Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'labor'
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Viewing papers 161 through 170 of 254
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Working PaperThe Closure Effect: Evidence from Workers Compensation Litigation
January 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-01
Consideration of the "best interests" of Workers Compensation (WC) claimants often involves the assumption that those who receive benefits in a "lump-sum" behave "too myopically" with respect to labor supply. However, many attorneys argue that lump-sum settlements induce a beneficial "sense of closure." In this paper, I provide an empirical context for these ideas using a unique set of linked administrative databases owned by the State of California. Upon receipt of a court-approved lump-sum settlement, WC claimants immediately increase labor supply. No such change is found for claimants who receive a court-approved settlement in which the insurer provides benefits over time, suggesting that the method of litigation settlement is a determinant of labor supply.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperA Formal Test of Assortative Matching in the Labor Market
November 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-40
We estimate a structural model of job assignment in the presence of coordination frictions due to Shimer (2005). The coordination friction model places restrictions on the joint distribution of worker and firm effects from a linear decomposition of log labor earnings. These restrictions permit estimation of the unobservable ability and productivity differences between workers and their employers as well as the way workers sort into jobs on the basis of these unobservable factors. The estimation is performed on matched employer-employee data from the LEHD program of the U.S. Census Bureau. The estimated correlation between worker and firm effects from the earnings decomposition is close to zero, a finding that is often interpreted as evidence that there is no sorting by comparative advantage in the labor market. Our estimates suggest that his finding actually results from a lack of sufficient heterogeneity in the workforce and available jobs. Workers do sort into jobs on the basis of productive differences, but the effects of sorting are not visible because of the composition of workers and employers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Effect of Wage Insurance on Labor Supply: A Test for Income Effects
October 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-37
Studies of moral hazard in wage insurance programs such as Unemployment Insurance (UI) or Workers Compensation (WC) have demonstrated that higher benefits discourage work, emphasizing the price distortion inherent in benefit provision. Utilizing administrative data linking WC claim records to wage records from a UI payroll tax database, I find that the effect of WC benefits on the duration of benefit receipt cannot fully account for the effect of these benefits on post-injury unemployment. This indicates that a significant fraction of the effect of WC benefits on employment is due to an income effect rather than a price distortion.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperHealth Insurance and Productivity: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-27
This paper examines the relationship between employer-sponsored offers of health insurance and establishments' labor productivity. Our empirical work is based on unique plant level data that links the 1997 and 2002 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component with the 1992, 1997, and 2002 Census of Manufactures. These linked data provide information on employer-provided insurance and productivity. We find that health insurance offers are positively associated with levels of establishments' labor productivity. These findings hold for all manufacturers as well as those with fewer than 100 employees. Our preliminary results also show a drop in health care costs from the 75th to the 25th percentile would increase the probability of a plant offering insurance by 1.5-2.0 percent in both 1997 and 2002. The results from this paper provide encouraging and new empirical evidence on the benefits employers may reap by offering health insurance to workers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEarnings Inequality and Coordination Costs: Evidence from U.S. Law Firms
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-24
Earnings inequality has increased substantially since the 1970s. Using evidence from confidential Census data on U.S. law offices on lawyers' organization and earnings, we study the extent to which the mechanism suggested by Lucas (1978) and Rosen (1982), a scale of operations effect linking spans of control and earnings inequality, is responsible for increases in inequality. We first show that earnings inequality among lawyers increased substantially between 1977 and 1992, and that the distribution of partner-associate ratios across offices changed in ways consistent with the hypothesis that coordination costs fell during this period. We then propose a 'hierarchical production function' in which output is the product of skill and time and estimate its parameters, applying insights from the equilibrium assignment literature. We find that coordination costs fell broadly and steadily during this period, so that hiring one's first associate leveraged a partner's skill by about 30% more in 1992 than 1977. We find also that changes in lawyers' hierarchical organization account for about 2/3 of the increase in earnings inequality among lawyers in the upper tail, but a much smaller share of the increase in inequality between lawyers in the upper tail and other lawyers. These findings indicate that new organizational efficiencies potentially explain increases in inequality, especially among individuals toward the top of the earnings distribution.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTesting for Factor Price Equality in the Presence of Unobserved Factor Quality Diferences
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-22
We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality across regions that is valid under general assumptions about production, markets and factors. Application of this method to the United States reveals substantial and increasing deviations in relative skilled wages across labor markets in both 1972 and 1992. These deviations vary systematically with labor markets .industry structure both in the cross section and over time.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUnderstanding Earnings Instability: How Important are Employment Fluctuations and Job Changes?
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-20
Using three panel datasets (the matched CPS, the SIPP, and the newly available Longitudinal Employment and Household Dynamics (LEHD) data), we examine trends in male earnings instability in recent decades. In contrast to several papers that find a recent upward trend in earnings instability using the PSID data, we find that earnings instability has been remarkably stable in the 1990s and the 2000s. We find that job changing rates remained relatively constant casting doubt on the importance of labor market 'churning.' We find some evidence that earnings instability increased among job stayers which lends credence to the view that greater reliance on incentive pay increased instability of worker pay. We also find an offsetting decrease in earnings instability among job changers due largely to declining unemployment associated with job changes. One caveat to our findings is that we focus on men who have positive earnings in two adjacent years and thus ignore men who exit the labor force or re-enter after an extended period. Preliminary investigation suggests that ignoring these transitions understates the rise in earnings instability over the past two decades.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Micro-Dynamics of Skill Mix Changes in a Dual Labor Market: The Spanish Manufacturing Experience
May 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-12
As in many other developed countries, the share of skilled workers in Spain's labor force dramatically increased during the 1990s. This paper decomposes the aggregate skill mix change by a set of key firm characteristics and in the context of Spain's dual labor market. We find that continuing firms were the major drivers of skill mix growth and that expanding firms in particular increased their ratio of skilled workers. Net entry played a smaller but positive role due to higher-skilled entrants and lower-skilled exiters. Finally, we find that although firms with higher concentrations of temporary workers make bigger employment changes overall, firms' low-skilled employment is more strongly pro-cyclical than is high skilled employment.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperExploring Differences in Employment between Household and Establishment Data
April 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-09
Using a large data set that links individual Current Population Survey (CPS) records to employer-reported administrative data, we document substantial discrepancies in basic measures of employment status that persist even after controlling for known definitional differences between the two data sources. We hypothesize that reporting discrepancies should be most prevalent for marginal workers and marginal jobs, and find systematic associations between the incidence of reporting discrepancies and observable person and job characteristics that are consistent with this hypothesis. The paper discusses the implications of the reported findings for both micro and macro labor market analysisView Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEmployer Health Benefit Costs and Demand for Part-Time Labor
April 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-08
The link between rising employer costs for health insurance benefits and demand for part-time workers is investigated using non-public data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey- Insurance Component (MEPS-IC). The MEPS-IC is a nationally representative, annual establishment survey from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Pooling the establishment level data from the MEPS-IC from 1996-2004 and matching with the Longitudinal Business Database and supplemental economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a reduced form model of the percent of total FTE employees working part-time is estimated. This is modeled as a function of the employer health insurance contribution, establishment characteristics, and state-level economic indicators. To account for potential endogeneity, health insurance expenditures are estimated using instrumental variables (IVs). The unit of analysis is establishments that offer health insurance to full-time employees but not part time employees. Conditional on establishments offering health insurance to full-time employees, a 1 percent increase in employer health insurance contributions results in a 3.7 percent increase in part-time employees working at establishments in the U.S.View Full Paper PDF
