Are women just too smart to be computer scientists?
08 Dec 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, managerial economics, occupational choice, organisational economics, personnel economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: economics of personality traits, gender wage gap, reversing gender gap
Women started drifting away from computer science in the mid-1980s. The interpretation put forward by the professional grievance industry, that is, by National Public Radio in the USA is:
The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.
These early personal computers weren’t much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing.
And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.
Source: NPR
Another interpretation is there are systematic differences between teenage boys and teenage girls in verbal and written skills. Young women moved away from enrolling in computer…
View original post 224 more words
Gender pay gap at age 25-29, OECD countries @GreenCatherine
03 Dec 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: compensating differentials, gender wage gap, labour demographics
The gender pay gap in New Zealand rounds down to zero for women in their mid-20s!
The role of the six-day working week in Japanese sexism and the gender wage gap
02 Dec 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, economic history, economics, economics of love and marriage, gender, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, personnel economics Tags: asymmetric marriage premium, compensating differentials, entrepreneurial alertness, gender wage gap, marital division of labour
When I was studying in Japan, they were at the end of phasing out working on Saturdays. The staff at my university work on Saturday mornings for four hours and then went home.
The Japanese working week was reduced by law from 48 to 44 hours per week in 1988 and to 40 hours per week from 1993 (Prescott 1999; Hayashi and Prescott 2002). The Japanese stopped routinely working on Saturdays over the 1990s. The number of national holidays was increased by three and an extra day of annual leave was also prescribed by law.
While feuding with strangers on an unrelated matter about the gender wage gap, it somehow occurred to me that the six-day working week might have something to do with what is on the face of a large amount of sexism in Japan and a large gender wage gap.
That feud with strangers was about unconscious bias as a driver of the gender wage gap in New Zealand. The gender wage gap Japan is attributed to conscious prejudice.
Source: OECD Stat.
In the above chart I have plotted the average weekly hours worked of Japanese workers and the Japanese gender wage gap. Two things can be noticed from the above chart:
- there is a sharp reduction in the number of hours worked per week by Japanese workers when they stopped working on Saturdays; and
- the gender wage gap started declining after the introduction of a five-day working week in Japan.
In a country where it is standard to work six days a week, the price of motherhood would be much higher than in other countries industrialised countries that phased out the 48-hour week decades previous. The asymmetric marriage premium would also be much higher if one partner to the marriage worked a six-day week while the other looked after the children.
Other drivers of the gender wage gap that arise from human capital specialisation and depreciation and from the differences of a few years in the marrying ages of men and women would be intensified if people worked another day per week. The payoff from a marital division of labour and human capital specialisation where one worked long hours and the other focused on investing in human capital that allow them to care for the children and move in and out of the workforce with less human capital depreciation would be much larger.
Much is made of the distinctiveness of Japanese culture and its sexism. In my time in Japan, the thing I notice most distinctively about Japanese culture was its extraordinary pragmatism and willingness to change rapidly. The Japanese economic miracle was founded on rapid industrialisation, innovation and repeated renewal of human capital. That requires an entrepreneurial spirit and open-mindedness.
Cultural and preference based explanations of the gender wage Including that in Japan underrate the rapid social change in the role of women in the 20th century in all countries in all cultures. As Gary Becker explains:
… major economic and technological changes frequently trump culture in the sense that they induce enormous changes not only in behaviour but also in beliefs. A clear illustration of this is the huge effects of technological change and economic development on behaviour and beliefs regarding many aspects of the family.
Attitudes and behaviour regarding family size, marriage and divorce, care of elderly parents, premarital sex, men and women living together and having children without being married, and gays and lesbians have all undergone profound changes during the past 50 years. Invariably, when countries with very different cultures experienced significant economic growth, women’s education increased greatly, and the number of children in a typical family plummeted from three or more to often much less than two.
A good explanation of this rapid social change is in Timur Kuran’s “Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolutions” and “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989“.
Kuran suggests that political revolutions and large shifts in political opinion will catch us by surprise again and again because of people’s readiness to conceal their true political preferences under perceived social pressure:
People who come to dislike their government are apt to hide their desire for change as long as the opposition seems weak. Because of the preference falsification, a government that appears unshakeable might see its support crumble following a slight surge in the opposition’s apparent size, caused by events insignificant in and of themselves.
