Job lock
Power Gets the Job: Priming Power Improves Interview Outcomes
Joris Lammers et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research explores whether momentary changes in power can shift professional interview outcomes. Two experiments manipulated power by asking applicants to recall a time they had or lacked power prior to writing a job application letter (Experiment 1) or being interviewed for admission to business schools (Experiment 2). Independent judges, who were unaware of the applicants' experimental condition or even the existence of the power manipulation, significantly preferred the written and face-to-face interview performance of powerful applicants to that of powerless (Experiments 1 and 2) or power-neutral applicants (Experiment 2). In addition, the judges' preference for power-primed applicants was mediated by perceptions of the applicant's persuasiveness. Overall, merely asking participants to remember a personal experience with power dramatically affected the impressions that interviewers had of them. Our findings illustrate power's far-reaching effects and have potentially important implications for understanding the psychology of job interviews.
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Changing work values in the United States, 1973-2006
Arne Kalleberg & Peter Marsden
Social Science Research, March 2013, Pages 255-270
Abstract:
This article examines changes in workers' work values for the period 1973-2006 using General Social Survey data. We assess the relative importance that workers assign to high income, as opposed to security, advancement, short hours and "importance and sense of accomplishment." The latter ranked highest throughout this period, but the relative priority placed on income and job security generally increased. We suggest that the rising relative rankings of earnings and job security reflect growing job, employability, and economic insecurity that workers generally experienced during this period, making these job characteristics generally more difficult to attain. Groups most vulnerable to job, employability, and economic insecurity - such as less educated workers and blacks - were most apt to place high importance on income and security. Differences in rankings between men and women, blacks and nonblacks, and college and high school graduates remained fairly stable over this period.
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Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France
Luis Garicano, Claire LeLarge & John Van Reenen
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees. Using data on the population of firms between 2002 and 2007 period, we structurally estimate the key parameters of our model to construct counterfactual size, productivity and welfare distributions. With flexible wages, the deadweight loss of the regulation is below 1% of GDP, but when wages are downwardly rigid welfare losses exceed 5%. We also show, regardless of wage flexibility, that the main losers from the regulation are workers (and to a lesser extent large firms) and the main winners are small firms.
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Managerial Hostility and Attitudes Towards Unions: A Canada-US Comparison
Michele Campolieti, Rafael Gomez & Morley Gunderson
Journal of Labor Research, March 2013, Pages 99-119
Abstract:
We use a cross-country survey of attitudes toward work and unions, which includes a sample of managers in both the US and Canada, to explore whether there is greater attitudinal hostility to unions in the U.S. Our estimates indicate that American manager's attitudes towards unions are, perhaps surprisingly, less hostile than those of Canadian managers. We explain this first finding by the differential effect of perceived union power, which is greater in Canada than the US and which is correlated negatively with union approval. We also find that US managers are less likely to use extreme methods to oppose union organizing drives, implying that the lower union rates in the US as compared to Canada are not likely the result of greater negativity towards unions themselves but rather some other factor or combination of factors. The implication is that if Canadian managers faced the same labor relations playing field as their US counterparts, they would likely find it easier to thwart union certification drives as well. Alternatively stated, Canadian-style labor relations reforms (such as card-check systems or quicker certification votes) could perhaps tip the balance in favor of unions when organizing in the US.
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Bankruptcy and Steel Plant Shutdowns
Robert Rogers
Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
The bankruptcies resulting from the American steel industry downturn in the period, 1999 to 2002, raise the question of whether the bankruptcy process itself led to permanent plant shutdowns and job losses. With information on 110 of the steel plants operating in the United States in 1994, this paper develops empirical models of steel plant closure and firm bankruptcy to see if the latter impacts on the former. Based on survival models, the results provide support for the hypothesis that the bankruptcy of steel companies could have led to viable steel plants closing, and thus, the bankruptcies in themselves may have caused permanent inefficient employment loss.
