Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-05-15DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102731
Massimiliano Calì , Giorgio Presidente
{"title":"Robots for economic development","authors":"Massimiliano Calì , Giorgio Presidente","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102731","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102731","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent evidence suggests that in manufacturing, automation technologies entail a trade-off between productivity gains and employment losses for the economies that adopt them. This paper casts doubts on such trade-off in the context of a developing country. It shows significant employment gains from automation in Indonesian manufacturing during the years 2008–2015, a period of rapid increase in robot imports. Analysis based on manufacturing plant data provides evidence that the absence of this trade-off is due to diminishing productivity returns to robot adoption. As a result, the benefits from automation could be particularly large for countries at early stages of industrialization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102731"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143948822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-06-22DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102741
Erika Forsberg , Akib Khan , Olof Rosenqvist
{"title":"Do sibling correlations in skills, schooling, and earnings vary by socioeconomic background? Insights from Sweden","authors":"Erika Forsberg , Akib Khan , Olof Rosenqvist","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102741","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102741","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Family background shapes individual outcomes across the life cycle. While research documents how family background importance varies across countries, less is known about heterogeneities across socioeconomic groups within countries. Using comprehensive Swedish register data, we compare sibling correlations—a more holistic measure of family influence than direct parent–child associations—in skills, schooling, and earnings across fine-grained groups defined by parental socioeconomic status (SES). We find that sibling correlations generally decline with parental SES. This pattern holds across cognitive skills, schooling, and earnings, and is robust to alternative definitions of parental SES. The decline is particularly pronounced when comparing the lowest decile to higher SES groups. For education and earnings, the decline in sibling correlations at higher SES levels is primarily driven by increased within-family variation, suggesting siblings in advantaged families develop more individualized paths. For skills, the decline reflects decreasing between-family variation. This result is consistent with theories on reinforcing parental investments, though other mechanisms, including complementarities between investments and abilities, credit constraints faced by low-SES families and broader poverty traps, may also contribute. Our results suggest that children from low-SES backgrounds not only have worse average outcomes than those from high-SES homes but also face constraints on individual development. This study provides insights into how equality of opportunity varies across the socioeconomic spectrum, revealing nuances in family influence that country-level averages may obscure.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102741"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144514233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-07-08DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102757
Xiangbo Liu , Zhiying Sun , Daisheng Tang , Shuai Chu
{"title":"Relaxation of fertility restrictions, sibling composition and gender gap in education: Evidence from China’s 1.5-child policy","authors":"Xiangbo Liu , Zhiying Sun , Daisheng Tang , Shuai Chu","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102757","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102757","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Fertility restrictions are generally believed to have increased children’s educational attainment. However, knowledge of the effects of relaxing fertility restrictions on the gender gap in education is lacking. Using China’s 1.5-child policy as an example, we explore how relaxing fertility restrictions affects the gender gap in education. We first construct a simple model to analyze how different family planning policies influence the gender gap in education through their effects on sibling composition. Using data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we next empirically estimate the policy effects through a triple-difference (DDD) approach. We find that the 1.5-child policy significantly widened the gender gap in education, primarily through a relative decline in female educational attainment compared to males. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the eldest daughters, particularly those with younger brothers, experience a larger decline in educational attainment. We uncover two mechanisms limiting girls’ schooling: resource dilution through more siblings, and caregiving burdens as eldest sisters. We also find that supportive education policies can help narrow the gender gap in education by mitigating the negative impact on females’ educational attainment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102757"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144614706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-06-21DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102745
Angus Holford , Sonkurt Sen
{"title":"Racial representation among academics and students’ academic and labor market outcomes","authors":"Angus Holford , Sonkurt Sen","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102745","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102745","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the impact of racial representation among academic staff on university students’ academic and labor market outcomes. We use administrative data on the universe of staff and students at all UK universities, linked to survey data on students’ post-graduation outcomes, exploiting idiosyncratic variation (conditional on a rich set of fixed effects and observable student, staff, and university-department level characteristics) in the proportion of racial minority academic staff to whom students are exposed. We find that minority and own-race representation benefits the academic outcomes of minority groups: When minority students are exposed to 1 standard deviation higher proportion of minority academics, they are 1.03ppt (2% of the mean) more likely to graduate with a first or upper second class honors degree and they are also 0.88ppt (1.5% of the mean) more likely to graduate on time. There is no beneficial impact of minority or own-race representation on the labor market outcomes of minorities. However, we do find that minority representation among academic staff significantly increases progression of minority students to graduate study, suggesting that there may be benefits of same-race representation operating through provision of role models or domain-specific advice and guidance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102745"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144471922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-05-28DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102732
Laura Kawano , Sara LaLumia , Shanthi Ramnath , Michael Stevens
