Heterogeneity, selection and labor market disparities

We study the incentives to acquire skill in a model where heterogeneous firmsand workers interact in a labor market characterized by matching frictions and costlyscreening. When effort in acquiring skill raises both the mean and the variance of theresulting ability distribution, multiple equilibria may arise. In the high-effort equilibrium, heterogeneity in ability is sufficiently large to induce firms to select the bestworkers, thereby confirming the belief that effort is important for finding good jobs.In the low-effort equilibrium, ability is not sufficiently dispersed to justify screening,thereby confirming the belief that effort is not so important. The model has implications for wage inequality, the distribution of firm characteristics, sorting patternsbetween firms and workers, and unemployment rates that can help explaining observedcross-country variation in socio-economic and labor market outcomes.

Monthly Labor Force Data, November 2014

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Londres, terra promesa: l'emigració de joves universitaris titulats catalans a Londres

L’alta taxa d’atur juvenil a Catalunya i la precarització persistent del mercat laboral per als joves, han provocat que molts d’ells es plantegin marxar a l’estranger per a provar sort. Segons l’INE, al 2012 van emigrar 10791 catalans i el 35,7% són joves d’entre 16 i 34 anys. El Regne Unit va ser la tercera destinació preferida, amb 958 catalans emigrants reconeguts. La globalització ha difuminat les fronteres i ha obert els horitzons a empreses i treballadors. Les experiències internacionals són cada cop més necessàries si volem formar part d’aquest món, però tenen les seves contrapartides. La present investigació estudia el cas de 10 joves catalans amb titulacions universitàries que han marxat a Londres a la recerca d’aquesta experiència internacional, tot desitjant assentar les bases d’una carrera professional exitosa. El focus d’estudi és conèixer les motivacions de l’emigració que han trobat a la ciutat anglesa i quines són les expectatives de futur

Welfare regimes and change in the employment structure: Britain, Denmark and Germany since 1990

Welfare states are often reduced to their role as providers of social protection and redistribution. In 1990, Esping-Andersen argued that they also affect employment creation and the class structure. We analyse the stratification outcomes for three welfare regimes - Britain, Germany and Denmark - over the 1990s and 2000s. Based on individual-level surveys, we observe a disproportionate increase among professionals and managers, and a decline among production workers and clerks. The result is clear-cut occupational upgrading in Denmark and Germany. In Britain, high and low-end service jobs expanded, resulting in a polarized version of upgrading. Growth in low-end service jobs - and thus polarization - is no precondition for full employment. Both Britain and Denmark halved their low-educated unemployment rate between 1995 and 2008. Yet low-end service jobs expanded only in Britain, not in Denmark. The cause is the evolution of labour supply: rising educational attainment means that fewer low-educated workers look for low-skilled jobs.

Monthly Labor Force Data, December 2014

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Iowa Workforce News, August 2014, Issue 30

Iowa Workforce Development's bi-monthly newsletter.

La necesaria transformación del modelo productivo en España: el papel del territorio.

El fracàs de les bases del model productiu espanyol fonamentat en una baixa productivitat s'ha traduït en una incapacitat absoluta de reacció enfront de la crisi econòmica amb creixents taxes d'atur i un greu estancament del PIB. El principal repte de l'economia espanyola requereix d'apostes decidides per pilars en els quals se sustenti un nou model productiu, això és, la creativitat, la innovació i el coneixement. Aquest article abordarà en primer lloc el marc teòric en el qual s'emmarca el paper que assumeix el territori al segle XXI com a motor de canvi econòmic. Seguidament, s'identifiquessin els aspectes clau de l'actual model productiu i a continuació s'estudiarà la contribució del territori al canvi de model sobre la base de quatre grans àrees metropolitanes: Madrid, Barcelona, València i Bilbao. Finalment, s'incidirà en les recomanacions de política pública a la llum dels anteriors resultats.

Cities, skills, and regional change

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban changereflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examinesalmost 200 years of regional change in the U.S. and finds that few, if any, growth relationships remain constant, including Gibrat's Law. Education does a reasonable jobof explaining urban resilience in recent decades, but does not seem to predict countygrowth a century ago. After reviewing this evidence, we present and estimate a simple model of regional change, where education increases the level of entrepreneurship.Human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce moreproduct varieties and thereby increase labor demand. We find that skills are associatedwith growth in productivity or entrepreneurship, not with growth in quality of life, atleast outside of the West. We also find that skills seem to have depressed housing supplygrowth in the West, but not in other regions, which supports the view that educatedresidents in that region have fought for tougher land-use controls. We also present evidence that skills have had a disproportionately large impact on unemployment duringthe current recession.

Monthly Labor Force Data, April 2015

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Monthly Labor Force Data, May 2015

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Monthly Labor Force Data, July 2015

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Monthly Labor Force Data, September 2015

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Monthly Labor Force Data, October 2015

Monthly Labor Force Data report produced by the Iowa Workforce Development.

Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce, October 2009

Several studies use administrative educational and unemployment insurance records to report average wages [2,7]. The State of Iowa also uses UI records to track students from majors in community colleges to industry of employment. The Iowa Department of Education (IDE) and Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) collaborated to form the Training and Employment Outcomes System.

Improved Employment Data for Transportation Planning, 1998

Transportation planners typically use census data or small sample surveys to help estimate work trips in metropolitan areas. Census data are cheap to use but are only collected every 10 years and may not provide the answers that a planner is seeking. On the other hand, small sample survey data are fresh but can be very expensive to collect. This project involved using database and geographic information systems (GIS) technology to relate several administrative data sources that are not usually employed by transportation planners. These data sources included data collected by state agencies for unemployment insurance purposes and for drivers licensing. Together, these data sources could allow better estimates of the following information for a metropolitan area or planning region: · Locations of employers (work sites); · Locations of employees; · Travel flows between employees’ homes and their work locations. The required new employment database was created for a large, multi-county region in central Iowa. When evaluated against the estimates of a metropolitan planning organization, the new database did allow for a one to four percent improvement in estimates over the traditional approach. While this does not sound highly significant, the approach using improved employment data to synthesize home-based work (HBW) trip tables was particularly beneficial in improving estimated traffic on high-capacity routes. These are precisely the routes that transportation planners are most interested in modeling accurately. Therefore, the concept of using improved employment data for transportation planning was considered valuable and worthy of follow-up research.