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We employ data that match the population of Danish workers to the universe of private-sector Danish firms, with product-level trade flows by origin-and destination-countries. We document new stylized facts about offshoring and instrument for offshoring and exporting. Within job spells, offshoring increases (decreases) the high-skilled (low-skilled) wage; exporting increases the wages of all skill-types; the net wage-effect of trade varies substantially within the same skill-type; conditional on skill, the wage-effect of offshoring varies across task characteristics. We estimate the overall effects of offshoring on workers' present and future income streams by constructing pre-offshoring-shock worker-cohorts and tracking them over time.

This paper analyzes the role of specialized high-skilled labor in the disproportionate growth of the service sector. Empirically, the importance of skill-intensive services has risen during a period of increasing relative wages and quantities of high-skilled labor. We develop a theory in which demand shifts toward more skill-intensive output as productivity rises, increasing the importance of market services relative to home production. Consistent with the data, the theory predicts a rising level of skill, skill premium, and relative price of services that is linked to this skill premium.

Confronted with high variety and low volume market demands, many companies, especially the Japanese electronics manufacturing companies, have reconfigured their conveyor assembly lines and adopted seru production systems. Seru production system is a new type of work-cell-based manufacturing system. A lot of successful practices and experience show that seru production system can gain considerable flexibility of job shop and high efficiency of conveyor assembly line. In implementing seru production, the multi-skilled worker is the most important precondition, and some issues about multi-skilled workers are central and foremost. In this paper, we investigate the training and assignment problem of workers when a conveyor assembly line is entirely reconfigured into several serus . We formulate a mathematical model with double objectives which aim to minimize the total training cost and to balance the total processing times among multi-skilled workers in each seru . To obtain the satisfied task-to-worker training plan and worker-to- seru assignment plan, a three-stage heuristic algorithm with nine steps is developed to solve this mathematical model. Then, several computational cases are taken and computed by MATLAB programming. The computation and analysis results validate the performances of the proposed mathematical model and heuristic algorithm.

We show that the migration of low-skilled, rural workers to urban centers has a negative causal effect on innovation of firms in such urban centers. Our tests exploit the staggered relaxation of city-level household registration system in China, which facilitates rural residents to migrate to cities. We find a significant decrease in innovation for firms headquartered in cities that have adopted such policies relative to firms headquartered in cities that have not. Overall, our results support the view that an abundant supply of low-skilled workers increases the benefit of using existing low-skilled technology and thus reduces firms' incentive to innovate.

Many low-income countries and development organizations are calling for greater liberalization of labor immigration policies in high-income countries. At the same time, human rights organizations and migrant rights advocates demand more equal rights for migrant workers. The Price of Rights shows why you cannot always have both. Examining labor immigration policies in over forty countries, as well as policy drivers in major migrant-receiving and migrant-sending states, Martin Ruhs finds that there are trade-offs in the policies of high-income countries between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. Insisting on greater equality of rights for migrant workers can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies, especially for lower-skilled workers. Ruhs advocates the liberalization of international labor migration through temporary migration programs that protect a universal set of core rights and account for the interests of nation-states by restricting a few specific rights that create net costs for receiving countries. The Price of Rights analyzes how high-income countries restrict the rights of migrant workers as part of their labor immigration policies and discusses the implications for global debates about regulating labor migration and protecting migrants. It comprehensively looks at the tensions between human rights and citizenship rights, the agency and interests of migrants and states, and the determinants and ethics of labor immigration policy.

