The paper looks at the dynamics of employment in South Africa and examines the factors that contributed to the job-shedding observed during the recent financial crisis. The paper finds that the rapid growth of the real wage, which outpaced the labor productivity growth in most sectors, played an important role in suppressing employment creation. The paper also finds that while there is a co-int...

Recent theoretical models show that international trade can induce within-industry skillupgrading by raising R&D intensity and creating skill-biased technologies. This paper tests this assertion by estimating the effect of rising import shares on wage shares for 4-digit SIC US manufacturing industries. Using Arellano-Bond estimation to account for the endogeneity of imports, I find that neither...

Why Does Unemployment Hurt the Employed? Evidence from the Life Satisfaction Gap between the Public and Private Sectors Simon Luechinger, Stephan Meier, and Alois Stutzer Abstract: High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well‐being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular, job securit...

Self-Esteem and Earnings Recent research in economics suggests a positive association between self-esteem and earnings. A major problem in this literature is that from simple cross-sectional wage regressions it is not possible to conclude that self-esteem has a causal impact on earnings. While classical measurement error leads to an attenuation bias, reverse causality and omitted variable are l...

We analyze a model of wage payment practices in which strategic complementarities arise because each employer’s costs of delaying wages decrease with the arrears in its labor market. The model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification through fixed effects for employees, employers, and local labor markets, and instrumental variables based on policy ...

The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data We use unique Swedish data to estimate intergenerational associations between adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-b...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations on unemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricter enforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higher unemployment, less income inequality, a higher proportion of formal employment, and a lower formal wage premium. Our results are co...

This paper investigates the UK wage curve using longitudinal micro data drawn from the first eight waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). We estimate a fixed-effects model that controls for observed and unobserved individual-specific heterogeneity. Our results suggest that there is evidence of a negative relationship in wage-unemployment space. The estimated unemployment elasticity...

Using data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies, this study investigates the association between commute time and subjective well-being in a sample of 16to 65-year-old employees in urban China. We find evidence that a longer commute time is associated with lower levels of both life satisfaction and happiness, especially when the commute times are extreme (≥ 1 hour per day). A multiple media...

There is a signifi cantly higher prevalence of multigenerational living arrangements among migrants than among natives in Germany which may be explained with migrants choosing this household structure in order to compensate for economic disadvantages. This hypothesis is tested by analyzing the economic conditions within multigenerational households. The results show that in multigenerational mi...