Get fact: were there really 50,000 boat arrivals a year under Labor?

Tony Abbott has claimed that before he “stopped the boats”, they were coming in at a rate of 50,000 a year. Is that true? David Tittensor, a research fellow to the UNESCO Chair, with Deakin’s Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, checks the claim.

Working hours in supply chain Chinese and Thai factories: evidence from the fair labor association's 'soccer project'

This article examines the determinants of working excessive hours, defined as working in excess of 60 hours per week or for more than six consecutive days, in Chinese and Thai supply chain factories. We use a matched employer-employee dataset collected from 15 Chinese and Thai footwear and sporting apparel supply chain factories, which supply international brands. Matched employer-employee data allow us to examine the effect of worker and firm characteristics on hours worked. We find that in addition to the demographic and human capital characteristics of workers, firm-level characteristics and worker awareness of how to refuse overtime are important in explaining variation in hours worked. © John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2011.

Migrants as Homo economicus : explaining the emerging phenomenon of a shortage of migrant labor in China's coastal provinces

The problem of a shortage of migrant labor is a new development in China's coastal provinces. We discuss the reasons for this emerging phenomenon using a conceptual framework that extends the traditional Lewis dualistic labor market model to incorporate a migrant labor market. We emphasize that migrant labor shortage in China not only reflects a declining wage gap between what peasants receive and what migrants can earn in the cities, but also the institutional legacies of the planning era such as the hukou (household registration) system which discriminates against migrants vis-a-vis urban residents in terms of access to social insurance and other social services. We proceed to draw on a unique survey of migrants and urban residents collected in Jiangsu to show that migrants receive lower incomes, and they have poorer access to social insurance than those with an urban registration in China's cities. Our findings have important implications for the alleviation of the migrant labor shortage problem.

The comparative efficiency and productivity of labor-managed and capital-managed firms

The available empirical literature comparing the efficiency and productivity of labor-managed and capital-managed firms is reviewed and meta-analysed. The results suggest that labor-managed firms are not less efficient or less productive than capital-managed firms. Labor-managed firms have lower output-to-labor ratios and even lower capital-to-labor ratios. However, the differences in these ratios are not statistically significant. The labor-managed firm's democratic governance, industrial relations climate, and organisational setting do not appear to adversely affect productivity and efficiency. © 1997 by URPE All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

Discrimination, Peformance and Career Progression in Australian Public Sector Labor Markets

While promotion is an important mechanism for allocating labor within organizations, relatively little is known about the determinants of promotion in the highly diverse and traditionally heavily regulated Australian labor markets. This study uses unique data from the Victorian Public Sector Census 2004 to identify the extent and nature of bias in the promotion process. Specifically, we use the promotion histories of 16,675 public sector employees to investigate the existence of discrimination in promotion on the basis of gender, disability and cultural diversity. We find that some differences exist in the rate of promotion on the basis of gender, and to a lesser extent, of birthplace, but, importantly, most of these are due to differences in endowments. There are effectively no differences in promotion on the basis of disability. We find that the main driver of promotion in Victorian public sector labor markets is worker effort and performance. Compared to labor markets elsewhere, the Australian public sector is relatively free of discrimination in promotions.

Informality in labor market and welfare

The neoclassical growth model with two sectors in production is employed in this paper in order to investigate how a change in the tax structure affects informality and welfare. We calibrate and simulate the model and find that welfare always increases when we reduce the tax rate on the demand for labor and adjust the tax rate on the value added so that the government revenue remains constant.

A search-theoretic explanation for the negative correlation between labor income and impatience

Lawrance (1991) has shown, through the estimation of consumption Euler equations, that subjective rates of impatience (time preference) in the U.S. are three to Öve percentage points higher for households with lower average labor incomes than for those with higher labor income. From a theoretical perspective, the sign of this correlation in a job-search model seems at Örst to be undetermined, since more impatient workers tend to accept wage o§ers that less impatient workers would not, thereby remaining less time unemployed. The main result of this paper is showing that, regardless of the existence of e§ects of opposite sign, and independently of the particular speciÖcations of the givens of the model, less impatient workers always end up, in the long run, with a higher average income. The result is based on the (unique) invariant Markov distribution of wages associated with the dynamic optimization problem solved by the consumers. An example is provided to illustrate the method.

The causal effect of family size on child labor and education

This paper investigates the causal relationship between family size and child labor and education among brazilian children. More especifically, it analyzes the impact of family size on child labor, school attendance, literacy and school progression. It explores the exogenous variation in family size driven by the presence of twins in the family. The results are consistent under the reasonable assumption that the instrument is a random event. Using the nationally representative brazilian household survey (Pnad), detrimental effects are found on child labor for boys. Moreover, significant effects are obtained for school progression for girls caused by the exogenous presence of the young siblings in the household.