Explore the vast range of titles available.

Poor people derive most of their income from work; however, there is insufficient understanding of the role of employment and earnings as a linkage between growth and poverty reduction, especially in low income countries. With the objective of providing inputs into the policy discussion on how to enhance poverty reduction through increased employment and earnings for given growth levels, this study explores this linkage in the case of Madagascar using data from the national accounts and household surveys from the years 1999, 2001, and 2005, a period characterized among others by a short but severe crisis which started at the end of 2001 and the subsequent economic rebound. This report is part of a series of studies conducted in the context of the World Bank’s research framework aiming to improve the understanding of the linkages among growth, labor, and poverty reduction.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a system to enhance the quality of vocational training programs in Kuwait state by using the concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD). Approach: The approach starts by investigating the private sector of the labor market. The interviewing of a sample group of the private sector companies was done to know their expectation of the performance of vocational training outcomes. Then, QFD was applied to find the technical requirements, which will help in satisfying the market's expectations to design a new program that leads to enhancement of the quality of the outcome of the Vocational Training. The house of quality technique allows prioritizing the technical descriptors based on the technical difficulty, target value, absolute weight, and relative weight. Findings: The first priority that found from applying the QFD is the parameter \"Practice to Be Willing in Learning- Applying New Technologies\" because of its highest relative weight 195 points followed by the parameter \"Understanding The Need to Learn New Skills\" which has a relative weight of 165 points. The second priority is the parameter \"Simulation Activities\" because it has a relative weight of 152 points followed by the parameter \"Managing Tasks and Meeting Deadlines\" which has a relative weight of 146 points. The third priority is the parameter \"Using IT Skills to Complete Activities\" because of it has a relative weight is 132 points followed by the parameter \"Time Management Activities\" which has a relative weight is 112 points. Research limitation: The research limitation is in the changing of the current curriculum program. Practical implications: The practical implication is to modify the students' vocational training curriculum, by adapting new technologies and application sequences of activities and solution strategies within the time limit. Value: The value of this paper is to explain how a studying curriculum can be modified in order to satisfy the market requirements.

What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model of perfect competition.Monopsony in Motionstands apart by analyzing labor markets from the real-world perspective that employers have significant market (or monopsony) power over their workers. Arguing that this power derives from frictions in the labor market that make it time-consuming and costly for workers to change jobs, Manning re-examines much of labor economics based on this alternative and equally plausible assumption. The book addresses the theoretical implications of monopsony and presents a wealth of empirical evidence. Our understanding of the distribution of wages, unemployment, and human capital can all be improved by recognizing that employers have some monopsony power over their workers. Also considered are policy issues including the minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and caps on working hours. In a monopsonistic labor market, concludes Manning, the \"free\" market can no longer be sustained as an ideal and labor economists need to be more open-minded in their evaluation of labor market policies.Monopsony in Motionwill represent for some a new fundamental text in the advanced study of labor economics, and for others, an invaluable alternative perspective that henceforth must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the subject.

We assess the empirical content of equilibrium models of labor market sorting based on unobserved (to economists) characteristics. In particular, we show theoretically that all parameters of the classic model of sorting based on absolute advantage in Becker (1973) with search frictions can be nonparametrically identified using only matched employer-employee data on wages and labor market transitions. In particular, these data are sufficient to nonparametrically estimate the output of any individual worker with any given firm. Our identification proof is constructive and we provide computational algorithms that implement our identification strategy given the limitations of the available data sets. Finally, we add on-the-job search to the model, extend the identification strategy, and apply it to a large German matched employer-employee data set to describe detailed patterns of sorting and properties of the production function.

Duality in microeconomic theory refers to the description of the same economic phenomenon by different sets of variables: quantities and prices. It relies on the price-taking behavior of economic agents. This paper takes the challenge of delivering a comprehensive analysis of monopsony in the labor market from a duality perspective. The standard monopsonist's short-run normalized profit maximization model is enriched by the introduction of the non-wage determinant of the labor supply which takes the role of the price of the newly introduced pseudo labor. The pseudo production and pseudo cost functions are identified as dual functions of the short-run normalized profit function of monopsonist for the given labor supply function. Duality as a way of thinking enables an elegant derivation of a version of Hotelling’s lemma in the monopsony case. Finally, comparative statistics reveal interesting economic relations, important for the empirical investigation.

