scholarly journals Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A Margo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Disaggregated Data ◽  
United States Labor Market ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Promising Source

Recent research on labor markets in the 1930s has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence. The paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the United States labor market during the Great Depression and the paradigms to explain them. It then turns to recent studies of employment and unemployment using disaggregated data of various types. The paper concludes with discussions of research on other aspects of labor markets in the 1930s and on a promising source of microdata for future work.

scholarly journals Monopsony Power and Guest Worker Programs

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric M. Gibbons ◽  
Allie Greenman ◽  
Peter Norlander ◽  
Todd Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Guest Workers ◽  
Guest Worker ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Monopsony Power ◽  
Program Data

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We find that many guest workers face moderately or highly concentrated labor markets, based on federal merger scrutiny guidelines, and that concentration generally decreases wages. For example, moving from a market with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of zero to a market comprised of two employers lowers H-1B worker wages approximately 10%, and a pure monopsony (one employer) reduces wages by 13%. A simulation shows that wages under pure monopsony could be 47% lower, suggesting that employers do not use the full extent of their monopsony power. Enforcing wage regulations and decreasing barriers to mobility may better address issues of exploitation than antitrust scrutiny alone.

Double Disadvantage

2016 ◽  
Vol 666 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
Karen A. Pren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Illegal Migrants ◽  
Secondary Sector ◽  
Substantial Decline

From 1988 to 2008, the United States’ undocumented population grew from 2 million to 12 million persons. It has since stabilized at around 11 million, a majority of whom are Mexican. As of this writing, some 60 percent of all Mexican immigrants in the United States are in the country illegally. This article analyzes the effect of being undocumented on sector of employment and wages earned in the United States. We show that illegal migrants are disproportionately channeled into the secondary labor market, where they experience a double disadvantage, earning systematically lower wages by virtue of working in the secondary sector and receiving an additional economic penalty because they are undocumented. Mexican immigrants, in particular, experienced a substantial decline in real wages between 1970 and 2010 attributable to their rising share of undocumented migrants in U.S. labor markets during a time when undocumented hiring was criminalized.

COVID-19 and the Costs of Deadly Disasters

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 366-370
Author(s):  
Sydney C. Ludvigson ◽  
Sai Ma ◽  
Serena Ng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Industrial Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time Series Models ◽  
Monthly Data ◽  
The Impact

Using monthly data on costly natural disasters affecting the United States over the last 40 years, we estimate 2 time series models and use them to generate predictions about the impact of COVID-19. We find that while our models yield reasonable estimates of the impact on industrial production and the number of scheduled flight departures, they underestimate the unprecedented changes in the labor market.

Apprenticeship in the United States: Labor Market Forces and Social Policy

1967 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Farber ◽  
A. Harvey Belitsky ◽  
Jack Barbash
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
United States Labor Market

Labor Monopsony in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Eric A. Posner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Market Power ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Market Concentration ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Low Wages

Most labor markets are monopsonistic, meaning that employers have market power and can suppress wages below the competitive rate. Among the various sources of market power is concentration: the usually small number of employers who compete to offer a type of job to workers. At one time, economists assumed that labor markets were competitive, and largely ignored the phenomenon of labor market concentration. Recent empirical work, relying on newly available databases, has established that labor market concentration is a serious problem in the United States and may account for a wide range of pathologies, including low wages, inequality, and stagnant economic growth.

Raciolinguistic ideology and Spanish-English bilingualism on the US labor market: An analysis of online job advertisements

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Close Subtirelu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Market Value ◽  
The United States ◽  
Assigned Value ◽  
The Us ◽  
Job Advertisements ◽  
United States Labor Market

AbstractMultilingualism is often framed as human capital that increases individuals’ labor market value. Such assertions overlook the role of ideology in assigning value to languages and their speakers based on factors other than communicative utility. This article explores the value assigned to Spanish-English bilingualism on the United States labor market through a mixed methods analysis of online job advertisements. Findings suggest that Spanish-English bilingualism is frequently preferred or required for employment in the US, but that such employment opportunities are less lucrative. The results suggest a penalty associated with Spanish-English bilingualism in which positions listing such language requirements advertise lower wages than observationally similar positions. Quantitative disparities and qualitative differences in the specification of language requirements across income levels suggest that bilingual labor is assigned value through a racial lens that leads to linguistic work undertaken by and for US Latinxs being assigned less value. (Multilingualism, labor market, Spanish in the United States, economics of language, raciolinguistics, human capital)*

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