Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Collective Bargaining Coverage in Chile: Increase or Illusion?","authors":"Gonzalo Durán S., Sergio Gamonal C.","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3396890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3396890","url":null,"abstract":"Collective bargaining in Chile is both underdeveloped and weak, resulting in very limited coverage. However, up to now, there is no exist an official percentage. The Labor Office, which is the state institution that collects the information about collective bargaining in Chile has systematically reported the percentage of salaried involved in collective instruments that start their validity every year, but not the percentage that considers workers involved in all the valid collective instruments (not only the starters). This is surprising and constitutes a research gap that has an impact on the public debate. In this backdrop, a recent OECD report has shown the Chilean collective bargaining coverage developments between 1990 and 2015. While the Labor Office reported in 2015 a coverage (considering only the starters) of 7.2%, the OECD has published 18.9%. Which is the real number? apparently, something has changed or works better in Chile based on such report. In this paper, we show that those figures are far to be accurate. Through a multi-step process, we correct the official numbers and estimate a collective bargaining coverage which oscillates between 11.1% and 6.9% in 2015.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"154 7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131387706","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 Effects of Healthcare Policy: Evidence from the 2007 FDA Black Box Warning on Antidepressants","authors":"A. Butikofer, Christopher J. Cronin, Meghan M. Skira","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3314122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3314122","url":null,"abstract":"Public policies aimed at improving health may have indirect effects on outcomes such as education and employment. We study the labor market effects of the US Food and Drug Administration's 2007 expanded black box warning on antidepressants. Our difference-in-differences estimates imply that the warning reduced employment by 6.1 percent among women aged 35-49 with a history of depression. We explore potential mechanisms and find that antidepressant and psychotherapy use among women aged 35-49 decreased after the warning. Our analysis suggests that the 2007 warning reduced US labor force participation by 0.23 percentage points, leading to $11.8 billion in lost wages.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126106011","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":"Job Displacement, Unemployment, and Crime: Evidence from Danish Microdata and Reforms","authors":"P. Bennett, Amine Ouazad","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3314079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3314079","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper estimates the individual impact of a worker’s job loss on his/her criminal activity. Using a matched employer–employee longitudinal data set on unemployment, crime, and taxes for all residents in Denmark, the paper builds each worker’s timeline of job separation, unemployment, and crime. The paper focuses on displaced workers: high-tenure workers who lose employment during a mass-layoff event at any point between 1990 and 1994 (inclusive). Controlling for municipality- and time-specific confounders identifies the individual impact separately from the aggregate impact of the unemployment rate on crime. Placebo tests display no evidence of trends in crime prior to worker separation. Using Denmark’s introduction of the Act on an Active Labor Market at the end of 1993, we estimate the impacts of activation and of a reduction in benefit duration on crime: crime is lower during active benefits than during passive benefits and spikes at the end of benefit eligibility. We use policy-induced shifts in the kink formula relating prior earnings to unemployment benefits to estimate the separate impacts of labor income and unemployment benefits on crime: the results suggest that unemployment benefits do not significantly offset the impact of labor income losses on crime.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115466075","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":"Noncompetes as Tax Evasion","authors":"Rebecca N. Morrow","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3242458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3242458","url":null,"abstract":"Al Capone famously boasted of his criminal empire: “Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business.” Treasury Agent Frank Wilson and Prosecutor George Johnson put Capone behind bars not by disputing his characterization and pursuing murder or assault or RICO charges, but by accepting it and enforcing its tax implications. Irrespective of their legality, Capone’s businesses were profitable, and Capone had not reported their profits for tax purposes. A simple application of bedrock tax law achieved what other legal routes failed to achieve and sent Capone to Alcatraz. The trick was to see the tax argument. \u0000 \u0000Policymakers should use a similar approach to curtail the excessive, exploitative, and anticompetitive use of employment noncompete agreements. Currently, nearly one in five (or thirty million) American workers is bound by an employment noncompete. Employers claim that they adequately compensate employees for noncompete restrictions with higher wages, bigger raises, and/or more generous bonuses. Policymakers scoff at this claim and use contract law to attack them. Unfortunately, employment noncompetes are like Al Capone in that they have flourished despite the law’s efforts to restrain them. Recently, the largest study of noncompetes in U.S. history paradoxically found that their prevalence is unaffected by their enforceability. In states like California that refuse to enforce employment noncompetes, they are as common as in states that uphold them. Contract law has proved ill-equipped to respond to the pervasive, expanding, and damaging use of noncompetes. \u0000 \u0000This Article is the first to shift the focus and to argue that employment noncompetes, as employers currently use them, constitute tax evasion and should be attacked as such. If employers pay employees for noncompetes through compensation, then by employers’ own account, this compensation is not purely an expense associated with immediate benefits; rather, it is an expenditure associated with future benefits — benefits that the employer will enjoy years after payment. Thus, the IRS should stop allowing employers to fully immediately deduct the compensation they pay to employees subject to noncompetes and instead should require that an adequate portion of total compensation be allocated to the noncompete and amortized over the restricted period, beginning when employment ends.