Labour market frictions, social policies, and barriers to technology adoption

Barriers to technological changes have recently been shown to be a key element in explaining differences in output per worker across countries. This study examines the role that labour market features and institutions have in explaining barriers to technology adoption. I build a model that includes labour market frictions, capital market imperfections and heterogeneity in workers' skills. I found that the unemployment rate together with the welfare losses that workers experiment after displacement are key factors in explaining the existence of barriers to technology adoption. Moreover, I found that none of these factors alone is sufficient to build these barriers. The theory also suggests that welfare policies like the unemployment insurance system may enhance these kinds of barriers while policies like a severance payment system financed by an income tax seem to be more effective in eliminating them.

Employment by lotto revisited

We study employment by lotto (Aldershof et al., 1999), a matching algorithm for the so-called stable marriage problem. We complement Aldershof et al.'s analysis in two ways. First, we give an alternative and intuitive description of employment by lotto. Second, we disprove Aldershof et al.'s conjectures concerning employment by lotto for general matching markets.

Employment and public capital in spain

This paper analyses the e¤ects on employment of increasing the stock of public capital. To this end, we derive a wage equation so that wages are endogenized. This allows us to show that, by means of a higher elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages, a rise in public capital increases employment. The estimation of a structural model for the Spanish private sector tests and con…rms empirically this relationship. The results show that an increase in public capital has a significant and positive direct influence on employment, and indirect e¤ects derived from lower wages and higher economic growth. Finally, we undertake a simulation exercise to assess the long run efects on employment and economic growth of increasing public capital.

Unemployment, growth and fiscal policy: new insights on the hysteresis hypothesis

We develop a growth model with unemployment due to imperfections in the labor market. In this model, wage inertia and balanced budget rules cause a complementarity between capital and employment capable of explaining the existence of multiple equilibrium paths. Hysteresis is viewed as the result of a selection between these diferent equilibrium paths. We use this model to argue that, in contrast to the US, those fiscal policies followed by most of the European countries after the shocks of the 1970’s may have played a central role in generating hysteresis.

Employment descentralisation: polycentric compaction or sprawl? The case of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region 1986-1996

The Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR) has been repeatedly characterised as a polycentric-type urban system. The aim of this study is to corroborate this affirmation by making use of a methodology that enables the identifying of employment subcentres and valuing of the degree of polycentrism of the BMR in 1986 and 1996. The results obtained in the two years confirm the existence and extension of the polycentrism.

New business formation and employment growth: some evidence for the Spanish manufacturing industry

This paper explores the effects of new business formation on employment growth in Spanish manufacturing industries. New firms are believed to make an important contribution to economic growth but the extent of this contribution is unclear. We consider time lags of new firm formation as explanatory variables of employment change and identify how long the effect of new firm entries on employment lasts. Our main results show that the effects of new business formation are positive in the short term, negative in the medium term and positive in the long term, thus confirming the existence of indirect supply-side effects found in similar studies for other countries. Key words: regional growth, firm entry, time lags and Spanish economy. JEL classifications: L00, L60, R11, R12

Catalan Policies and Experiences on Cooperative Repositories

The Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) together with the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) started in 1999 a cooperative repository, named TDR, to file in digital format the full-text of the read thesis at the universities of our country to spread them worldwide in open access preserving the intellectual copyright of the authors. This became operational in 2001 and today it is a service fully consolidated not only among the Catalan universities, but also used by other Spanish universities. Since then, there are four additional cooperative repositories which have been created: RECERCAT, for research papers; RACO, for scientific, cultural and erudite Catalan magazines; PADICAT, for archiving Catalan web sites; and MDC, for Catalan digital collections of pictures, maps, posters, old magazines... These five repositories have some common characteristics: they are open access, that is, they are accessible on the internet for free; they mostly comply with the Open Archive Initiative interoperability protocol for facilitating the efficient dissemination of content; and they have been built in a cooperative manner so that it is easy to adopt common procedures and to share the repository developing and managing costs, it permits more visibility of the indexed documents throughout the search engines, and a better provision for long-term preservation can be made. In this paper we present the common policy established for the Catalan cooperative repositories, we describe the five of them briefly, and we comment on the results obtained of our 6-year experience since the first one became operational.

What works best for getting the unemployed back to work: employment services or small-business assistance programs? evidence from Romania

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. Â One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Â Using unusually rich (for transition economies) survey data and matching methods, I evaluate the relative effectiveness of these two programmes in Romania. Â While I find that employment services (ES) are, on average, more successful than a small-business assistance programme (SBA), estimation of heterogeneity effects reveals that, compared to non-participation, ES are effective for workers with little access to informal search channels, and SBA works for less-qualified workers and those living in rural areas. Â When comparing ES to SBA, I find that ES tend to be more efficient than SBA for workers without a high-school degree, and that the opposite holds for the more educated workers.

