Ending child labour can only be through expanding family opportunities
11 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic growth, human capital, labour economics, technological progress Tags: Ben Powell, child labour
The demand for labour is a derived demand
03 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: demand for labour, derived demand for labour, in reputation the, marginal revenue product of labour
The willingness to pay of buyers is the fundamental constraint on wages, conditions, and job amenities including reduced hours of work. Entrepreneurs will not pay no more for inputs – be it labour, land, machinery, or raw materials – than they expect to recoup later on from the sale of their final product (Hicks 1932; Hamermesh 1996).
Wages reflect the value the employee adds to the sales of the firm. The value of what an employee adds is set by the consumers who buy or abstain from buying the output of the firm.
The prices that the final consumer will pay or refuse to pay for products assigns to each kind of labour used in its production a maximum profitable wage. An employer cannot pay higher wages or provide more generous working conditions if buyers are not willing to pay more to cover the extra cost of this (Hicks 1932; Stigler 1987). A profit minded employer cannot grant favours to employees at the expense of customers.
Employers compete for the services of workers who are seeking a range of jobs in industry and occupational labour markets in the areas in which they live. An employer who offers wages, working hours and conditions below what others are paying for the extra value added by a worker will experience higher staff turnover as employees quit to more rewarded jobs elsewhere (Stigler 1987).
These less alert employers will also struggle to recruit and retain the types of workers that are the most profitable for that firm to employ unless they pay the going rate. Rivalry with other sellers sets the maximum on what an employer can profitably pay in wages and survive.
Competition from other employers sets a minimum in wages, hours, working conditions and job amenities to recruit and retain a profitable workforce. Wages are demarked both by what consumers are willing to pay for what the firm produces and by what wages that rival employers are offering in comparable jobs (Stigler 1987).
The politics of ethnicity-based research in New Zealand
30 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, politics - New Zealand, population economics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: employment discrimination, inequality, Maori economic development, poverty, Simon Chapple, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
When Simon Chapple in 2000 wrote “Māori Socio-Economic Disparity”, which showed that disadvantage in New Zealand is more closely tied to age, marital status, education, skills, and geographic location than it is to ethnicity, broadly conceived, such as Māori ethnicity:
- He was summoned before the Māori Affairs Committee of parliament to defend his paper! His chief executive at the Ministry of Social Policy went along with him to defend what he wrote while employed as a senior analyst at the Department of Labour. Staff at his new ministry launched a petition to have Simon fired.
- The head of the Māori Affairs Ministry accused Simon of breaching the public service code of conduct.
Chapple also found that there are important differences in socio economic development by Māori self-identity. Those who identified only as Māori did worse than those that are identified as Māori and another ethnicity. Identifying only as Māori also correlated with living in rural New Zealand.
In terms of employment discrimination, employers would not know whether a Māori job applicant identified as only as Māori or also with another ethnicity, so discrimination is not a good explanation of Māori disadvantage because of this counterfactual. A major driver of Māori disadvantage, which is identifying on the Census form solely as Maori, is simply unknown to discriminating employers as a basis for discrimination in hiring and promotion.
There were editorials in the Dominion Post, which I cannot find online, and in the New Zealand Herald. The latter said:
The Government is being prodded to recognise that Maori deprivation has more to do with socio-economic factors than ethnicity.
This was the conclusion of a report by the Labour Department’s senior research analyst, Simon Chapple. Helen Clark might well have had that finding partly in mind when she referred to a lot of water having gone under the bridge since the Government first formulated legislation.
Mr Chapple said, in essence, that place of residence, age, education and skills had more to do with poverty than race. In areas such as South Auckland, Northland and the central North Island, there were poor Maori, but there were also poor Pākehā and poor Pasifika.
The Minister attacked him and the paper as well for contradicting the Minister’s claim during the election campaign that everything got worse for Maori in the 1990s.
Real equivalised median household income rose 47% from 1994 to 2010; for Māori, this rise was 68%; for Pasifika, 77% (Perry July 2014)
See Karen Baehler’s Ethnicity-based research and politics: snapshots from the United States and New Zealand for more information and a comparison with the similar response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: A Case for National Action in 1965.
About a quarter of Negro families are headed by women. The divorce rate is about 2 1/2 times what it is [compared with whites],” Moynihan said. “The number of fatherless children keeps growing. And all these things keep getting worse, not better, over recent years.”
Moynihan, now retired from the United States Senate, was a senior official in LBJ’s Labor Department in 1965. He wrote his report on a typewriter over a few weeks and had the publications office in the basement of the Labor Department print 100 of them, marked “For Official Use Only.”
