This brief on Seattle’s minimum wage experience represents the first in a series that CWED will be issuing on the effects of the current wave of minimum wage policies–those that range from $12 to $15. Upcoming CWED reports will present similar studies of Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and New York City, among others. The … Continue reading
This paper estimates dynamic employment multipliers in a U.S. county during 1998-2015. On average,one exogenous tradable job gain creates 1.1 jobs in the rest of the county economy in the same year, but is offset by losses of 0.23 job one year later and 0.32 job two years later. The multiplier is modest during the … Continue reading
This essay has examined the Italian SWTR, which is a typical example of the European Mediterranean one where the role of the State is marginal as compared to that of the family. The latter has to bear the cost of the extremely slow transition period young people undergo on their way from education to a … Continue reading
Recent studies have claimed that as many as 48 percent of college graduates are overqualified for the jobs they have, but this figure seems inconsistent with their comparatively higher earnings relative to earnings of workers without a college degree. To obtain that high mark, those studies classify many occupations that pay well as being a … Continue reading
There is growing interest in how schools can shape children’s non-cognitive skills (sometimes known as behavioral traits, soft skills, or personality). One reason for this interest is that non-cognitive skills predict a wide range of economic outcomes, such as employment and lifetime earnings, but are also relatively malleable—at least until adulthood. This opens up a … Continue reading
Economists generally accept that the skills rewarded in the labor market arise from a combination of endowed abilities, economic environments, and endogenous human capital in- vestments. Endowments, environments and investments almost certainly interact in compli- cated ways, transforming the distribution of abilities drawn at birth into a distribution of education, wages, and labor supply outcomes … Continue reading
This paper examines the relationship between workforce demographics and aggregate productivity. Changes in the age structure of the workforce is found to be significantly correlated with changes in aggregate productivity. Different demographic structures may be related to almost one quarter of the persistent productivity gap between the OECD and low income nations as well as … Continue reading
The goal of this study was to analyse the perceptions of Spanish women taking occupational training courses and of gender equality experts with respect to the relationship between initial formal education, occupational training, continuing education and employment, as well as the role played by the family in this relationship, in order to elucidate conceptions of … Continue reading
This paper analyses the individual driving factors of refugees’ and family migrants’ labour market performance, using an ordinal logistic regression model. In a basic model, their employment rate is being regressed against the main socio-demographic characteristics (sex, age, education), before a supplementary model includes other information (years of residence, language skills and information about parents) … Continue reading
Overeducation is known to be costly to workers and it also has negative implications for firms and the wider macro economy. To date, the vast body of research in the area has focused on examining the incidence and impacts of overeducation within countries. This paper attempts to examine patterns in overeducation between countries using a … Continue reading
The increased migration of skilled workers globally has led to a focus in the immigration literature on the economic costs of unsuccessful labour market integration. Less attention has been given to the consequences of employment difficulties, such as those related to over-education, on aspects of immigrants’ subjective well-being. Although a large proportion of immigrants experience … Continue reading
The differential sorting of men and women into different occupations could be an important channel through which gender wage differences are maintained. At the same time, the same factors that lead men and women to choose different occupations may also have a direct effect on the gender wage gap. Over the last decade, labor economists … Continue reading
In response to substantial provincial funding cuts through the 1990s combined with a declining postsecondary-aged domestic student population, Canada’s postsecondary institutions are increasingly tapping into the international student market for their tuition revenues. Complementing this increase, the Canadian government has in recent years made a number of important changes to its immigration policies easing the … Continue reading
As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labour, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. This column discusses evidence that industrial robots reduced employment and wages between 1990 and 2007. Estimates suggest that an extra robot per 1,000 workers reduces the employment to population ratio by 0.18-0.34 … Continue reading
Contrary to public perception, the migrant share of the world population has not changed substantially since the 1960s, with roughly 3 percent currently living in a country different from their country of birth. Global migration patterns, however, have become increasingly asymmetric as high-skilled migration has become a greater force globally. The international distribution of talent … Continue reading