Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-03-19DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102713
Jeffrey Clemens , Michael R. Strain
{"title":"Why do labor unions advocate for minimum wage increases?","authors":"Jeffrey Clemens , Michael R. Strain","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102713","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102713","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Over the past decade, organized labor has played a significant role in advocating for minimum wage increases. Why might this be, given that the minimum wage may act as a substitute for the bargaining power offered by labor unions? In this paper, we study the interplay between minimum wages and union membership. Using variation in U.S. states’ minimum wages during the 2010s, we estimate that each dollar in minimum wage increase predicts a 5 percent increase (0.3 pp) in the likelihood of union membership among individuals ages 16–40. Consistent with a classic “free-riding” hypothesis, however, we find that minimum wage increases predict declines in union membership among the minimum wage's most direct beneficiaries. Instead, increases in union membership occur among much broader groups that are not directly affected by the minimum wage.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102713"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143715272","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 : 2025-03-12DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102699
Attila Gyetvai , Maria Zhu
{"title":"Coworker networks and the role of occupations in job finding","authors":"Attila Gyetvai , Maria Zhu","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102699","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102699","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Which former coworkers help displaced workers find jobs? We answer this question by studying occupational similarity in job finding networks. Using matched employer–employee data from Hungary, this paper relates the unemployment duration of displaced workers to the employment rate within their former coworker networks. We find that only coworkers from the same narrow occupation are helpful in job finding, while those from different occupations are not. This effect lasts for a few months after displacement and is primarily driven by former coworkers in occupations requiring at most a primary level of education.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102699"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143645129","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 : 2025-03-12DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102706
Claudio Lucifora , Federica Origo
{"title":"Rigid yet resilient: Firms’ margins of adjustment to demand shocks in regulated labour markets","authors":"Claudio Lucifora , Federica Origo","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102706","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102706","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate how firms adjust to demand shocks when wages and employment determination are regulated. Using firm-level data for the Italian metal engineering industry from 2009 to 2021, we estimate the elasticity of the wage bill to changes in firm's real sales. We disentangle the effect on wage components (base wage and wage cushion) and labour inputs (permanent or temporary employment and working hours). Results show that the elasticity of the wage bill to demand shocks mainly works through adjustment of working hours (especially <em>via</em> short-time work) and partly employment, while wages are less sensitive. Unions at the workplace reduce employment adjustment through a more intensive use of short-time work schemes. The lower employment adjustment to changes in sales in unionized firms does not depend on past investments or innovation, and it is associated to higher responsiveness of profits to declining sales only in weakly unionized firms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102706"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143679604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-03-11DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102707
Ioannis Laliotis
{"title":"Foreign doctors and hospital quality: Evidence from the English NHS","authors":"Ioannis Laliotis","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102707","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102707","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the relationship between hospital quality and the share of foreign doctors in the English NHS. Baseline findings suggest that heart attack mortality is higher in hospitals with greater shares of foreign doctors practising relevant specialties. Robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses indicate that this association is specific to Acute Myocardial Infraction (AMI) treatment and is driven by hospitals that are smaller, of lower-quality, and ill-equipped to provide optimal care. When explicitly considering for treatment type, AMI mortality does not vary with the share of foreign AMI specialists in hospitals capable to access certain treatment technologies within 150 min. Overall, the results suggest that higher AMI mortality is not caused by foreign-trained AMI doctors but instead reflects structural challenges and resource-driven hiring patterns in constrained hospitals, which tend to rely more heavily on foreign doctors to mitigate worse outcomes. Further research is needed to better understand the allocation of foreign doctors to underperforming hospitals and its implications for healthcare delivery.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102707"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143645128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-03-06DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102694
Marco Clemens , Jan Sauermann
{"title":"Making the right call: The heterogeneous effects of individual performance pay on productivity","authors":"Marco Clemens , Jan Sauermann","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102694","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102694","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Performance pay has been shown to have important implications for worker and firm productivity. Although workers’ skills may directly matter for the cost of effort to reach performance goals, surprisingly little is know about the heterogeneity in the effects of incentive pay across workers. In this study, we apply a dynamic difference-in-differences estimator to the introduction of a generous bonus pay program to study how salient performance thresholds affect incentivized and non-incentivized performance outcomes for low- and high-skilled workers. While we do find that individual incentive pay did not affect workers’ performance on average, we show that this result conceals an underlying heterogeneity in the response to individual performance pay: individual performance pay has a significant effect on the performance of high-skilled workers but not for low-skilled workers. The findings can be rationalized with the idea that the costs of effort differ by workers’ skill level. We also explore whether agents alter their overtime hours and find a negative effect, possibly avoiding negative consequences of longer working hours.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102694"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143576841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-03-05DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102693