Kuran argues that everyone has a different revolutionary threshold where they reveal their true beliefs, but even one individual shift to opposition leads to many others to come forward and defy the existing order. Small concessions embolden the ground-swell of revolution.
Those ready to oppose social intolerance or who are lukewarm in their intolerance keep their views private until a coincidence of factors gives them the courage to bring their views into the open. They find others share their views and there is a revolutionary bandwagon effect.
Plenty of people have had personal experiences of this in the 1980s and the 1990s when there were rapid changes in social and political attitudes about racism, sexism and gay rights. This includes Japan.
In the case of the Japanese gender wage gap, the move from a six-day to a five-day working week radically changed the asymmetric marriage premium and the payoff from investing in both specialised human capital and in human capital that depreciates quickly when away from work.
This large shift in incentives to work and invest in human capital would embolden a change in social attitudes. This is because the previous views were no longer profitable and many would gain from the change. Others who prefer just to go along with crowd would quickly follow them in to stay in tune with whatever is now popular.
Much of Japanese sexism may be the preference falsification that was low-cost when there was a six-day working week. The move to a five-day working week greatly increased the cost of that sexism and the profits from finding new ways of organising the workplace that better matched motherhood and career in Japan.
Undervalued workers are an untapped business opportunity for more alert entrepreneurs to hire these undervalued workers. In the case of Japan, with a five-day working week, hiring women for jobs that involved considerable investment in firm-specific human capital became more profitable. Previously under a six-day working week it was more profitable to invest in men because they undertook few childcare responsibilities. Under a five-day working week, that payoff matrix favours women more than in the past.
Does plastic surgery pay?
02 Dec 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice
The Heckman equation explained
26 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economics of education, human capital Tags: early childhood education, economics of families, James Heckman
White Brits are the ethnic group least likely to go to university
24 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, human capital, labour economics Tags: British economy, College premium, graduate premium, tertiary attainment, university premium
@economicpolicy gathers more evidence of a waning gender pay gap @joshbivens_DC @eliselgould
22 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, economic history, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, minimum wage, occupational choice, poverty and inequality Tags: asymmetric marriage premium, Claudia Goldin, compensating differentials, economics of fertility, gender wage gap, marriage and divorce, power couples
As part of a large paper calling for massive government intervention, the Economic Policy Institute, impeccably left-wing, massed a considerable amount of evidence about the withering away of the gender wage gap and anomalies in what is left of that gap. None of these anomalies bolster the case for more regulation of the labour market.
The first of their charts showed the large reduction in the gender wage gap in the USA. Women’s wages have been increasing consistently over the last 40 years or so. The second of their tweeted charts shows that women of all races consistently outperformed men in wages growth, often by a large margin.
Their most interesting chart is about how the gender gap is not only highest among top earners, their pay gap has not fallen at all in the last 40 years. If anything, that gender wage gap is rising at the top end of the labour market albeit slowly. Progress in closing the gender gap been pretty consistent at the lower pay levels. That progress is certainly better than no progress at all.
The Economic Policy Institute didn’t enquire in any detail into why women with the most options in the labour market had made the least progress in closing the gender wage gap.
None of their solutions such as more collective-bargaining and a higher minimum wage will help the top end of the job market.
There is an anomaly in the Economic Policy Institute’s reasoning. The women who would suffer least from a purported inequality of bargaining power inherent in the capitalist system and have plenty of human capital have had least success in closing the gender pay gap. These women can shop around for better job offers and start their own businesses. Many do because they are professionals where self-employment and professional partnerships are common.
The better discussions of the gender wage gap emphasise choice. Women choosing at the top end of the labour market to balance career and family and choosing the occupation and education where the net advantages of doing that are the greatest. As the Economic Policy Institute itself notes:
In 2014, the gap was smallest at the 10th percentile, where women earned 90.9 percent of men’s wages. The minimum wage is partially responsible for this greater equality among the lowest earners, as it results in greater wage uniformity at the bottom of the distribution.