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116661973","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":"Flexibility and Authority: Resolving Labor Disputes in a County Government in Western China","authors":"Xin He","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3204071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3204071","url":null,"abstract":"Existing literature regards flexibility and authority as key characteristics of informal justice. We further contend that the combination of the two is crucial for informal justice to be effective. We investigate the process of dispute resolution by a Chinese labor agency. Following the life cycles of a sample of 810 labor disputes, we find that this informal justice forum was efficient and effective, made possible by the combination of flexibility and authority. Flexibility means that the agency attracts certain types of cases that are usually screened out of the formal legal system and that agency officials use \"informal,\" hence flexible, techniques. Authority means that the administrative agency possesses additional powers over the disputants, hence the disputants are under pressure to follow its suggestions and decisions. A comparative analysis of various cases of informal justice reinforces the importance of combining flexibility and authority. We further demonstrate that flexibility without authority is insufficient, and that some informal justice forums are effective because they enjoy both.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116818508","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":"The Problem of 'Misclassification' or How to Define Who is an 'Employee' Under Protective Legislation in the Information Age","authors":"K. Dau-Schmidt","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3143296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3143296","url":null,"abstract":"The problem of determining who is an “employee” under various protective statutes is foundational to the practice of labor and employment law. Any failures of individual bargaining in the employment relationship can only be remedied through collective bargaining or worker protective legislation, both of which require determining which workers are “employees” covered by the statutory system of collective bargaining or eligible for the benefits of the protective legislation. Because the statutory definitions of who is a covered employee are commonly very general and self-referential, the courts have adopted a series of legal tests to provide structure for arguments as to which employees are covered. The tests include the “rightto-control test,” the “economic realities test,” hybrid tests, and more recently, at legislative direction, the “ABC test.” \u0000 \u0000The classification of some workers as covered “employees” and others as non-covered workers, most often “independent contractors,” has been an important issue in labor and employment law for as long as there has been protective legislation only covering “employees”. Employers have incentive to misclassify their workers as independent contractors, in an effort to avoid the costs of the protective legislation, or to formulate their business in a way that enables them to use independent contractors rather than employees to minimize regulatory costs. This last strategy is known in the academic literature as “regulatory arbitrage” because the employer constructs his or her business model so as to end up in a cheaper regulatory regime. The problems of misclassification and regulatory arbitrage to avoid protective legislation have intensified as information technology has allowed increased subcontracting and the development of business models in the sharing economy that pose serious puzzles under the traditional tests of the employment relationship. \u0000 \u0000In this chapter I present a brief overview of the “misclassification problem;” the problem of distinguishing covered employees from independent contractors in the information age. I begin with a general exposition of the problem, including an outline and discussion of the traditional tests of who is an employee under American labor and employment law. I then discuss the problem in light of the recent developments of the information age, the growth of subcontracting and outsourcing and the development of new business models utilizing internet platforms that allow online matching of service consumers with workers for “work on demand,” and the performance of contracted work through “crowd-sourcing.” Finally, I discuss the various reforms that people have suggested to address the problem of determining when workers are covered by protective legislation in the information age so as to provide predictability and minimize the problems of misclassification and regulatory arbitrage. In particular, I discuss recent legislative developments and proposals to include “depe","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126310566","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":"The Influence of Labour Reforms on Inflation. Evidence from Spain","authors":"J. Carrasco-Gallego, Carlos Usabiaga, E. Cabero","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3124387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3124387","url":null,"abstract":"Changes in labor legislation may have a major impact on inflation. They transform the structure of labor costs, the most important cost for firms. This channel of influence has barely been explored. This paper presents empirical evidence of its effect on inflation. Using the Phillips curve approach, we analyze alterations in Spanish labor legislation and their influence on inflation. The labor reforms (in 1984, 1994, 1997 and 2012) that sought to make labor relations more flexible, allowing firms to adapt, have a significant and negative influence on inflation; they help firms to reduce costs by using labor more efficiently with new types of contracts and/or temporary hiring. The reforms of 1992, 2001, 2006 and 2010, with more ambivalent or milder objectives, have no influence. The significant reforms require adequate time as firms need to adapt to the new rules and translate them into prices, supporting the idea of sticky prices.