticipation effects, and spillover effects, and to understand underlying mechanisms. The field experiments are implemented at scale in a natural context in Austria and involve a e7.4 million expensive program for the second chapter and an intervention involving over 10,000 job seekers for the third chapter. The fourth chapter takes a step further to examine the consequences of temporary jobs, which often constitute job seekers’ only option for re-employment. The analysis explores the implications of temporary employment on workers’ wages and scrutinizes the interplay with labor market institutions across 30 high-income countries, revealing negative spillover effect on permanent workers’ wages. The fifth chapter goes full circle by uncovering unemployed workers’ preferences between guaranteed employment and guaranteed income, revealing a strong correlation in support for both concepts with higher support for guaranteed employment. The dissertation is further complemented with a comparative viewpoint published in several complimentary papers and founded on the Oxford Supertracker—a global directory of policy trackers and surveys to document responses to the Covid-19 pandemic across different areas, countries, and data types. At the methodological level, the dissertation propels the empirical turn in social research by widening access to novel data sources and enhancing the application of empirical methods for causal and comparative social policy analysis. At the substantive level, the dissertation contributes by creating robust evidence on innovative social policy ideas to foster a comprehensive understanding of social policies devised for unemployed workers in a changing world of work
Internal and External Job Ladders in the U.S. Labor Market
No full textA fundamental characteristic of the U.S. labor market over the last four decades has been the dual aging of workers and firms. In 1987, the percentage of workers younger than 24 years and firms younger than five years was 18 and 22 percent, respectively. By 2017, these percentages had nearly halved. Over the same period, the percentage of workers older than 55 years and firms older than 11 years nearly doubled.
The aging of workers and firms has had far-reaching implications, shaping the secular trends observed in various labor market outcomes over this period. These include declines in measures of firm turnover, such as firm entry and exit rates, as well as job creation and destruction rates (Karahan, Pugsley & Sahin 2022, Engbom 2019). As older firms grew larger and increasingly dominated local labor markets, their market power expanded (Peters & Walsh 2021, Hopenhayn, Neira & Singhania 2022). Moreover, as older and larger firms became more stable in terms of size, worker separation and unemployment rates exhibited a declining trend (Crump, Eusepi, Giannoni & Sahin 2019).
Another important trend observed during this period was a decline in the frequency of worker reallocations across employers, captured by Employer-to-Employer (EE) transitions. Between 1985 and 2017, EE transitions fell by nearly 20 percent, attracting significant attention in research and policy regarding their origins and consequences. Since workers typically experience increases in pay, productivity, or amenities when switching jobs across employers, these transitions are commonly associated with upward mobility on the job ladder. Their decline—referred to as the decline in worker reallocation or dynamism—has raised concerns about the decreasing flexibility of US labor markets