{"title":"Tackling Undeclared Work: Improving the Range and Effectiveness of Sanction Tools","authors":"Colin Williams","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3835628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3835628","url":null,"abstract":"Many economies tackle undeclared work by increasing the real or expected costs of participation in undeclared work. This can be achieved by increasing the perceived and/or actual sanctions imposed on those caught or by increasing the real and/or expected risk of detection. This report focuses upon the range and effectiveness of the available sanction tools to facilitate learning among enforcement authorities. The objectives of this report are to share and deepen understanding of: the effectiveness of using sanctions to tackle undeclared work, and the range of sanction tools available.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122242302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financially Stressed Employees","authors":"Roberto Pinto","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3823267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3823267","url":null,"abstract":"I use variation in US consumer bankruptcy laws to study the impact of employees' financial well-being on corporate performance. I find that better employees' financial well-being leads to higher firm profitability and labor productivity. The cross-sectional analysis finds more pronounced effects for more human capital intensive firms and those with fewer routine tasks. These results indicate that workers' financial hardship impairs workplace performance, especially in sectors where cognitive skills directly affect productivity. Overall, my findings suggest that policies promoting individuals' financial well-being have positive spillover effects on corporate performance.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125008975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bundling Postemployment Restrictive Covenants: When, Why, and How It Matters","authors":"N. Balasubramanian, Evan Starr, Sho Yamaguchi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3814403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3814403","url":null,"abstract":"Many of a firm’s most important informational or relational resources are at risk of diffusion to its competitors because they are embedded in the firm’s human capital. Using novel firm- and worker-level data, we present descriptive evidence on the adoption of and outcomes associated with four post-employment restrictive covenants (PERCs) that limit the diffusion of such resources to competitors: non-disclosure agreements (NDA), non-solicitation agreements, non-recruitment agreements, and non-compete agreements. We find that firms tend to adopt these PERCs together, with just three combinations (no PERCs, only an NDA, all four) covering more than 82% of workers and 70% of firms. We examine two rationales for why firms might bundle PERCs together—value creation and pure value capture—and draw out and test their implications both for worker and firm outcomes and for adoption. Our results suggest that pure value capture is the likely rationale for bundling PERCs with the average worker, while value creation is more applicable to top managers. Finally, we document how studying just one PERC can be misleading when such PERCs are bundled.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"162 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131425169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Federico S. Mandelman, Yang Yu, Francesco Zanetti
{"title":"The 'Matthew Effect' and Market Concentration: Search Complementarities and Monopsony Power","authors":"Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Federico S. Mandelman, Yang Yu, Francesco Zanetti","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3787787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3787787","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that face search complementarities in the formation of vendor contracts. Search complementarities amplify small differences in productivity among firms. Market concentration fosters monopsony power in the labor market, magnifying profits and further enhancing highproductivity firms’ output share. Firms want to get bigger and hire more workers, in stark contrast with the classic monopsony model, where a firm aims to reduce the amount of labor it hires. The combination of search complementarities and monopsony power induces a strong “Matthew effect” that endogenously generates superstar firms out of uniform idiosyncratic productivity distributions. Reductions in search costs increase market concentration, lower the labor income share, and increase wage inequality.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114787958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Uneven Growth: Automation’s Impact on Income and Wealth Inequality","authors":"Benjamin Moll, Lukasz Rachel, P. Restrepo","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3801089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3801089","url":null,"abstract":"The benefits of new technologies accrue not only to high‐skilled labor but also to owners of capital in the form of higher capital incomes. This increases inequality. To make this argument, we develop a tractable theory that links technology to the distribution of income and wealth—and not just that of wages—and use it to study the distributional effects of automation. We isolate a new theoretical mechanism: automation increases inequality by raising returns to wealth. The flip side of such return movements is that automation can lead to stagnant wages and, therefore, stagnant incomes at the bottom of the distribution. We use a multiasset model extension to confront differing empirical trends in returns to productive and safe assets and show that the relevant return measures have increased over time. Automation can account for part of the observed trends in income and wealth inequality.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125518015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gabriel Ulyssea, C. Meghir, P. Goldberg, Rafael Dix-Carneiro
{"title":"Trade and Informality in the Presence of Labor Market Frictions and Regulations","authors":"Gabriel Ulyssea, C. Meghir, P. Goldberg, Rafael Dix-Carneiro","doi":"10.1920/WP.IFS.2021.221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1920/WP.IFS.2021.221","url":null,"abstract":"We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects economic outcomes in the presence of informality. We show that: (1) Trade openness unambiguously decreases informality in the tradable sector, but has ambiguous effects on aggregate informality. (2) The productivity gains from trade are understated when the informal sector is omitted. (3) Trade openness results in large welfare gains even when informality is repressed. (4) Repressing informality increases productivity, but at the expense of employment and welfare. (5) The effects of trade on wage inequality are reversed when the informal sector is incorporated in the analysis. (6) The informal sector works as an \"unemployment,\" but not a \"welfare buffer\" in the event of negative economic shocks. \u0000 \u0000Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123834109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Living it up at the Hotel California: Employee Mobility Barriers and Collaborativeness in Firms' Innovation","authors":"Eunkwang Seo, Deepak Somaya","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3725819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3725819","url":null,"abstract":"Research has long recognized the importance of collaboration for innovation, but relatively little is known about the strategic drivers of collaborative innovation in firms. We posit that robust collaboration within firms can increase the inter-firm mobility of inventors and increase spillovers of innovative knowledge to competitors by mobile inventors. Therefore, by mitigating these value capture hazards associated with collaboration, barriers to employee mobility may induce firms to increase collaborativeness in innovation. Additionally, consistent with the mechanism underlying this proposition, we hypothesize that firms whose innovation entails more complex knowledge, which is known to impede inter-firm knowledge spillovers, will increase collaboration less when employee mobility increase. We test these hypotheses by leveraging quasi-exogenous changes in two legal mobility barriers for inventors across U.S. states, and find that higher mobility barriers are associated with greater inventor collaboration (as observed in patented innovation), and this effect is weaker for firms possessing more complex knowledge. These findings deepen our understanding of the strategic tradeoffs between value creation and value capture entailed in collaborative innovation within firms, and of human capital strategies that help to manage these tradeoffs.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130075985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Employment and State Incentives in Transition Economies: Are Subsidies for FDI Ineffective? The Case of Serbia","authors":"Uros Delevic","doi":"10.18356/a6f64950-en","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18356/a6f64950-en","url":null,"abstract":"This study analyses the effects of government subsidies for foreign direct investment (FDI) on employment at the municipal level in Serbia. It finds that the positive correlation of subsidies with employment is limited to the creation of subsidized jobs. In other words, subsidies are ineffective in creating additional jobs, beyond the jobs created by subsidized multinational enterprises (MNEs). There is no crowding-in and there is some evidence of crowding-out in the least developed municipalities. The municipalities that received subsidized investments did not experience higher employment in comparison with the period of no subsidies and in comparison with municipalities that never received subsidized investments. Some positive effects emerge, with a two-year lag, in the municipalities which, conditional on the level of development, lowered wages. The key policy implication is that subsidy-driven FDI policy, based on financial subsidies per job created, does not lead to a sustained employment growth pattern. Policymakers might need to target high value-adding activities of MNEs that induce the creation of domestic value added.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131383982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Human Rights Violations of Migrants Workers in India During COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Chitranjali Negi Advocate","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3629773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3629773","url":null,"abstract":"“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. \u0000 \u0000Today, the important issue is how to save the human rights & dignity of migrant workers The problems of migrant workers have become very important in many developing countries of the world. Migration of labour started in India during the period of British colonial rule. The National Commission on Rural Labour in India (NCRL,1991) estimates more than 10 million circular migrants in the rural areas alone. These include an estimated 4.5 million interstate migrants and 6 million inter-state migrants in India. One of the reasons behind the Human Rights Violation of State Migrants workers in India are political and economic. State Migrants are outsiders in other State, they do not vote and thus cannot put governments under electoral pressure. \u0000 \u0000On 24th March 2020, the Government of India ordered a nationwide lock down in India- starting midnight to stop the Corona virus from spreading in Country. Lock down in India has impacted millions of migrant’s workers. Lack of food and basic amenities, loss of employment, fear of unknown and lack of social support were major reasons for struggle in this huge part of population. Due to the lock-down, more than three hundred deaths were reported, with reasons ranging from starvation, suicides, exhaustion, road and rail accidents, police brutality and denial of timely medical care. Eighty migrants died while travelling back home on the Shramik Special trains. Several incidents, viral videos of police misbehavior, brutality (beating with cane-charged) on migrant workers, have been reported from across the country. \u0000 \u0000The Indian Judiciary has also not protected itself in glory by failing in its duty to protect the rights and dignity of migrant labour citing the ground of non-interference in policy. India is a founding member of the ILO and it has been a permanent member of the ILO Governing Body since 1922. India has ratified six out of the eight-core/fundamental ILO conventions. India has not ratified the two core fundamental conventions (Convention No 87,98). It is necessary to maintain important aspects of labour standards & labour rights (Migrants Rights) and aim of achieving a system where there are no barriers to the smooth process of the Rule of Law.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116092078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do Job Creation Schemes Improve the Social Integration and Well-Being of the Long-Term Unemployed?","authors":"B. Ivanov, Friedhelm Pfeiffer, L. Pohlan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3486130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3486130","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we analyze the effects of a German job creation scheme (JCS) on the social integration and well-being of long-term unemployed individuals. Using linked survey and administrative data for participants and a group of matched non-participants, we find significant positive effects of being employed within this program. They are larger for individuals with health impairments and above-average duration of welfare dependence. The program effects decline over time, which cannot be explained by decreasing levels of well-being and social integration of the participants. Instead, this decrease is driven by a rising share of controls who find a job and catch up to similar outcome levels as program participants. Overall, our results suggest that JCSs can be an efficient labor market policy instrument to improve the quality of life of the long-term unemployed.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132970444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}