{"title":"Who picks up the slack? Understanding spousal responses to unemployment spells","authors":"Laura Kawano , Sara LaLumia , Shanthi Ramnath , Michael Stevens","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102732","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102732","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We use a large panel of married households to update estimated added worker effects. In response to a primary earner’s job loss, secondary earners are 1.1 to 2.4 percentage points more likely to work and compensate for 3.6 to 5.1 percent of the displaced worker’s lost earnings. When a secondary earner is displaced, spousal employment is unchanged but there is a substantial earnings <em>reduction</em>. These small compensatory responses are explained by an increased probability that the nondisplaced spouse exits employment, either through correlated unemployment shocks or retirement. Conditional on relative-earner status, sex-based differences in added worker effects are small.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102732"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144166430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-07-15DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102756
Junjie Guo
{"title":"Estimation of the wage offer distribution using both accepted and rejected offers","authors":"Junjie Guo","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102756","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102756","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper estimates the wage offer distribution using workers who received multiple offers in a short period of time, including both accepted and rejected offers. We show that, after accounting for worker heterogeneity and measurement error, each wage offer is a random draw from the same distribution, and a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 0.137 is consistent with data. The dispersion is smaller than most estimates in the literature, increasing in the unemployment rate for workers without a bachelor’s degree, but not significantly related to a worker’s age or employment status.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102756"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144634128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-06-12DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102748
Joe Dodd, Luke Munford, Matt Sutton, Igor Francetic
{"title":"The effect of area-level waiting times for psychological therapies on individual-level labour market outcomes","authors":"Joe Dodd, Luke Munford, Matt Sutton, Igor Francetic","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102748","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102748","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The association between common mental health conditions, including anxiety and depression, and labour outcomes has been extensively documented. However, the consequences of delaying access to therapies addressing these conditions is unknown. The NHS Talking Therapies programme was launched in England in 2008 and had expanded to reach 1.24 million users by 2021. We investigate the reduced-form impact of delayed access to this programme on the gap in probability of employment and taking time away from work attributable to poor mental health. We measure mental health and labour outcomes using 2015-2019 data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. As this does not record use of Talking Therapies, we use poor mental health to proxy capacity to benefit and identify the intent-to-treat effect. A one standard deviation (10.5 days) decrease in median area-level waiting time leads to a 1.5 percentage point decrease in the gap in probability of employment between individuals in good and poor mental health. Similarly, the gap in the probability of taking time away from work decreases by around 1 percentage point. Our findings are robust to alternative model specifications, sample definitions, treatment definitions, and dealing with potential selective attrition. Our reduced form estimates suggest that faster access to effective treatment can improve labour market outcomes and reduce the productivity losses associated with mental health problems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102748"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144321576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-06-29DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102749
Mery Ferrando , Véronique Gille
{"title":"Does the identity of leaders matter for education? Evidence from the first black governor in the US","authors":"Mery Ferrando , Véronique Gille","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102749","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102749","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Can role models from the same group enhance educational outcomes of disadvantaged minority students? We analyze the election of Douglas Wilder in Virginia in 1989, who was the first Black American to serve as governor in the US. Results from a triple difference and an event-study approach demonstrate increased educational attainment among Black individuals in Virginia after the election. Using an original survey and secondary data, we provide suggestive evidence that a role model effect may be driving these results. Our findings thus suggest that increasing exposure to Black politicians in high-profile positions might contribute to narrowing the White-Black gap in education in the US.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102749"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144534974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-07-03DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102747
Mattis Beckmannshagen , Johannes Koenig
{"title":"Out for good: Transitory and persistent labor market effects of heterogeneous health shocks","authors":"Mattis Beckmannshagen , Johannes Koenig","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102747","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102747","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We propose a novel method to detect and disentangle moderate and severe health shocks in a general population survey based on a data-driven classification of sickness absences and hospitalizations. Both types of shocks are widespread with an annual incidence of about 1.7%, which rises steeply with age. We estimate the effects of both shocks on labor market outcomes and find that severe shocks have more persistent effects on employment (7.5 percentage point reduction), labor income, and household net income. Moderate shocks have transitory effects on employment (2 percentage point reduction), but more long-lasting effects on work hours.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102747"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144634134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-10-01Epub Date: 2025-06-05DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102744
Dominique Goux , Eric Maurin
{"title":"Who will work on Sunday? The winners and losers of Sunday laws relaxation","authors":"Dominique Goux , Eric Maurin","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102744","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102744","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In 2016, a law authorized Sunday working in the retail sector in some thirty French areas. We show that the reform did not coincide with any significant increase in retail trade employment in target areas. However, the increase in the number of days shops are open has led employers to favor employees who are sufficiently experienced to manage a store independently. There has been a significant drop in the employment share of less experienced workers, as well as a sharp decline in the share of single parents, for whom it is difficult to reconcile family responsibilities and Sunday work.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"96 ","pages":"Article 102744"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144271250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}