- He warned about the breakdown of the African-American family where deprivation and disorganisation had formed their own vicious circle.
- Many civil rights leaders had labelled Moynihan’s report a subtle form of racism because of its unflattering portrayal of the black family (Wilson 1987).
- These accusations of racism helped make the breakdown of the family a taboo subject in social policy in the USA
see The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades for a review by the best and the brightest in American economics and sociology on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prophetic warnings. Holzer says, for example:
Moynihan was extremely insightful and even prescient in arguing that the employment situation of young black men was a “crisis . . . that would only grow worse.”
He understood that these trends involve both limits on labour market opportunities that these young men face as well as skill deficits of and behavioural responses by the young men themselves.
More children are growing-up without a working father living in the home and glean the awareness that work is a central expectation of adult life (Wilson 1987, 1996).
Single-parent households increased from 13 per cent of all Māori households in 1981 to 24.4 per cent in the 2006 Census. In the 2006 Census, 70 per cent of Māori single parent households were on a low income compared to 15 per cent of other Māori one family households (Kiro, Randow and Sporle 2010).
Most of the skill gaps that are present at the age of 18 – skill gaps which substantially explain gaps in adult earnings and employment in all groups – are also present at the age of five (Cunha and Heckman 2007). There is much evidence to show that disadvantaged children have lower levels of soft skills (non-cognitive skills): motivation, persistence, self-discipline, the ability to work with others, the ability to defer gratification and plan ahead, etc. (Heckman 2008). Most of the skills that are acquired at school build on these soft skills that are moulded and reinforced within whānau.
When I started working on labour economics in 2007 I found that the labour economics of Māori was very narrowly written and stayed well clear of the minefield that Simon braved about how ethnicity does not matter that much to Māori social disadvantage.
Lessons from field trials with work mandates
30 Jul 2014 2 Comments
in human capital, labour economics, labour supply, welfare reform Tags: 1996 US welfare reforms, labour supply, mandatory work requirements, policy trade-offs, welfare reforms, work for the dole
One of the most controversial aspect of the U.S. program changes are the negative incentives – time limits, sanctions, and diversion – that are built into their structure.
All of these policies limit the entitlement to cash public assistance, by either enforcing behavioural requirements (such as work search) or limiting the availability of assistance.
As Besley and Coate (1992) pointed out, linking such requirements with public assistance payments can help deter welfare participation among those who could find a job on their own.
The majority of evaluations of mandatory welfare-to-work programs show significant increases in labour supply and reduced welfare dependency. The drawback is the increase in wage income is greatly offset by the decline in benefit income. In–work tax credits played a major role in making work pay in 1996 U.S. welfare reform
The Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) was implemented in 1994 and provided a strong earnings threshold, allowing women to receive some cash assistance until their earnings reached about 140 per cent of the U.S. poverty line. It also required participation in mandatory job search programs.
A randomly assigned control group remained in AFDC without work requirements or substantial earnings thresholds. MFIP involved both strong negative and positive work incentives. A subset of the treatment group (also randomly assigned) was provided with the earnings thresholds but not the mandatory work requirements.
The MFIP results allow the separate and joint effects of mandatory job search and earnings thresholds to be explored. When only positive work incentives are provided through an expanded earnings threshold, this has little effect on labour supply, consistent with earlier results. The additional income provided by these higher thresholds had strong income-increasing and poverty-reducing effects. Once mandatory work requirements are added to MFIP, then labour supply increases as well, but there is little further effect on income or poverty.
The evaluations of MFIP suggest that the stick of work requirements increases labour supply, but has little effect on overall income as increases in earnings are offset by reduced benefits.
The carrot of greater earnings thresholds provides an income enhancing effect. When used together, there is increased work and higher earnings, along with reduced poverty.
The relatively strong measures to mandate work participation can be effective. Work mandates with sanctions are more effective at inducing work than are more financial incentives. Strict work requirements by themselves may have little income-enhancing effects if they are not combined with some form of wage support for the low-skilled.
Education and training programs do not seem any more effective in promoting labour force attachment and increased earnings than work experience programs. In various welfare reform experiments in the U.S. during the 1990s, states tested training programs – human capital development programs — against work first programs – labour force attachment programs.
The work-first programs increased earnings and decreased welfare usage faster, while human capital development programs cost more, particularly in the first year when women were training rather than working.
But even three years out, after women from human capital development programs had been in the labour market two years, human capital development participants still did not outperform labour force attachment participants.