The gap is highest at the top of the distribution, with 95th percentile women earning 78.6 percent as much as their male counterparts. Economist Claudia Goldin (2014) postulates that the gap is larger for women in high-wage professions because they are penalized for not working long, inflexible hours that often come with many professional jobs, due in large part to the arrival of children and long-standing social expectations about the division of household labour between men and women.
What the Economic Policy Institute does not explain is why these long-standing social expectations about the division of household labour should be strongest among well-paid women with plenty of options.
Among these options of high-powered women in well-paid jobs is the ability to buy every labour-saving appliance, hire a nanny and ample childcare and acquire everything else on the list of demands of the Economic Policy Institute on closing the gender pay gap. Something doesn’t add up?
Of course, the Economic Policy Institute discusses the unadjusted gender wage rather than the adjusted gender wage. When you study the gender wage gap after making adjustments for demographic and other obvious factors, it is clear that this pay gap is driven by the choices women make between career and family.
Claudia Goldin did a great study of Harvard MBAs using online surveys of their careers. This is the very group that according to the Economic Policy Institute have made the least progress in bringing down patriarchy in the labour market. Specifically, the overturning of traditional expectations about the marital division of labour in childcare and parenthood.
https://twitter.com/alyssalynn7/status/669219008747610113
Goldin found that three proximate factors accounted for the large and rising gender gap in earnings among MBA graduates as their careers unfold:
- differences in training prior to MBA graduation,
- differences in career interruptions, and
- differences in weekly hours.
The greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs are largely associated with motherhood. There are some careers that severely penalise any time at all out of the workforce or working less than punishingly long and rigid hours.
A 2014 Harvard Business School study found that 28 percent of recent female alumni took off more than six months to care for children; only 2 percent of men did.
Claudia Goldin found one counterfactual that cancels out the gender wage gap amongst MBA professionals: hubby earns less! Female MBAs who have a partner who earn less than them earn as much as the average MBA professional on an hourly basis but work a few less hours per week.
The gender wage gap is persisted in high-paying jobs because career women have so many options. Studies of top earning professionals show that they make quite deliberate choices between family and career. The better explanation of why so many women are in a particular occupation is job sorting: that particular job has flexible hours and the skills do not depreciate as fast for workers who take time off, working part-time or returning from time out of the workforce.
Low job turnover workers will be employed by firms that invest more in training and job specific human capital:
- Higher job turnover workers, such as women with children, will tend to move into jobs that have less investment in specialised human capital, and where their human capital depreciates at a slower pace.
- Women, including low paid women, select careers in jobs that match best in terms of work life balance and allows them to enter and leave the workforce with minimum penalty and loss of skills through depreciation and obsolescence.
This is the choice hypothesis of the gender wage gap. Women choose to educate for occupations where human capital depreciates at a slower pace.
The gender wage gap for professionals can be explained by the marriage market combined with assortative mating:
- Graduates are likely to marry each other and form power couples; and
- There tends to be an age gap between men and women in long-term relationships and marriages of two years.
This two-year age gap means that the husband has two additional years of work experience and career advancement. This is likely to translate into higher pay and more immediate promotional prospects.
An interesting and informed look at the pay gap between men and women economist.com/blogs/freeexch… https://t.co/0nxtC9ILWo—
Charles Read (@EconCharlesRead) November 06, 2015
Maximising household income would imply that the member of the household with a higher income, and greater immediate promotional prospects stay in the workforce. This is entirely consistent with the choice hypothesis and equalising differentials as the explanation for the gender wage gap. As Solomon Polachek explains:
At least in the past, getting married and having children meant one thing for men and another thing for women. Because women typically bear the brunt of child-rearing, married men with children work more over their lives than married women. This division of labour is exacerbated by the extent to which married women are, on average, younger and less educated than their husbands.
This pattern of earnings behaviour and human capital and career investment will persist until women start pairing off with men who are the same age or younger than them. That is, more women will have to start marrying down in both income and social maturity.
Women executives earn more, are promoted faster! @greencatherine @janelogie
20 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in gender, human capital, occupational choice
Source: Limor Golan.