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Unemployment, Earnings, and Enrollment among Post 9/11 Veterans
Meredith Kleykamp
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines three outcomes characterizing different aspects of post 9/11 veterans' economic reintegration to civilian life: unemployment, earnings, and college enrollment, using Current Population Survey data from 2005-2011. Analyses include interactions of veteran status with sex, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment to evaluate whether diverse veterans experience diverse consequences of service. In brief, I find that the basic unemployment differences between veterans and non-veterans often reported in the media understate the effect of military service on unemployment for men, since veterans have other characteristics that are associated with higher employment rates. Female veterans appear to suffer a steeper employment penalty than male veterans, but black veterans appear to suffer less of a penalty than white veterans. But on two other measures, earnings and college enrollment, veterans appear to be doing better than their civilian peers. Veterans with a high school education or less outearn their civilian peers, but veterans with at least some college education appear to lose some or all of the veteran earnings advantage compared to veterans with a high school degree, suggesting the greatest wage returns to military service accrue among the least educated. Veterans with at least a high school education are more likely to be enrolled in college than their civilian peers. Treating veterans as a monolithic block obscures differences in the consequences of military service across diverse groups.
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Globalization and labor market institutions: International empirical evidence
Niklas Potrafke
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A widespread concern is that labor market institutions erode in the course of globalization, which, in turn, decreases employment and wages. By using panel data and cross-sectional data, I investigate the influence of globalization on labor market regulation. I use the indicators of labor market institutions by Gwartney et al. (2012) and the KOF indices of globalization. To deal with potential reverse causality, I employ a system GMM panel estimator and use a constructed trade share as proposed by Frankel and Romer (1999) as an instrumental variable for globalization in cross-sectional models. The results do not show that globalization induced labor market deregulation.
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Losing Heart? The Effect of Job Displacement on Health
Sandra Black, Paul Devereux & Kjell Salvanes
NBER Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We study how job displacement in Norway affects cardiovascular health using a sample of men and women who are predominantly aged in their early forties. To do so we merge survey data on health and health behaviors with register data on person and firm characteristics. We track the health of displaced and non-displaced workers from 5 years before to 7 years after displacement. We find that job displacement has a negative effect on the health of both men and women. Importantly, much of this effect is driven by an increase in smoking behavior. These results are robust to a variety of specification checks.
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Do House Prices Impact Business Starts?
Lakshmi Balasubramanyan & Edward Coulson
Journal of Housing Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
At the national level, business starts and housing prices both fell dramatically over the 2007-2009 period. Using a proprietary database of business starts this paper quantitatively models the interaction between house price and business starts from 2005 to 2009. We identify the impact by exploiting the cross-sectional variation in house price changes during the period. Controlling for observable and unobservable city characteristics, we find the significance of a robust relationship between house prices and business starts depends on the size of the business starts; a robust link exists between house prices and very small business, whereas, no significant robust link is seen for large business starts.
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The Effects of Personality Traits on Adult Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From Siblings
Jason Fletcher
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
While large literatures have shown that cognitive ability and schooling increases employment and wages, an emerging literature examines the importance of so-called "non-cognitive skills" in producing labor market outcomes. However, this smaller literature has not typically used causal methods in estimating the results. One source of heterogeneity that may play an important role in producing both personality and other non-cognitive skills and labor market outcomes is family background, including genetic endowments. This paper is the first to use sibling differences to estimate the associations between personality on employment and wages and is also able to control for many other sources of heterogeneity, including attractiveness, cognitive ability, schooling, occupation, and other factors. Overall, the findings suggest that personality measures have important associations with labor market outcomes in adulthood and that the results vary considerably by demographic group. The findings also highlight the potential role of extraversion in being associated with favorable labor market outcomes, which has not been documented in many other studies.
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The Impact of Social Networks on Labour Market Outcomes: New Evidence from Cape Breton
Adnan Khan & Steven Lehrer
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
Debates centered on the role of social networks as a determinant of labour market outcomes have a long history in economics and sociology; however, determining causality remains a challenge. In this study we use information on random assignment to a unique intervention to identify the impact of changes in the size of alternative social network measures on subsequent employment at both the individual and community level. Our results indicate that being assigned to the treatment protocol significantly increased the size of social networks, particularly weak ties. Nevertheless, these increases did not translate into improved employment outcomes 18 months following study completion. We do not find any evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity based on the initial size of one's social network; but those whose strong ties increased at a higher rate during the experiment were significantly less likely to hold a job following the experiment. We find that many of these results also hold at the community level among those who did not directly participate in the intervention. In summary, our results suggest that policies can successfully influence the size of an individual's social network, but these increases have limited impacts on long run labour market outcomes with the notable exception of changes in the composition of individuals who hold jobs.
