IZA Prize in Labor Economics – serie

This volume presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labor markets and public policy reforms. Professor Blundell's hugely influential work has enhanced greatly our understanding of how individuals' behavior on the labor market respond to taxation and social policy influence. Edited by IZA, this volume brings together the author's key papers, some co-authored and some unpublished, with new introductions and an epilogue. It covers some of the main research insights in the study of labor supply. The question of how individuals adapt their behavior in response to policy changes is one of the most investigated topics in empirical labor and public economics. Do people reduce their working hours if governments decide to raise taxes? Might they even withdraw completely from the labor market? Labor supply estimations are extensively used for various policy analyses and economic research. Labor supply elasticities are key information when evaluating tax-benefit policy reforms and their effect on tax revenue, employment, and redistribution. The chapters cover empirical and theoretical developments as well as applications to tax and welfare reform, and each represents a substantive research contribution from Blundell's publications in top research outlets.

Why is unemployment higher in some countries than others? Why does it fluctuate between decades? Why are some people at greater risk than others? Layard and Nickell have worked on these issues for thirty years. Their famous model, first published in 1986, is now used throughout the world. It asserts that unemployment must be high enough to reduce the real wages for which workers settle to the level justified by productivity. So what affects 'wage push'? The authors showed early on that the key factors affecting 'wage push' are how unemployed workers are treated and how wages are negotiated. If unemployed people get benefits without being required to accept jobs, vacancies go unfilled and mass unemployment results. The solution is welfare-to-work policies like those now introduced in most parts of the world. The authors have proposed these policies for the last twenty-five years in a series of key articles reproduced in this book. Their original analysis explains the subsequent movement of unemployment over the last two decades. They conclude the book with a new chapter on what should be done in the recession: no-one, they say, should be given unemployment benefit beyond a year, after which they should be offered work.

The original book published with the IZA, this work presents and analyzes the work of one of the most important economists of the 20th century - Jacob Mincer. Mincer's work has had a lasting influence on contemporary labor economics in both theoretical and methodological terms. Mincer played a central role in shaping contemporary labor economics, not the least by largely determining its research agenda. His work in the 1960s and 70s on the determinants of individual earnings, notably human capital, and on labor force supply, particularly female participation, have had an enormous impact on the way others have approached labor economics. This book presents a systematic analysis of his extensive published work, emphasising its continuity as a lifetime research program that has made a lasting influence on modern labor economics.

David Card and Alan B. Krueger have made substantial contributions to the field of Labor Economics. Their influential work focuses on policy-relevant issues and spans vast and important topics, including: unemployment, minimum wage, migration, measurement error, unions, wage differentials among various groups in the US, labor demand, social insurance, and technological change. Card and Krueger have also been extremely influential in econometrics methodology; they were at the forefront of employing an 'experimental' approach in their research design and implementation. Both of these IZA prize winners have made significant methodological contributions on instrumental variable estimation, measurement error, regression discontinuity methods, and the use of 'natural' experiments. This book provides an overview of their most important work and is divided two main parts: the first section focuses on school quality and the differences in wages across groups in the US; the second part concentrates on the effect of changes in the minimum wage on employment and wage setting. In section introductions, Card and Krueger offer their insight into these two areas and discuss the historical context for their research.

How should firms select their employees? How should they design their compensation schemes such that employees are motivated to work hard? How do the performance and compensation of teammates influence workers' motivation and productivity? Personnel economics examines human resource practices and answers questions that are of paramount importance for business leaders around the globe. In this volume, Edward P. Lazear, a founding father of personnel economics and winner of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics 2004, takes stock of the economic analysis of personnel management, and the advancements and achievements that have been made in this field over the past 30 years. The book contains an impressive selection of Lazear's most important papers. It provides a unifying approach to human resource practices and a useful reference on personnel strategies such as hiring, motivating, and training an effective work force.

In all Western societies women earn lower wages on average than men. The gender wage gap has existed for many years, although there have been some important changes over time. This volume of collected papers contains extensive research on progress made by women in the labor market, and the characteristics and causes of remaining gender inequalities. It also covers other dimensions of inequality and their interplay with gender, such as family formation, wellbeing, race, and immigrant status. The author was awarded the 2010 IZA Prize in Labor Economics for this research. Part I comprises an Introduction by the Editors. Part II probes and quantifies the explanations for the gender wage gap, including differential choices made in the labor market by men and women as well as labor market discrimination and employment segregation. It also delineates how the gender wage gap has decreased over time in the United States and suggests explanations for this narrowing of the gap and the more recent slowdown in wage convergence. Part III considers international differences in the gender wage gap and wage inequality and the relationship between the two. Part IV considers a variety of indicators of gender inequality and how they have changed over time in the United States, painting a picture of significant gains in women's relative status across a number of dimensions. It also considers the trends in female labor supply and what they indicate about changing gender roles in the United States and considers a successful intervention designed to increase the relative success of academic women. Part V focuses on inequality by race and immigrant status. It considers not only race difference in wages and the differential progress made by African-American women and men in reducing the race wage gap, but also race differences in wealth which are considerably larger than differences in wages. It also examines immigrant-native differences in the use of transfer payments, and the impact of gender roles in immigrant source countries on immigrant women's labor market assimilation in the U.S. labor market.