How labour and other markets work
18 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, Austrian economics, entrepreneurship, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, Milton Friedman, minimum wage, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, survivor principle, unions Tags: market process, The meaning of competition
@NZGreens is the gender pay gap 6.6%, 11.8% or 14%?
10 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, politics - New Zealand Tags: compensating differentials, gender wage gap, Leftover Left, New Zealand Greens, Twitter left
Source: Statistics New Zealand: New Zealand Income Survey.
@greencatherine Unadjusted NZ gender pay gap is 6%, the best in world. http://t.co/2fYuVbJg9E—
Jim Rose (@JimRose69872629) March 19, 2015
Source: Gender pay gap | Ministry for Women.
The unadjusted gender pay gap has been in a long-term decline for generations. The unadjusted gender wage gap in 2015 is 11.8% as shown in the above chart and in the second New Zealand Green’s Facebook link above but not first of their Facebook links above where it is claimed to be 14%.
To sex-up their numbers, the Labour Party and Greens used the gap between the average wages of men and women. This was rather than the median wage to make their gender wage gap comparisons despite the pious commitment of the Greens to use median wage in their gender wage gap calculations in the recent past.
The unadjusted gender pay gap has all but disappeared at the bottom of the labour market as the chart below shows. The gender wage gap remains stubbornly high at the high end of the wage market at 20% because of compensating differentials. Professional women are balancing families and careers in choosing the occupations that best suits each individual woman.
Unions – not the cause of our 40 hour workweek
10 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, health and safety, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, Marxist economics, minimum wage, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, unions Tags: The Great Enrichment, union power, union wage premium
Most of the gender pay gap explained by age, marriage, hours worked
05 Nov 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of love and marriage, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA Tags: asymmetric marriage premium, compensating differentials, female labour force participation, gender wage gap, marital labour supply
HT: Lorenzo Michael Warby.
@EconomicPolicy showed gender pay equality when arguing the opposite @CHSommers @Mark_J_Perry
02 Nov 2015 2 Comments
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA Tags: asymmetric marriage premium, compensating differentials, gender wage gap, marital division of labour, power couples, top 1%, top incomes, Twitter left, union power, union wage premium
The Economic Policy Institute were good enough to dig out unit record data on the unadjusted US gender wage gap by percentiles. In attempting to show there was a persistent gender pay gap, the impeccably left-wing Economic Policy Institute showed that the unadjusted gender pay gap has all but disappeared in the USA.
There is next to no gender wage gap even in unadjusted terms towards the bottom of the labour market. This is despite all the protestations of the Left of an inherent inequality of bargaining power between the bosses and workers.
The low paid are supposed to be powerless unless unionised. Declining unionisation is a leading explanation on the Left of the rising income shares of the top 10%, top 1% in the top 0.1%.
If that inherent inequality of bargaining power trundled out at every opportunity by the Twitter Left explains anything in the labour market, this inequality of bargaining power should be operating with greatest strength at the bottom of the labour market.
Clearly the inherent inequality of bargaining power between the bosses and workers is not doing its job regarding the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap in the USA increases as you move up the income ladder rather than the other way around.
The explanation of the Economic Policy Institute for greater gender pay equality at the bottom is the minimum wage and male wage stagnation:
It is interesting to note that the wage gap between genders is smaller at the 10th percentile than at the 95th. At the 10th percentile, women earn 91 percent of men’s wages while women make only 79 percent of men’s wages at the 95th percentile.
The minimum wage is partially responsible for this greater equality among the lowest earners—it sets a wage floor that applies to everyone, which means that people near the bottom of the distribution are likely to make more equal wages. Also, low-wage workers are disproportionately women, which means that the minimum wage particularly bolsters women’s wages.
…Although women have seen modest wage gains in the last several decades, the main reason the gender wage gap has slowly narrowed is that the vast majority of men’s wages have stagnated or declined.
It is a bit rich for the Economic Policy Institute to praise the minimum wage as a force for increasing incomes after spending so much of its time saying how the minimum wage has fallen way behind wages growth in general.