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The Impact of the Unemployment Rate on Attrition of First-Term Enlistees
Jeremy Arkes & Stephen Mehay
Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the effects of home-state unemployment rates on attrition behavior of Navy enlistees for successive career windows during the first term of service: the first 6 months, the second 6 months, the second year, and the third year of service. The results indicate that attrition is negatively associated with changes in the local unemployment rate during the first three career windows covering two years of service. However, after two years of service, the estimated effect of the unemployment rate becomes insignificant for most groups of sailors. This is likely because sailors with the poorest job matches are sorted out early in the first term of service.
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John Jerrim
Education Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several studies have considered whether American college students' hold ‘realistic' wage expectations. The consensus is that they do not - overestimation of future earnings is in the region of 40-50%. But is it just college students who overestimate the success they will have in the labor market, or is this something common to all young adults? In this paper, I analyze National Educational Longitudinal Study (1988) data to consider whether 20-year-old college men are more realistic about their future income than their peers (of the same age) who are already in the labor force. My findings suggest that young people in employment actually make worse predictions of their future income (on average) than certain student groups, so long as the latter successfully obtain a university degree.
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Is Productivity Growth Too Strong For Our Own Good?
Mark Vitner & Azhar Iqbal
Business Economics, February 2013, Pages 29-41
Abstract:
Productivity growth and improvement in a nation's standard of living are widely thought to go hand in hand. During the past 15 years, however, the gap between productivity growth and growth of living standards has widened, igniting a debate about whether a larger share of the benefits from productivity gains has gone to capital rather than labor. The first phase of our study characterizes U.S. productivity growth for the period 1948-2011. Our statistical analysis found that productivity growth did not follow one particular pattern over time, and we therefore doubt that it would follow one pattern (either a higher or lower growth rate) in the near future. Our analysis concludes that the "productivity resurgence" era of 1996:Q1 to 2011:Q4 is associated with lower growth rates of real per capita income, employment, and consumer confidence relative to productivity. That may validate the "savage cost-cutting" and "polarization" hypotheses. The stable and higher growth rates of corporate profits and the S&P 500 index indicate that capital and higher skilled workers may have gained benefits from productivity growth over time. A simultaneous rise in food stamp recipients and income share of the top 0.01 percent during the post-mid-1990s era suggest that the distribution of the stronger productivity growth gains is asymmetric.
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Lawrence Katz & Robert Margo
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
This paper examines shifts over time in the relative demand for skilled labor in the United States. Although de-skilling in the conventional sense did occur overall in nineteenth century manufacturing, a more nuanced picture is that occupations "hollowed out": the share of "middle-skill" jobs - artisans - declined while those of "high-skill" - white collar, non-production workers - and "low-skill" - operatives and laborers increased. De-skilling did not occur in the aggregate economy; rather, the aggregate shares of low skill jobs decreased, middle skill jobs remained steady, and high skill jobs expanded from 1850 to the early twentieth century. The pattern of monotonic skill upgrading continued through much of the twentieth century until the recent "polarization" of labor demand since the late 1980s. New archival evidence on wages suggests that the demand for high skill (white collar) workers grew more rapidly than the supply starting well before the Civil War.
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The Time Divide in Cross-National Perspective: The Work Week, Education and Institutions That Matter
Peter Frase & Janet Gornick
Social Forces, March 2013, Pages 697-724
Abstract:
Prior empirical studies have found that American workers report longer hours than do workers in other highly industrialized countries, and that the highly educated report the longest hours relative to other educational levels. This paper analyzes disparities in working hours by education levels in 17 high- and middle-income countries to assess whether this finding holds cross-nationally, for both men and women. In contrast to many prior studies of working time, we use a measure of weekly rather than annual hours worked, which we argue provides a better window on the discretionary time available to individuals and households. We find that the within-country gradient in average hours by education is not uniform: higher income countries are more likely to show the U.S. pattern, and middle-income countries show the reverse pattern, with the less educated reporting longer hours. We conclude by assessing some possible macrolevel explanations for this variation, including per capita gross domestic product, tax rates, unionization, country-level regulations, earnings inequality, and the regulation of weekly work hours.