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129865114","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":"New Governance Tune-Up: How Behavioral Insights Can Help Refine the New Governance Regulatory Narrative","authors":"K. Wenger","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3123346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3123346","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, a number of legal scholars have advocated “new governance” approaches to regulation. New governance scholars eschew both traditional command-and-control and complete deregulation models, instead focusing on middle-ground hybrid approaches in which legal actors seek to emulate private-sector success stories. New governance narratives paint a sometimes rosy picture of the potential benefits of this kind of hybrid approach. This Article uses William Simon’s legal scholarship about Toyota as a jumping-off point to examine the framing of new governance narratives. New governance proposals often follow a particular story line, setting out empirical and case-study driven accounts of how to build a better mousetrap based on private-sector successes. This narrative structure is intuitive and is psychologically appealing. However, it may be prone to overstate causal connections, due to a variety of behavioral biases such as confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and representativeness heuristic. Scholars cognizant of these potential issues can better “tune up” the new governance framework.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132163002","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":"Is Faster Better? Quantifying the Relationship between Broadband Speed and Economic Growth","authors":"George S. Ford","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3138632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3138632","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, I aim to quantify the relationship between higher broadband speeds (10 Mbps versus 25 Mbps) and the growth rates in important economic outcomes in U.S. counties including jobs, personal income, and labor earnings. Doing so exposes the potential for severe selection bias in studies of broadband's economic impact, which is addressed in this study using Coarsened Exact Matching. Once balanced, the data reveal no economic payoff from the 15 Mbps speed difference between the years 2013 and 2015 (when data is available). I also revisit an early and widely-cited study on broadband's effect on employment to evaluate the possible impacts of selection bias, and conclude that the positive benefits of broadband reported in that particular study are likely spurious. The selection bias problem may infect other studies on the economic impacts of broadband Internet services. Future research on broadband's economic impact should explicitly address selection bias.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"123 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129822069","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":"A Modern Union for the Modern Economy","authors":"Jeffrey M. Hirsch, Joseph A. Seiner","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2924833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2924833","url":null,"abstract":"Membership in traditional unions has steeply declined over the past two decades. As the White House and Congress are now completely Republican controlled, there promises to be no reversal of this trend in the near future. In the face of this rejection of traditional bargaining efforts, several attempts have been made to create alternative “quasi-union” or “alt-labor” relationships between workers and employers. These arrangements represent a creative approach by workers to have their voices heard in a collective manner, though still falling far short of the traditional protections afforded by employment and labor law statutes.This Article critiques one such high-profile, quasi-union effort in the technology sector—the Uber Guild. While the Guild does not provide any of the traditional bargaining protections found in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), it offers Uber drivers some input over the terms and conditions under which they work. Falling somewhere between employment-at-will and unionization protected under the NLRA, the Uber Guild is a creative attempt to help both workers and the company to better understand how they can improve the working relationship.This Article navigates the Uber Guild and other nontraditional efforts that promise a collective voice for workers in the face of a precipitous decline in union membership. Closely examining the implications of these existing quasi-union relationships, this Article explores how workers in the technology sector face unique challenges under workplace laws. For the first time in the academic literature, we argue that these workers are particularly well situated to benefit from a nontraditional union model and explain what that model should look like. While there can be no doubt that a traditional union protected by the NLRA is the optimal bargaining arrangement, we must consider the enormous challenges workers in the technology sector face in obtaining these protections. A modern union is needed for the modern economy.","PeriodicalId":177971,"journal":{"name":"Economic Perspectives on Employment & Labor Law eJournal","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125896670","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}