Job accessibility and employment probability

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impact of residential job accessibility on female employment probability in the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Madrid. Following a “spatial mismatch” framework, we estimate a female employment probability equation where variables controlling for personal characteristics, residential segregation and employment potential on public transport network are included. Data used come from Microcensus 2001 of INE (National Institute of Statistics). The research focuses on the treatment of endogeneity problems and the measurement of accessibility variables. Our results show that low job accessibility in public transport negatively affects employment probability. The intensity of this effect tends to decrease with individual’s educational attainment. A higher degree of residential segregation also reduces job probability in a significant way..

Changes in the demand for private medical insurance following a shift in tax incentives

The 1998 Spanish reform of the Personal Income Tax eliminated the 15% deduction for private medical expenditures including payments on private health insurance (PHI) policies. To avoid an undesirable increase in the demand for publicly funded health care, tax incentives to buy PHI were not completely removed but basically shifted from individual to group employer-paid policies. In a unique fiscal experiment, at the same time that the tax relief for individually purchased policies was abolished, the government provided for tax allowances on policies taken out through employment. Using a bivariate probit model on data from National Health Surveys, we estimate the impact of said reform on the demand for PHI and the changes occurred within it. Our findings suggest that the total probability of buying PHI was not significantly affected. Indeed, the fall in the demand for individual policies (by 10% between 1997 and 2001) was offset by an increase in the demand for group employer-paid ones, so that the overall size of the market remained virtually unchanged. We also briefly discuss the welfare effects on the state budget, the industry and society at large.

Bargaining one-dimensional policies and the efficiency of super majority rules

We consider negotiations selecting one-dimensional policies. Individuals have single-peaked preferences, and they are impatient. Decisions arise from a bargaining game with random proposers and (super) majority approval, ranging from the simple majority up to unanimity. The existence and uniqueness of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium is established, and its explicit characterization provided. We supply an explicit formula to determine the unique alternative that prevails, as impatience vanishes, for each majority. As an application, we examine the efficiency of majority rules. For symmetric distributions of peaks unanimity is the unanimously preferred majority rule. For asymmetric populations rules maximizing social surplus are characterized.

Service offshoring and white-collar employment

This paper empirically studies the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using data for more than one hundred U.S. occupations. A model of firm behavior based on separability allows to derive the labor demand elasticity with respect to service offshoring for each occupation. Estimation is performed with Quasi-Maximum Likelihood, to account for high degrees of censoring in the employment variable. The estimated elasticities are then related to proxies for the skill level and the degree of tradability of the occupations. Results show that service offshoring increases high skilled employment and decreases medium and low skilled employment. Within each skill group, however, service offshoring penalizes tradable occupations and benefits non-tradable occupations.

The Black Box of Business Dynamics

Research in business dynamics has been advancing rapidly in the last years but the translation of the new knowledge to industrial policy design is slow. One striking aspect in the policy area is that although research and analysis do not identify the existence of an specific optimal rate of business creation and business exit, governments everywhere have adopted business start-up support programs with the implicit principle that the more the better. The purpose of this article is to contribute to understand the implications of the available research for policy design. Economic analysis has identified firm heterogeneity as being the most salient characteristic of industrial dynamics, and so a better knowledge of the different types of entrepreneur, their behavior and their specific contribution to innovation and growth would enable us to see into the ‘black box’ of business dynamics and improve the design of appropriate public policies. The empirical analysis performed here shows that not all new business have the same impact on relevant economic variables, and that self-employment is of quite a different economic nature to that of firms with employees. It is argued that public programs should not promote indiscriminate entry but rather give priority to able entrants with survival capacities. Survival of entrants is positively related to their size at birth. Innovation and investment improve the likelihood of survival of new manufacturing start-ups. Investment in R&D increases the risk of failure in new firms, although it improves the competitiveness of incumbents.

Employment effects of service offshoring: evidence from matched firms

This paper studies the effects of service offshoring on the level and skill composition of domestic employment, using a rich data set of Italian firms and propensity score matching techniques. The results show that service offshoring has no effect on the level of employment but changes its composition in favor of high skilled workers.

The Evolution of adaptation policies in Britain

Adaptació de habitatge al Regne Unit. Ponència presentada al "2º Espacio de Encuentro Rehabilitación y Adaptación Funcional de la Vivienda" (Sant Sebastià, 2 Juny 2010)