Published with the IZA, this volume presents Richard Easterlin's outstanding research on the analysis of subjective well-being, and on the relationship between demographic developments and economic outcomes. In both fields, his work has laid the foundations for enlarging the scope of traditional economic analysis and has increased our understanding of behaviour in several important domains, such as fertility choices, labour market behaviour, and the determinants of individual well-being. In various seminal contributions, Easterlin has demonstrated the importance of material aspirations and relative economic status for human behaviour. This book is a collection of 11 of his key papers, revised and edited to make a cohesive book. New material includes an Introduction from the editors, two section Introductions from Easterlin, and an Epilogue from Easterlin.

Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides are the recipients (with Peter Diamond) of the Nobel memorial Prize in Economics 2010. They have made path-breaking contributions to the analysis of markets with search and matching frictions, which account for much of the success of job search theory and the flows approach in becoming a leading tool for microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis of labor markets. Both scientists have gained groundbreaking insights through individual as well as joint research. Consequently, this volume not only features several papers which helped shape the equilibrium search model, including some early contributions which have initiated the research on what is known today as the search and matching model of the labor market, but it also presents a joint paper by the IZA Prize Laureates, which is a complete statement of the equilibrium search and matching model with endogenous job creation and job destruction. As part of the IZA Prize Series, the book presents a selection of their most important work which has highly enriched research on unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon, on labor market dynamics, and on cyclical adjustment.

This book presents a series of research articles written over the past four decades by leading economists George J. Borjas and Barry R. Chiswick. Borjas and Chiswick are leading experts on the adjustment of immigrants in their destination country and their impact on the economy. Although they worked separately throughout their careers, and did not always agree, their intellectual interaction has greatly increased understanding of the economic consequences of international migration and immigration policy across developed immigrant receiving countries. This volume brings together their contributions for the first time to demonstrate how public policy issues on immigration have evolved over time.An in-depth analysis of the key issues relating to international migration Foundations of Migration Economics explores the assimilation of immigrants, focusing on the earning changes of immigrants with a longer duration in the host economy; how immigrant networks and ethnic enclaves influence the labor market and linguistic adjustment of immigrants; determinants of language proficiency and to what extent pre-migration skills are effectively employed by the destination; and the effect of immigration on the earnings of earlier waves of immigrants and native-born workers.

The book collects articles published by Daniel Hamermesh between 1969 and 2013 dealing with the general topic of the demand for labor. The first section presents empirical studies of basic issues in labor demand, including the extent to which different types of labor are substitutes, how firms' and workers' investments affect labor turnover, and how costs of adjusting employment affect the dynamics of employment and patterns of labor turnover. The second section examines the impacts of various labor-market policies, including minimum wages, penalty pay for using overtime hours or hours worked on weekends or nights, severance pay for displaced workers, and payroll taxes to finance unemployment insurance benefits. The final section deals with general questions of discrimination by employers along various dimensions, including looks, gender and ethnicity, in all cases focusing on the process of discrimination and the behavior that results. Throughout the focus is on the development of theoretically-based hypotheses and testing them using the most appropriate data, often data collected uniquely for the particular project.

Employment and Development brings together the contributions of 2014 IZA Prize in Labor Economics award winner Gary S. Fields to address global employment and poverty problems. Most of the poor in developing countries live in households in which people work, but still they are poor because the best available work pays so little. Employment and Development: How Work Can Lead From and Into Poverty questions how economic growth affects standards of living, how labor markets work in developing countries, and how different labor market policies affect well-being.Through a collection of essays, this book tackles major questions in development and labor economics. Who benefits from economic growth and who is hurt by economic decline? Why are distributional factors and labor market conditions improving in some countries but not in others? How do developing countries' labor markets work? How would labor market conditions change if different policies were to be put into effect? What are the welfare consequences of these changes? Through distributional analysis, Fields examines inequality, poverty, income mobility, and economic well-being, and through analysis of changing labor market conditions he examines employment and unemployment, employment composition, and labor earnings. By concentrating on the poor and understanding how the labor markets work for them and how their labor market earnings might be raised in response to different policy interventions, Fields addresses questions of first-order importance for human well-being.

The first in a series of books published with the IZA, this book presents and analyzes the work of one of the most important economists of the 20th century - Jacob Mincer. Mincer's work has had a lasting influence on contemporary labor economics in both theoretical and methodological terms. Mincer played a central role in shaping contemporary labor economics, not the least by largely determining its research agenda. His work in the 1960s and 70s on the determinants of individual earnings, notably human capital, and on labor force supply, particularly female participation, have had an enormous impact on the way others have approached labor economics. This book presents a systematic analysis of his extensive published work, emphasising its continuity as a lifetime research program that has made a lasting influence on modern labor economics.

Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides are the recipients (with Peter Diamond) of the Nobel memorial Prize in Economics 2010. They have made path-breaking contributions to the analysis of markets with search and matching frictions, which account for much of the success of job search theory and the flows approach in becoming a leading tool for microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis of labor markets. Both scientists have gained groundbreaking insights through individual as well as joint research. Consequently, this volume not only features several papers which helped shape the equilibrium search model, including some early contributions which have initiated the research on what is known today as the search and matching model of the labor market, but it also presents a joint paper by the IZA Prize Laureates, which is a complete statement of the equilibrium search and matching model with endogenous job creation and job destruction. As part of the IZA Prize Series, the book presents a selection of their most important work which has highly enriched research on unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon, on labor market dynamics, and on cyclical adjustment.

The second in a series of books published with the IZA, this volume presents Richard Easterlin's outstanding research on the analysis of subjective well-being, and on the relationship between demographic developments and economic outcomes. In both fields, his work has laid the foundations for enlarging the scope of traditional economic analysis and has increased our understanding of behaviour in several important domains, such as fertility choices, labour market behaviour, and the determinants of individual well-being.In various seminal contributions, Easterlin has demonstrated the importance of material aspirations and relative economic status for human behaviour. This book is a collection of 11 of his key papers, revised and edited to make a cohesive book. New material includes an Introduction from the editors, two section Introductions from Easterlin, and an Epilogue from Easterlin.

Why is unemployment higher in some countries than others? Why does it fluctuate between decades? Why are some people at greater risk than others? Layard and Nickell have worked on these issues for thirty years. Their famous model, first published in 1986, is now used throughout the world. It asserts that unemployment must be high enough to reduce the real wages for which workers settle to the level justified by productivity. So what affects 'wage push'? The authors showed early on that the key factors affecting 'wage push' are how unemployed workers are treated and how wages are negotiated. If unemployed people get benefits without being required to accept jobs, vacancies go unfilled and mass unemployment results. The solution is welfare-to-work policies like those now introduced in most parts of the world. The authors have proposed these policies for the last twenty-five years in a series of key articles reproduced in this book. Their original analysis explains the subsequent movement of unemployment over the last two decades. They conclude the book with a new chapter on what should be done in the recession: no-one, they say, should be given unemployment benefit beyond a year, after which they should be offered work.

In all Western societies women earn lower wages on average than men. The gender wage gap has existed for many years, although there have been some important changes over time. This volume of collected papers contains extensive research on progress made by women in the labor market, and the characteristics and causes of remaining gender inequalities. It also covers other dimensions of inequality and their interplay with gender, such as family formation, wellbeing, race, and immigrant status. The author was awarded the 2010 IZA Prize in Labor Economics for this research. Part I comprises an Introduction by the Editors. Part II probes and quantifies the explanations for the gender wage gap, including differential choices made in the labor market by men and women as well as labor market discrimination and employment segregation. It also delineates how the gender wage gap has decreased over time in the United States and suggests explanations for this narrowing of the gap and the more recent slowdown in wage convergence. Part III considers international differences in the gender wage gap and wage inequality and the relationship between the two. Part IV considers a variety of indicators of gender inequality and how they have changed over time in the United States, painting a picture of significant gains in women's relative status across a number of dimensions. It also considers the trends in female labor supply and what they indicate about changing gender roles in the United States and considers a successful intervention designed to increase the relative success of academic women. Part V focuses on inequality by race and immigrant status. It considers not only race difference in wages and the differential progress made by African-American women and men in reducing the race wage gap, but also race differences in wealth which are considerably larger than differences in wages. It also examines immigrant-native differences in the use of transfer payments, and the impact of gender roles in immigrant source countries on immigrant women's labor market assimilation in the U.S. labor market.

David Card and Alan B. Krueger have made substantial contributions to the field of Labor Economics. Their influential work focuses on policy-relevant issues and spans vast and important topics, including: unemployment, minimum wage, migration, measurement error, unions, wage differentials among various groups in the US, labor demand, social insurance, and technological change. Card and Krueger have also been extremely influential in econometrics methodology; they were at the forefront of employing an 'experimental' approach in their research design and implementation. Both of these IZA prize winners have made significant methodological contributions on instrumental variable estimation, measurement error, regression discontinuity methods, and the use of 'natural' experiments. This book provides an overview of their most important work and is divided two main parts: the first section focuses on school quality and the differences in wages across groups in the US; the second part concentrates on the effect of changes in the minimum wage on employment and wage setting. In section introductions, Card and Krueger offer their insight into these two areas and discuss the historical context for their research.