The gender gap lingers at the top of the labour market despite the quite substantial wage gains for women as compared to men over the past 15 years. The Economic Policy Institute dismissed the substantial gains as modest despite their own documenting of them.
It is even richer for the Economic Policy Institute to start extending the male wage stagnation hypothesis to the top 20% and top 10%.
The top of the income distribution has not been known previously known as victims of wage stagnation.
The gender wage gap remains stubbornly high at the top end of the US labour market at 20% for the last few decades. The gender wage is so large and has stayed large at the top half of the labour market for the past few decades because of compensating differentials. Women on higher incomes are balancing families and careers in choosing the occupations that best suits each individual woman, their talents and educational choices.
Source: OECD Employment Database.
Studies of top earning professionals show that they make quite deliberate choices between family and career. The better explanation of why so many women are in a particular occupation is job sorting: that particular job has flexible hours and the skills do not depreciate as fast for workers who take time off, working part-time or returning from time out of the workforce. Low job turnover workers will be employed by firms that invest more in training and job specific human capital.
- Higher job turnover workers, such as women with children, will tend to move into jobs that have less investment in specialised human capital, and where their human capital depreciates at a slower pace.
- Women, including low paid women, select careers in jobs that match best in terms of work life balance and allows them to enter and leave the workforce with minimum penalty and loss of skills through depreciation and obsolescence.
This is the choice hypothesis of the gender wage gap. Women choose to educate for occupations where human capital depreciates at a slower pace. This gender wage gap for professionals can be explained by the marriage market combined with assortative mating:
- Graduates are likely to marry each other and form power couples; and
- There tends to be an age gap between men and women in long-term relationships and marriages of two years.
This two-year age gap means that the husband has two additional years of work experience and career advancement. This is likely to translate into higher pay and more immediate promotional prospects. Maximising household income would imply that the member of the household with a higher income, and greater immediate promotional prospects stay in the workforce.
This is consistent with the choice hypothesis and equalising differentials as the explanation for the gender wage gap. As Solomon Polachek explains:
At least in the past, getting married and having children meant one thing for men and another thing for women. Because women typically bear the brunt of child-rearing, married men with children work more over their lives than married women. This division of labour is exacerbated by the extent to which married women are, on average, younger and less educated than their husbands.
This pattern of earnings behaviour and human capital and career investment will persist until women start pairing off with men who are the same age or younger than them.
In low-paying jobs, there is little in the way of trade-offs other than full-time or part-time work. Low-paid jobs do not involve choosing majors at university, choosing careers, industries and employers that call for long hours and uninterrupted careers or not so long hours, fewer human capital and promotional penalties for time off and more work-life balance. The choice hypothesis is the far better explanation for the persistence of the unadjusted gender wage gap in the USA as Polachek explains:
The gender wage gap for never marrieds is a mere 2.8%, compared with over 20% for marrieds. The gender wage gap for young workers is less than 5%, but about 25% for 55–64-year-old men and women.
If gender discrimination were the issue, one would need to explain why businesses pay single men and single women comparable salaries. The same applies to young men and young women. One would need to explain why businesses discriminate against older women, but not against younger women. If corporations discriminate by gender, why are these employers paying any groups of men and women roughly equal pay?
Why is there no discrimination against young single women, but large amounts of discrimination against older married women? … Each type of possible discrimination is inconsistent with negligible wage differences among single and younger employees compared with the large gap among married men and women (especially those with children, and even more so for those who space children widely apart)
The main drivers of the gender wage gap are unknown to employers such as whether the would-be recruit or employer is married, their partner is present, how many children they have, how many of these children are under 12, and how many years are there between the births of their children.
The low skilled won’t be hired for living wage jobs @nmjyoung @EtuUnion @WellingtonMayor @FIRST_Union
30 Oct 2015 3 Comments
in applied price theory, human capital, labour economics, minimum wage, personnel economics, politics - New Zealand, rentseeking Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, expressive voting, living wage
The upshot of the Wellington City Council paying a living wage to employees and including those of sub-contractors is over time the composition of their low skilled labour force will change. The Council will recruit people who can earn in other jobs $19.25. Workers who don’t have the capability of producing at that level of productivity will never be interviewed.