Consistent with two models of imperfect competition in the labor market—the efficient bargaining model and the monopsony model—we provide two extensions of a microeconomic version of Hall's framework for estimating price-cost margins. We show that both product and labor market imperfections generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue, which can be characterized by a 'joint market imperfections parameter'. Using an unbalanced panel of 10,646 French firms in 38 manufacturing industries over the period 1978—2001, we can classify these industries into six different regimes depending on the type of competition in the product and the labor market. By far the most predominant regime is one of imperfect competition in the product market and efficient bargaining in the labor market (IC-EB), followed by a regime of imperfect competition in the product market and perfect competition or right-to-manage bargaining in the labor market (IC-PR), and by a regime of perfect competition in the product market and monopsony in the labor market (PC-MO). For each of these three predominant regimes, we assess within-regime firm differences in the estimated average price-cost mark-up and rent sharing or labor supply elasticity parameters, following the Swamy methodology to determine the degree of true firm dispersion. To assess the plausibility of our findings in the case of the dominant regime (IC-EB), we also relate our industry and firm-level estimates of price-cost mark-up and extent of rent sharing to industry characteristics and firm-specific variables respectively.

In the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) became of great importance for a large share of employees since it represents the only option to both continue working and minimise the risk of virus exposure. Uncertainty about the duration of the pandemic and future contagion waves even led companies to view WFH as a ‘new normal’ way of working. Based on influence function regression methods, this paper explores the potential consequences in the labour income distribution related to a long-lasting increase in WFH feasibility among Italian employees. Results show that a positive shift in WFH feasibility would be associated with an increase in average labour income, but this potential benefit would not be equally distributed among employees. Specifically, an increase in the opportunity to WFH would favour male, older, high-educated, and high-paid employees. However, this ‘forced innovation’ would benefit more employees living in provinces have been more affected by the novel coronavirus. WFH thus risks exacerbating pre-existing inequalities in the labour market, especially if it will not be adequately regulated. As a consequence, this study suggests that policies aimed at alleviating inequality, like income support measures (in the short run) and human capital interventions (in the long run), should play a more important compensating role in the future.

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of life expectancy for optimal schooling and lifetime labor supply. The results of a simple prototype Ben-Porath model with age-specific survival rates show that an increase in lifetime labor supply is not a necessary, or a sufficient, condition for greater life expectancy to increase optimal schooling. The observed increase in survival rates during working ages that follows from the \"rectangularization\" of the survival function is crucial for schooling and labor supply. The empirical results suggest that the relative benefits of schooling have been increasing across cohorts of U.S. men born between 1840 and 1930. A simple quantitative analysis shows that a realistic shift in the survival function can lead to an increase in schooling and a reduction in lifetime labor hours.

We estimate an aggregate matching function and find that the regression residual, which captures movements in matching efficiency, displays procyclical fluctuations and a dramatic decline after 2007. Using a matching function framework that explicitly takes into account worker heterogeneity as well as market segmentation, we show that matching efficiency movements can be the result of variations in the degree of heterogeneity in the labor market. Matching efficiency declines substantially when, as in the Great Recession, the average characteristics of the unemployed deteriorate substantially, or when dispersion in labor market conditions—the extent to which some labor markets fare worse than others—increases markedly.

There is considerable academic and policy interest in how immigrants fare in the labour market of their host economy. This research is situated within these debates and explores the nexus between migrant labour and segmented labour markets. Specifically the analysis focuses on East-Central Europeans in Britain: a sizeable cohort of largely economic and recent migrants. A large quantity of interviews with low-wage employers and recruiters is used to examine the role served by East-Central European migrant labour in the UK labour market, to question whether this function is distinct from conventional understandings of the function of migrant labour and to explore how employer practices and other processes ‘produce’ these employment relations. Based on the findings from this approach, an argument is developed which contends that the ready availability of a well perceived cohort of migrant labour has sustained and extended flexible labour market structures towards the bottom end of the labour market.