This may suggest that the gains to experience among women who have been out of the labour market may be larger than the gains to formal education and training. Employment outcomes did not seem significantly worse among less skilled participants or participants with identifiable barriers to work, such as child care or health problems. Learning by doing and job match and job search capital are major sources of hard-to-measure post-school human capital and wages growth even for less skilled workers. Work-first programmes suggest that the reward from working which is human capital as well as wages are greater than an investment in time away from working to train.
The dual emphasis in the U.S. welfare reforms on positive work incentives and more punitive work mandates seems to have been important.
Work mandates (mandatory welfare-to-work programs, backed by sanctions and time limits) forced more people into work faster than would have naturally left welfare even strong economic environments. With low wages and (often) part-time hours, many welfare leavers would have gained little in income without subsidies to low-wage work. Reduced earnings thresholds, the expanded EITC, and subsidies to assist with child care or other work related expenses, all helped make work pay.
Diagrams HT: rand.org Conflicting Benefits Trade-Offs in Welfare Reform by Jeffrey Grogger, Lynn A. Karoly, and Jacob Alex Klerman (2002).
Alfred Marshall as a pioneer of human capital theory
21 Jul 2014 4 Comments
in history of economic thought, human capital, labour economics Tags: Alfred Marshall, human capital
Marshall viewed education as an instrument capable of lifting up the poor and relocating them into the middle class. The direct benefits come from eliminating much of
that wasteful negligence which allows genius that happens to be born of lowly parentage to expend itself in lowly work
The indirect benefits of education came from character formation:
[Education] confers great indirect benefits even on the ordinary workman. It stimulates his mental activity, it fosters in him a habit of wise inquisitiveness: it makes him more intelligent, more ready, more trustworthy in his ordinary work; it raises the tone of his life in working hours and out of working hours; it is thus an important means toward the production of material wealth; at the same time that, regarded as an end in itself, it is inferior to none of those which the production of material wealth can be made to subserve.
Marshall’s primary solution to the problem of poverty is education, but he also exhorts individuals to behave responsibly, with thrift and self control.
Close the Gender Pay Gap, Change the Way We Work – Claudia Goldin
19 Jul 2014 1 Comment
in human capital, labour economics, labour supply, personnel economics Tags: Claudia Goldin, gender wage gap
The desired ratio of older and younger workers
18 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in discrimination, human capital, labour economics, labour supply Tags: older workers
The large accumulation of firm and industry-specific human capital of older employees can be more in demand in some jobs than others (Lazear 1998).
The pace of technological change in a particular industry influences the role of different ratios of older and younger employees to the most profitable way to develop human capital within a given firm (Lazear 1998).
Recruitment, on-the-job training, and learning by doing are alternative methods of acquiring and accumulating human capital. The relative profitability of each method of developing and renewing human capital will depend upon whether internal or external sources are the cheaper suppliers of new human capital to the firm.
When technological change is rapid, knowledge of the new technology is often embodied in the formal education and recent job experiences of new entrants into the workforce and younger up-and-coming workers (Lazear 1998).
In industries with more rapid technological progress, the departure of older workers is less of a capital loss to employers. Employers may have fewer incentives to accommodate phased retirements if human capital rich replacements are available. These younger recruits may be embodied with the latest knowledge of new technologies through their formal education and schooling and their previous job experiences.
The amount of skills learnt on the job relative to formal education is important to the desired ratios of older and younger employees.
When on-the-job skills are important to the success of the firm, there is a great need for teachers to pass on these skills. Older experienced employees will be greatly valued as repositories of firm-specific human capital and as teachers to new employees (Lazear 1998).
When formal education acquitted outside the workplace is the more important way in which employees learn their skills, it will be less important for employers to invest in accommodations that retain older employees as teachers.
The extent to which the firm’s operations and customers are more idiosyncratic is important to the ratio of ratio of older and younger employees that is best for human capital accumulation (Lazear 1998).
Again, senior workers are more likely to have this special knowledge and act as teachers to recruits when the firm’s operations and customers are more idiosyncratic relative to other firms (Lazear 1998). Employers will be more reluctant to see older employees quit if they act as teachers to recruits in the ways of the firm.
An employer has less concerned if older employees plans to leave if the firm’s preferred ratio of younger to older employee is not harmed. In some cases, older employees are valued as teachers and repositories of knowledge. In other cases, staff turnover can be an opportunity to inject fresh blood (Lazear 1998). It is all in the operational particulars of each firm, the importance of on-the-job training versus formal education, and the pace of technological change in the industry.
Walter Williams Asks: “How Much Can Discrimination Explain?”
04 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
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