The optimal allocation of multi‐skilled workers in labor‐intensive industries can improve production capacity and reduce production costs. In actual production, the efficiency of workers will change with time due to their proficiency, fatigue, and other effects. In this article, we attempt to solve the problem of multi‐skilled workers allocation in unit brake production lines considering the heterogeneity of skills and time‐varying effects. A nonlinear mixed‐integer programming model is established, which fully considers the impact of worker efficiency due to proficiency, fatigue, and multi‐task rest recovery. The product production cycle and worker cost are the two objectives of the optimization solution. An enhanced NSGA‐II algorithm that combines the improved NSGA‐II algorithm and the variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm is used to solve the multiobjective optimization problem. Finally, the weighted ideal point method is used to obtain the Pareto optimal solution. The application case of a unit brake production is considered to evaluate the proposed model. The results indicate that the time cost and salary cost of workers are reduced by 8.03% and 18.91% compared with the original scheduling. The scheduling model considering learning, fatigue and recovery factors is more suitable for the actual production situation, ensuring the completion time and reducing the labor cost. A nonlinear mixed‐integer programming model to address the challenge of allocating multi‐skilled workers in unit brake production lines while accounting for skill heterogeneity and time‐varying effects. The model incorporates a dynamic worker efficiency component that considers the impact of learning, fatigue, and recovery on worker performance over time.

The least-skilled workforce in the United States is disproportionally employed in the provision of time-intensive services that can be thought of as market substitutes for home production activities. At the same time, skilled workers, with their high opportunity cost of time, spend a larger fraction of their budget in these services. Given the skill asymmetry between consumers and providers in this market, product demand shifts—such as those arising when relative skilled wages increase—should boost relative labor demand for the least-skilled workforce. We estimate that this channel may explain one-third of the growth of employment of noncollege workers in low-skill services in the 1990s.

PurposeThe paper formulates a bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming model, aimed at minimizing the total labor hours and the workload unfairness for the multi-skilled worker assignment problem in Seru production system (SPS).Design/methodology/approachThree approaches, namely epsilon-constraint method, non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm 2 (NSGA-II) and improved strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2), are designed for solving the problem.FindingsNumerous experiments are performed to assess the applicability of the proposed model and evaluate the performance of algorithms. The merged Pareto-fronts obtained from both NSGA-II and SPEA2 were proposed as final solutions to provide useful information for decision-makers.Practical implicationsSPS has the flexibility to respond to the changing demand for small amount production of multiple varieties products. Assigning cross-trained workers to obtain flexibility has emerged as a major concern for the implementation of SPS. Most enterprises focus solely on measures of production efficiency, such as minimizing the total throughput time. Solutions based on optimizing efficiency measures alone can be unacceptable by workers who have high proficiency levels when they are achieved at the expense of the workers taking more workload. Therefore, study the tradeoff between production efficiency and fairness in the multi-skilled worker assignment problem is very important for SPS.Originality/valueThe study investigates a new mixed-integer programming model to optimize worker-to-seru assignment, batch-to-seru assignment and task-to-worker assignment in SPS. In order to solve the proposed problem, three problem-specific solution approaches are proposed.

In this paper, we analyse the effect of emigration from Poland on Polish wages. Focusing on the 1998-2007 period for Poland, we use a unique dataset that contains information about household members who are currently living abroad, which allows us to develop region-specific emigration rates and to estimate the effect of emigration on wages using within-region variation. Our findings show that emigration led to a slight increase in wages for high-and medium-skilled workers, which are the two groups with the largest relative outmigration rates. Workers at the low end of the skill distribution might have experienced wage decreases.

In the context of the digital economy and the decline in the demographic dividend, how have the rights of low- and medium-skilled workers changed? This study uses cross-sectional data from the China Household Income Project (CHIP) in 2002, 2007, 2008, and 2013, employing a two-way fixed effects model to answer the research question. The findings are as follows: First, the development of the digital economy has reduced the relative income rights of low- and medium-skilled workers but improved their relative welfare. Second, the efficiency gains and industrial intelligence resulting from the digital economy’s factor reorganization and reallocation have weakened the relative income rights of low- and medium-skilled workers, but they have enhanced their relative welfare through digital governance models. Third, the labor shortage effect due to the decline in the demographic dividend primarily affects low- and medium-skilled workers, particularly those with low skills, leading to a supply trap. Fourth, in the context of declining demographic dividends, the development of the digital economy has only diminished the rights of low-skilled workers. This suggests that the substitution effect of low-skilled labor caused by the digital economy far outweighs the labor shortage effect due to the decline in the demographic dividend, and the impact of individual endowments, macroeconomic conditions, and government governance levels on the rights of low-skilled workers varies significantly.