The Council is required by law to recruit on merit and to be a good employer. Workers who would never have previously applied for Wellington City Council jobs covered by the living wage decision because they can earn better pay elsewhere will now do so because of the higher pay of these council jobs.
These higher skilled workers will crowd out the lower skilled workers that currently apply for the low paid jobs covered by the upcoming living wage increase. The workers with the type of skills that currently win those jobs covered by the living wage increase will not be shortlisted because the quality of the recruitment pool will increase because of the living wage. There will be an influx of more skilled workers attracted by the higher wages for council jobs because of the living wage policy. They will go to the head of the queue and displaced workers who currently apply for and win those council jobs.
A living wage is an exclusionary policy where ordinary workers, often with families who are not productive enough to produce $19.25 per hour plus overheads will never be interviewed by the Wellington City Council or council subcontractors for a job covered by the living wage increase.
In a cruel twist of fate, because the council is implementing its living wage on 1 July 2016, higher quality workers will start applying for jobs covered by the living wage increase now. This will further reduce the number of initial beneficiaries of the living wage increase. Council workers recruited between now on 1 July 2016 will be applying in anticipation of that increase.
The living wage adopted by the Wellington City Council is a classic case of rent capitalisation. With the council paying over the odds for a job, workers will have every incentive to compete for the higher wages. The most obvious way of winning that race for these limited number of higher paying jobs is to be a more productive worker than the other job applicants.
The living wage jobs will attract a higher quality pool of job applicants. These higher quality job applicants who would not otherwise applied but for the living wage will outcompete existing low skilled low paid workers who would otherwise benefited from the living wage increase. In some cases, these higher quality, more skilled recruits will be taking a job at the Council or its contractors covered by the living wage increase on much the same pay as they command anywhere else in the labour market. As such, ratepayers are paying about 20% more for no reduction in poverty.
The existing employees of the Wellington City Council and its subcontractors will be locked into golden handcuffs. Workers who lack the labour productivity to command a wage equivalent of the living wage elsewhere in the job market will never quit. Wellington City Council employees covered by the living wage will also have a much reduced incentive to up-skill will seek promotion. There will be no internal reward for undertaking additional training or job responsibilities among low skilled is because the living wage will mean they will not get a wage rise at the Council.
The windfall gains to the current low paid council employees but no future council employees illustrate the folly of a living wage policy at the Wellington City Council. Some of these existing Wellington City Council employees will have children so child poverty rates may improve. That is all that will be gained for a permanent increase of about 20% in the price paid for council services.
Because of the change in the recruitment pool for all future vacancies, the impact on the poverty rates among future council employees will be minimal. These recruits to future council vacancies covered by the living wage increase will be recruited from other jobs where they already earn a similar pay to the living wage paid at the Council. Ratepayers will pay about 20% more for services in return for a small reduction in child poverty among its existing council employees.
As these existing employees move on, and they will one day, ratepayers will continue to pay about 20% more until either the Council sees the errors of its ways or the policy is overturning on judicial review. There will be no reduction in family poverty because new recruits are switching to the Council for the usual wage premium from moving to one job to another and that’s it. As the existing council employees leave, any child poverty reduction from the living wage policy will fade to zero.
As mentioned, potential recruits who are productive enough to earn a competitive market wage equal to the living wage level in their existing jobs will be the most qualified applicants. The best of these higher quality applicants will fill future council vacancies covered by the living wage policy. Workers who are not productive enough to earn the living wage in other jobs simply won’t be shortlisted for council jobs. The Council must by law hire the best qualified applicant for any vacancy.
Source: Peter Kolesar, Garrett van Rysin and Wayne Cutler.
Any extra labour productivity from a living wage at the Wellington City Council is in doubt because low skilled service sectors are notorious for their low potential for productivity gains. They are the bread-and-butter of Baumol’s disease.
Source: Chris Rauchle.
It’s kicking the Wellington City Council when it is down to mention that low paid workers with families will lose a considerable part of the living wage increase because of reductions in their family tax credits – reductions in the Working for Families in-work tax credit. Any living wage increase at the Wellington City Council is the subject of multiple clawbacks by IRD. There is income tax, a 25% abatement rate on Working for Families tax credits on any family income above about $36,000 and 15% GST. All in all, the transfer out of the pockets of ratepayers to IRD would be at least one-third.