Marco G. Palladino , Alexandra Roulet , Mark Stabile
{"title":"Narrowing industry wage premiums and the decline in the gender wage gap","authors":"Marco G. Palladino , Alexandra Roulet , Mark Stabile","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102693","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102693","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The gender gap in firm wage premiums is well documented, but evidence on its evolution over time and its contribution to declining gender wage gaps remains mixed. Using comprehensive employer–employee data from France, we find that 20% of the reduction in the gender hourly wage gap between 2002 and 2019 can be attributed to a decline in the between-firm component of the gender gap in firm wage premiums. However, our analysis shows that this reduction is not driven by improvements in women’s relative position in the firm wage premium ladder. We find no evidence that, conditional on workers’ skills, women have become more likely to move into higher-paying firms or industries, or that newer cohorts of women are better represented in these segments. Instead, the narrowing is primarily driven by broader changes in the distribution of firm wage premiums, specifically through a compression of industry-specific premium differentials. These findings highlight how structural changes in the economy can affect gender wage gaps even in the absence of changes in women’s relative labor market position.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102693"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143629402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Labour EconomicsPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102695
Ainoa Aparicio Fenoll , Roberto Quaranta
{"title":"The uneven effects of conditional cash transfers on women and men","authors":"Ainoa Aparicio Fenoll , Roberto Quaranta","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102695","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102695","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We compare the effects of training-conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs on the labor market outcomes of women and men. We use the experiment in Del Boca et al. (2021) where low-income households are randomly assigned to one of three groups: cash transfer conditional on a family-specific bundle of training programs, unconditional cash transfer with no access to those training programs, and no treatment. We exploit Social Security data, including all registered labor contracts in Italy. We find that cash transfers conditional on training have a positive and sizeable effect on males’ labor income and that this effect stays in place for at least two years after the program. Unconditional cash transfers did not affect men. In contrast, female employment is positively affected by both cash transfers regardless of access to the training, but the effect is smaller if they are conditional.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102695"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143576839","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 : 2025-03-03DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102698
Andrew McGee , Peter McGee
{"title":"Gender differences in reservation wages in search experiments","authors":"Andrew McGee , Peter McGee","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102698","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102698","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Women report setting lower reservation wages than men in survey data. We show that women set reservation wages that are 14 to 18 percent lower than men's in laboratory search experiments that control for factors not fully observed in surveys such as offer distributions and outside options. This gender gap—which exists even controlling for overconfidence, preferences, personality, and intelligence—leads women to spend less time searching than men while accepting lower wages. More risk tolerant women set reservation wages that are too low early in search relative to theoretically optimal reservation wages given their risk preferences, reducing their earnings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102698"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143576840","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 : 2025-03-02DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102697
Susan J. Méndez , Anthony Scott , Peter Sivey
{"title":"Junior doctors’ specialty choice: Stated and revealed preferences over more than a decade","authors":"Susan J. Méndez , Anthony Scott , Peter Sivey","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102697","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102697","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>An important health policy issue in many countries is the over-specialisation of the medical workforce. Understanding junior doctors’ preferences over characteristics of alternative specialties is crucial in designing policies to improve the distribution of doctors across specialties. This paper estimates individual-level preferences over characteristics of alternative specialties from a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment (DCE) of junior doctors, then follows up the junior doctors from the DCE over the following twelve years to compare their actual labour market outcomes with their estimated preferences. Our results show that stronger preferences for higher earnings are associated with choosing the specialist rather than the general practice track after five years but this effect is smaller and not statistically significant after 12 years. Non-pecuniary intrinsic attributes of specialties, specifically those reflecting the ability to use human capital abilities and skills (e.g. academic opportunities or the ability to perform procedural work) are more enduring predictors of specialty choice over the long term. While the gap in earnings between general practitioners and specialists appears to impact on choices in the short term, this may be less relevant in the long term where matching to specialties based on abilities and skills play a more persistent role.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102697"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143611325","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 : 2025-03-01DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102692
René Böheim , Christoph Freudenthaler , Mario Lackner
{"title":"Male coaches increase the risk-taking of female teams—Evidence from the NCAA","authors":"René Böheim , Christoph Freudenthaler , Mario Lackner","doi":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102692","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102692","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We analyze the effect of the coach’s gender on risk-taking in women’s NCAA basketball teams. Coach’s gender has a sizable and significant effect on the team’s risk-taking, a finding that is robust to an instrumental variable approach. We find that women’s teams with a male head coach are 6 percentage points more likely to take risk than women’s teams with a female head coach. This gap is persistent within games and does not change with intermediate performance. Since risk-taking has a positive effect on winning a game, female head coaches could improve their team’s success by taking more risk.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48153,"journal":{"name":"Labour Economics","volume":"94 ","pages":"Article 102692"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143548369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}