Showing 1 - 10 of 113
"Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation -- the steam engine -- on skill demand and the wage structure in the merchant shipping industry. We find that the technical change created a new demand for skilled workers, the engineers,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10002345208
From 1860 to 1913 the six colonies that became states of Australia strove to attract migrants from the UK with a variety of assisted passages. The colonies/states shared a common culture and sought migrants from a common source, the UK, but set policy independently of each other. This experience...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014310929
Studies of the determinants of emigration from Europe from 1850 to 1913 include the gains to migrants but often neglect the costs. One component of those costs is earnings forgone on the voyage. In this paper I present new data on the voyage times for emigrants from the UK traveling to the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014311200
Sailing ships persisted on emigrant voyages to Australia until the late nineteenth century and passage durations decreased by three weeks from the late 1840s to the mid-1880s. The shortening of voyages by sail has been linked to improvements in navigation and in sailing ship technology but...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015046123
We examine the timing of firms' operations in a formal model of labor demand. Merging a variety of data sets from Portugal from 1995-2004, we describe temporal patterns of firms' demand for labor and estimate production-functions and relative labor-demand equations. The results demonstrate the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003784408
Risk-averse job seekers fearing the scarring effect of unemployment meet vacancies offering contractual employment protection (CEP) in form of guaranteed employment (GEC) or severance pay contracts (SPC). A GEC fully eliminates both the income risk and the scarring risk of unemployment. SPC...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003158655
Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003902085
Since formal laws can be observed or ignored to varying degrees, the actual enforcement regime shapes incentives and constraints. Most of the studies exploring EPL effects on labour market performance implicitly assume that EPL compliance is near to complete and therefore all firms bear full...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003903309
Wage determination under asymmetric information generates inefficiencies due to excess turnover. Severance pay and layoff taxes can improve efficiency. We show that inefficient separations can even be fully removed with fixed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003906313
We examine theoretically and empirically the properties of the equilibrium wage function and its implications for policy. Our emphasis is on how the researcher approaches economic and policy questions when there is labor market heterogeneity leading to a set of wages. We focus on the application...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008688722