Explore the vast range of titles available.

Improving performance and safety conditions in industrial sites remains a key objective for most companies. Currently, the main goal is to be able to dynamically locate both people and goods on the site. Security and access regulation to restricted areas are often ensured by doors or badge barriers and those have several issues when faced with people being in places they are not supposed to be in or even tools of objects being used incorrectly. In addition to this, a growing use of new devices requires precise information about their location in the environment such as mobile robots or drones. Therefore, it is becoming essential to have the tools to dynamically manage these flows of people and goods. Ultra-wide-band and motion capture solutions will be used to quickly identify people who may be in unauthorized areas or performing tasks which they have been uninstructed to do. In addition to the dynamic tracking of people, this also overcomes some issues associated with moving objects or tools around the production floor. We offer a new set of data that provides precise information on worker movement. This dataset can be used to develop new metrics regarding worker efficiency and safety.

This paper integrates the classic theory of firm boundaries, through span of control or taste for variety, into a model of the labor market with random matching and onthe-job search. Firms choose when to enter and exit, whether to create vacancies or destroy jobs in response to shocks, and Bertrand-compete to hire and retain workers. Tractability is obtained by proving that, under a parsimonious set of assumptions, all worker and firm decisions are characterized by their joint surplus, which in turn only depends on firm productivity and size. The job ladder in marginal surplus that emerges in equilibrium determines net poaching patterns by firm characteristics that are in line with the data. As frictions vanish, the model converges to a standard competitive model of firm dynamics. The combination of firm dynamics and search frictions allows the model to: (i) quantify the misallocation cost of frictions; (ii) replicate elusive life-cycle growth profiles of superstar firms; and (iii) make sense of the failure of the job ladder around the Great Recession as a result of the collapse of firm entry.

Serbia has become one of the largest remittance-recipient countries in the world. It is estimated that in 2004 Serbia received US2.4 billion dollars in remittances from Serbian workers in Germany, the United States, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and other countries. This amount represented 12 percent of Serbia’s GDP. This report provides an overview of remittance flows from Germany to Serbia and analyzes why a large part of remittance transfers take place outside financial institutions. The study presents a series of recommendations on needed policy changes to facilitate the transfer of remittance flows from the informal channels to licensed or registered financial institutions, thereby maximizing the developmental impact of remittances, reducing remittances fees, improving data collection practices, and strengthening the regulation and supervision of themoney transfer industry.

This paper analyses the impact of the business cycle on labour market dynamics in EU member states and the US during the first decade of the 21st century. Using unique measures of labour market flows constructed from worker-level micro data, we examine to what extent macro shocks were transmitted to national labour markets. We apply the approach by Blanchard and Wolfers (Econ J 110(462):1–33, 2000) to analyse the role of the interaction of macroeconomic shocks and labour market institutions for worker transitions in order to explain cross-country differences in labour market reactions in a period including the Great Recession. Our results suggest a significant influence of trade unions in channelling macroeconomic shocks. Specifically, union density moderates these impacts over the business cycle, i.e. countries with stronger trade unions experience weaker reactions of the unemployment rate and of worker transitions.

Discrimination based on gender is commonly observed on labor markets, although its scale and symptoms are different with regard to country and are subject to changes over time. Gender-related diverse flows on the labor market constitute one of its symptoms. The paper’s main objective was to answer the question whether women on the labor market were still secondary workers. The analysis was conducted based on general models of flows on the labour market, examining connections between changes in a number of unemployed and changes in a number of employed men and women. There were applied data for eight OECD countries from various regions of the world. The obtained results were highly diversified depending on the analysis period and country. However, they confirmed that in the past women had been more secondary workers despite no differences in the unemployment rate. Gender impact was noticeable especially in the employment decrease periods. For data after the year 1990, gender-related differences disappeared or significantly decreased in four countries (Australia, Denmark, United Kingdom, United States), but in two of them (Canada, South Korea) – differences increased. First published online 29 October 2020

This paper provides a critical review of the recent empirical evidence on the links between regulations affecting the hiring and firing of workers, labour reallocation and productivity growth. It also reviews how workers affected by labour mobility fare and discusses policy options to support them. The upshot is that stringent employment protection has a sizeable negative effect on labour market flows and, through this channel, hinders productivity growth. At the same time, the evidence also shows that while greater labour market reallocation benefits many workers through higher real wages and better careers, some displaced workers lose out via longer unemployment durations and/or lower real wages in post-displacement jobs. In this context, reforms of employment protection should be considered as part of a comprehensive package that also includes an adequate safety net for the unemployed and effective re-employment services.

We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer (E-to-E) flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of E-to-E flows is high, representing approximately 4% of employment and 30% of separations each quarter. The pace of E-to-E flows appears to be highly procyclical and varies systematically across worker, job, and employer characteristics. There are rich patterns in terms of origin and destination of industries. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that more than half of the workers making E-to-E transitions switch even broadly defined industries (i.e., NAICS supersectors).

We present empirical evidence that large structural shocks are followed by changes in labor market inequality. Specifically, we study short-run fluctuations in adjusted gender wage gaps (unequal pay for equal work) following episodes of structural shocks in the labor markets, using several decades of individual data for a wide selection of transition countries. We find that for cohorts who entered the labor market after the onset of transition. Labor market shocks lead to significant declines in the gender wage gap. This decrease is driven mostly by episodes experienced among cohorts who enter the labor market during the transition. By contrast, we fail to find any significant relation for cohorts already active in the labor market at the time of transition. We provide plausible explanations based on sociological and economic theories of inequality.

We examine the role of unemployment inflows and outflows in contributing to unemployment cyclicality in Czechia and Poland, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, and a three-state model of unemployment variance decomposition. We find that the labour market fluidity is higher in Poland than in Czechia, with Polish workers moving in and out of unemployment more frequently than their Czech counterparts. For both countries, the upward unemployment dynamics was during 2008-2011 driven by counter-cyclical increases in the job-separation rate, rather than by pro-cyclical declines in the job-finding rate. The inflow-outflow split was nonetheless more balanced in Czechia. The two economies further diverged across 2015-2018: Czech unemployment declined prevailingly due to diminishing job separations, while in Poland it was mostly due to improving job-finding prospects. This signals a deeper insider-outsider fragmentation of the Czech labour market, even during the period of economic expansion.

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the log-risk-ratio of exiting to entering unemployment of 0.65-0.68 across the advanced and skill-abundant countries in the sample. The relation is remarkably robust and it is unlikely to be due to reverse causality. I do not find evidence that this positive relation extends to the seven relatively less advanced and less skill-abundant countries in the sample: Peru, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mexico, Chile, Turkey and Kazakhstan.