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Marc-André Reinhard, Martin Scharmach & Patrick Müller
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigated the ability of more or less experienced employment interviewers and laypersons to detect deception in employment interviews. Although correct beliefs about indicators of deception led to higher deception detection accuracy, more experienced employment interviewers did not show more accurate beliefs about indicators of deception and did not perform better at detecting deception than less experienced interviewers and laypersons. Furthermore, more experienced interviewers showed a less-pronounced tendency of judging messages as true irrespective of their actual truthfulness (truth bias) than less experienced interviewers and laypersons. It is suggested that experience in employment interviewing does not automatically lead to higher deception detection abilities in employment interviews, but that correcting people's beliefs about indicators of deception can do so.
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Pernilla Andersson Joona & Eskil Wadensjö
Small Business Economics, January 2013, Pages 155-172
Abstract:
This paper analyzes self-employment entry among Swedish-born male wage-earners. Is it the best and the brightest or the least successful that become self-employed? The residual from an income regression is used as an indicator of who belongs to which group. We find that both wage-earners who receive a lower income than predicted, i.e. have a negative residual, and those who receive a higher income than predicted, i.e. have a positive residual, are more likely to become self-employed than those who receive an income close to the predicted one. However, splitting self-employment into different types depending on corporate form and number of employees, we find that the self-employed are drawn from both tails of the residual distribution only if it is a matter of unincorporated firms. Wage-earners who become self-employed and start an incorporated firm are only drawn from the top of the residual distribution. Using self-employment income and turnover as measures of self-employment performance, we find a positive linear relationship between the income residual and performance.
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Alex Bryson & Richard Freeman
Journal of Labor Research, March 2013, Pages 1-29
Abstract:
This paper explores the link between employee perceptions of working conditions and the desire for worker representation in Britain and the US. We find that the distribution of employee perceptions of poor working conditions is similar in Britain and the US; similar factors affect the number of perceived poor working conditions; and the perception of poor working conditions is strongly associated with the desire for union representation. The nature of workplaces, as opposed to employees' characteristics, is the predominant factor determining employee perceptions of poor working conditions.
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Shaun Genter, Gregory Hooks & Clayton Mosher
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this study of prison privatization we draw on the insights of a recent body of literature that challenges a widespread belief that prisons help to spur employment growth in local communities. We look to these studies to provide an empirically and theoretically grounded approach to addressing our research question: what are the benefits, if any, to employment growth in states that have privatized some of their prisons, compared to states with only public prisons? Our research makes use of a large, national, and comprehensive dataset. By examining the employment contributions of prisons, as recent research has done, we were able to corroborate the general findings of this research. To study prison privatization we distinguish between states in which privatization has grown rapidly and those states in which privatization has grown slowly (or not at all). Our findings lend support to recent research that finds prisons do not improve job prospects for those communities that host them. We contribute to this literature by demonstrating that new prisons in states in which privatization is surging impede employment growth in the host community. To explain this we highlight the significant reduction in prison staffing - in both private and public prisons - where privatization is growing quickly.
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Income diversification and risk for fishermen
Stephen Kasperski & Daniel Holland
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 5 February 2013, Pages 2076-2081
Abstract:
Catches and prices from many fisheries exhibit high interannual variability, leading to variability in the income derived by fishery participants. The economic risk posed by this may be mitigated in some cases if individuals participate in several different fisheries, particularly if revenues from those fisheries are uncorrelated or vary asynchronously. We construct indices of gross income diversification from fisheries at the level of individual vessels and find that the income of the current fleet of vessels on the US West Coast and in Alaska is less diverse than at any point in the past 30 y. We also find a dome-shaped relationship between the variability of individuals' income and income diversification, which implies that a small amount of diversification does not reduce income risk but that higher levels of diversification can substantially reduce the variability of income from fishing. Moving from a single fishery strategy to a 50-25-25 split in revenues reduces the expected coefficient of variation of gross revenues between 24% and 65% for the vessels included in this study. The increasing access restrictions in many marine fisheries through license reductions and moratoriums have the potential to limit fishermen's ability to diversify their income risk across multiple fisheries. Catch share programs often result in consolidation initially and may reduce diversification. However, catch share programs also make it feasible for fishermen to build a portfolio of harvest privileges and potentially reduce their income risk. Therefore, catch share programs create both threats and opportunities for fishermen wishing to maintain diversified fishing strategies.