I have not included any accommodation supplement, childcare subsidy or community services card the low paid worker is receiving from WINZ. The winding back of these social benefits to the low paid worker and his or her family is a pointless transfer from Wellington City ratepayers to the national taxpayer.
It will be kicking Wellington City Council even further to remind of the enforcement and compliance costs of living wage ordinances in the USA at the city level.
The Wellington City Council this week acted against legal advice to require contractors under joint services agreements with other councils in the Wellington region to pay employees who work within the boundaries of Wellington city the living wage. The American cities had to define the minimum number of hours in a day that minimum wage workers who are mobile for their jobs had to spend within their city limits before their employer was subject to their living wage ordinance.
It is standard to put forward an efficiency wage argument for a living wage. The higher wage paid as result of the introduction of the living wage will motivate workers to work harder and cheer each other on.
Source: John Horton.
These workers paid the efficiency wage will require less supervision because under an efficiency wage, a rate of pay that is more than the going rate for their skills and experience with other employers and in other industries and occupations, these workers paid the efficiency wage have more to lose if disciplined or dismissed. By the way, the theory of the efficiency wages is an American theory where there is employment at will.
This additional effort and greater motivation from the efficiency wage, from the above market rate of pay, will reduce the costs of supervision to the employer of teams of employees as well as increase output per worker. This is supposed to offset some of the costs of the living wage increase.
At bottom, this efficiency wage hypothesis is entrepreneurs are unaware of the higher quality and greater self-motivation of better paid recruits for vacancies but wise bureaucrats and farsighted politicians notice these gaps in the market. Bureaucrats and politicians notice these gaps in the market before those who gain from superior entrepreneur alertness to hitherto untapped opportunities for profit do so and instead leave that money on the table.
I won’t mention that many of the modern theories of the firm focus, in part or in full on reducing opportunistic behaviour, cheating and fraud in employment relationships. The cost of discovering prices and making and enforcing contracts and getting what you pay for are central to the Coase’s theory of the firm put forward in 1937.
In Barzel’s (1982) theory of the firm, measurement costs drive the emergence and organisation of the firm. The firm arose to minimising the cost of measuring what is to be exchanged by bringing some of those measuring tasks in-house. Much of the organisation of the firm, including the degree of vertical and horizontal integration and many different forms of contracting are driven by ensuring owners and managers get what they pay for and are not overcharged through manipulation or cheating.
Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972) theory of the firm focused on moral hazard in team production. As they explain
Two key demands are placed on an economic organization-metering input productivity and metering rewards.
The main rationale in personnel economics from everything ranging from employer funding of retirement pensions to the structure of promotions and executive pay including stock options is around better rewarding self-motivating employees and reducing the costs of monitoring employee effort.
Source: Department of Labour (2009).
The profits of entrepreneurs for running a firm is directly linked from their successful policing of the efforts of employees and sub-contractors to ensure the team and each member perform as promised and individual rewards matched individual contributions (Alchian and Demsetz 1972; Barzel 1987). The entrepreneur is a residual claimant to the revenues of the firm net of paying all other inputs. Entrepreneurs must successfully police the contributions of their employers and contractors if they are to survive in competition. The better they are at this, the more the alert entrepreneur profits.
Every profit minded entrepreneur seeks to hire the group of workers with the lowest cost per unit of output produced by them. Those that do not will not survive in competition with more alert rivals. The trade-off between worker quality and wages in setting hiring standards is a routine entrepreneurial decision in every firm when recruiting:
Managers often say that their goal in hiring is to obtain the best quality workers. It sounds like a good idea, but is it? The most productive workers are also likely to be the most expensive. Should the goal instead be to hire the least expensive workers? …The best worker is not the cheapest, nor the most productive, but the one with the highest ratio of productivity to cost. We should hire as long as the marginal productivity of the last worker hired is greater than or equal to the cost of the worker.
Source: Lazear and Gibbs.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments