FORMATION OF PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE OF STUDENTS OF ECONOMIC SPECIALTIES (IN THE PROCESS OF LEARNING ENGLISH)

At present, the system of general and vocational education is undergoing fundamental changes, as never before, orient specialists towards creativity in their professional activities. The main goal of modern vocational education is to train a qualified, competent specialist who is ready to work in an increasingly competitive labor market. Modern professional activity imposes special requirements on the communicative training of specialists, which is manifested in the ability to negotiate, conduct a dialogue, correlate linguistic means with the tasks and conditions of learning, take into account social norms of behavior and the communicative expediency of statements.

Firms and the Intergenerational Transmission of Labor Market Advantage

Recent research finds that pay inequality stems both from firm pay-setting and from workers’ individual characteristics. Yet, intergenerational mobility research remains focused on transmission of individual traits, and has failed to test how firms shape the inheritance of inequality. We study this question using three decades of Swedish population register data, and decompose the intergenerational earnings correlation into firm pay premiums and stable worker effects. One quarter of the intergenerational earnings correlation at midlife is explained by sorting between firms with unequal pay. Employer or industry inheritance account for a surprisingly small share of this firm-based earnings transmission. Instead, children from high-income backgrounds benefit from matching with high-paying firms irrespective of the sources of parents’ earnings advantage. Our analysis reveals how an imperfectly competitive labor market provides an opening for skill-based rewards in one generation to become class-based advantages in the next.

Labor Markets

What is the labor market? Like the goods and services markets, a labor market consists of the supply and demand sides. In the labor market, while workers supply labor, firms demand labor. This chapter studies the backward-bending nature of the labor supply curve and the downward-sloping nature of the labor demand curve. We also analyze the labor market equilibrium in a perfectly competitive labor market. Several policies such as immigration and minimum wage will be introduced to illustrate how government policies affect the labor market equilibrium.

How preferences shape the welfare and employment effects of trade

We set up a trade model with two countries, two sectors, and one production factor, which features a home-market effect due to the existence of trade costs. We consider search frictions and firm-level wage bargaining in the sector producing differentiated goods and a perfectly competitive labor market in the sector producing a homogeneous good. Consumers have price-independent generalized-linear preferences over the two types of goods, covering homothetic and quasi-homothetic preferences as two limiting cases. Due to the specific functional forms of indirect utility, homothetic preferences lead to risk aversion, while quasi-homothetic preferences lead to risk neutrality in our model. We show that trade between two countries that differ in their population size leads to an expansion of the differentiated goods sector and a contraction of the homogeneous good sector in the larger economy. This induces the larger country to net-export differentiated goods at the cost of a higher economy-wide rate of unemployment in the open economy (with the effects reversed for the smaller country). The welfare effects of trade depend on the preference structure. Looking at the two limiting cases, we show that the larger country is likely to benefit from trade if preferences are homothetic, whereas losses from trade are possible if preferences are quasi-homothetic. The opposite is true in the smaller country. This reveals an important role of preferences for the welfare effects of trade in the presence of labor market imperfection, a result we further elaborate on by considering more general preferences as well as differences of countries in their per-capita income levels.

Dilemmas of Sheltered Employment in Poland and Greece and the Concept of Supported Employment

People with severe disabilities, such as severe mental disabilities and autism spectrum disorders, do not participate in the open, competitive labor market to the same extent as people without disabilities or other forms of disability. Sheltered employment is an internationally accepted approach for the vocational integration of people with severe disabilities, which introduces integration in sheltered workplaces mainly with other people with disabilities and ongoing support from the Government or self-government. Therefore, sheltered employment can be defined as the employment of a person with a disability under particular conditions. This paper presents the legislative framework regarding sheltered employment in Poland and Greece and the ways sheltered employment takes place in each of the two countries with the corresponding comparisons and conclusions. The results show a need for a more precise and more comprehensive legislative framework on sheltered employment in Poland and Greece. Alternative options for the vocational integration of people with severe forms of disabilities, such as supported employment programs, need to come to the fore. Supported employment seems to be the only effective and efficient way for people who have particular difficulties in finding and keeping a paid job in the open labor market to take up paid employment on an equal basis with other people. Does the concept of supported employment have a chance to prove itself on Poland and Greece’s open labor markets and become a complementary tool in the vocational activation of people with disabilities? Legislative regulations, system projects, and stable sources of financing are necessary for both countries.

The Gig Economy and Independent Contractors

In recent years, a controversy has erupted over the distinction between employees and independent contractors. Commentators have argued that in the modern “gig economy,” many people traditionally classified as independent contractors are as vulnerable as employees and should be granted the legal protections that employees alone normally enjoy. However, the distinction between the two categories remains inescapable, and the theoretical basis for it has not been identified. A better approach derives the distinction from market structure. Employees are workers who, because they must make relationship-specific investments in a single firm, are subject to labor monopsony. Independent contractors do not make such relationship-specific investments, and hence normally operate in a competitive labor market. Employment and labor law may be explained as a method for protecting workers from labor monopsony; because independent contracts are not subject to labor monopsony, they do not require such protection.

Money Matters: Sector Differences, Competition, and the Public Personnel System

This study explores whether public personnel systems, particularly their compensation systems, are flexible and responsive to market wages in a competitive labor market. Focusing on registered nurses, we explore whether and how the public, private nonprofit, and for-profit labor markets influence each other in determining wages. We also examine if sector plays a role in determining wages. We use American Community Survey data from 2016 and 2017 to test these expectations. Fixed effects regressions and seemingly unrelated regressions with Chow tests reveal that higher wages in the dominant for-profit sector appear to drive up wages in the other two sectors, and vice versa. The results imply that public personnel systems are not so rigid and inflexible as perceived. Rather, they are sensitive to supply and demand and offer wages responding to competition from other sectors. Moreover, public employees do not ignore competitive opportunities in alternative employment markets in the private sectors. Students of public employment should not overlook the private sectors either. The markets are distinctive but not independent.

Microfoundations of R&D Alliance Formation: The Interplay of Scientist Mobility and the Cooperative Context of Collaboration

Alliance research emphasizes that firms can access research and development (R&D) collaboration opportunities when they enjoy relational or geographic embeddedness with potential partners. However, how can firms that are not embedded with prospective partners establish alliances? We emphasize the microfoundations of R&D alliance formation and propose that scientist mobility is an important substitutive mechanism that helps foster collaboration opportunities between firms that are poorly embedded. Specifically, we posit and show that in high-tech industries, scientist mobility is more facilitative for R&D alliance formation when potential partners lack relational ties between them or are not geographically colocated. Our findings demonstrate how incorporation of the competitive labor market context and its interplay with the cooperative context significantly changes the insights of a fundamental research stream emphasizing the importance of the cooperative context for alliance formation.

Learning From Coworkers

We investigate learning at the workplace. To do so, we use German administrative data that contain information on the entire workforce of a sample of establishments. We document that having more‐highly‐paid coworkers is strongly associated with future wage growth, particularly if those workers earn more. Motivated by this fact, we propose a dynamic theory of a competitive labor market where firms produce using teams of heterogeneous workers that learn from each other. We develop a methodology to structurally estimate knowledge flows using the full‐richness of the German employer‐employee matched data. The methodology builds on the observation that a competitive labor market prices coworker learning. Our quantitative approach imposes minimal restrictions on firms' production functions, can be implemented on a very short panel, and allows for potentially rich and flexible coworker learning functions. In line with our reduced‐form results, learning from coworkers is significant, particularly from more knowledgeable coworkers. We show that between 4 and 9% of total worker compensation is in the form of learning and that inequality in total compensation is significantly lower than inequality in wages.

The Ragged Edge of Rugged Individualism: Wage Theft and the Personalization of Social Harm

Every year, millions of low-wage workers suffer wage theft when their employers refuse to pay them what they have earned. Wage theft is both prevalent and highly impactful. It costs individuals thousands each year in unpaid earnings, siphons tens of billions of dollars from low-income communities, depletes the government of necessary resources, distorts the competitive labor market, and causes significant personal harm to its victims. In recent years, states and cities have passed new laws to attack the problem. These legal changes are important. They are also, broadly speaking, failing the people they are supposed to protect. This Article fills a significant gap in the literature by detailing the full scope of damage caused by wage theft and by critically examining the dominant approach to combatting it. Drawing on existing research and nearly 60 in-depth interviews about wage theft in the District of Columbia, this Article paints a thorough picture of wage theft’s harms, explores why and how existing reforms are failing, and explains what must be done instead. Enforcement schemes reflect the current view that wage theft is a personal harm properly addressed on a case-by-case basis in the civil justice system. As a result, reforms—both as written and implemented—generally attempt to empower and incentivize individuals to action. These approaches are failing. They misunderstand what wage theft is, how it plays out, and how it must be addressed. Wage theft is not an individual problem, but a social harm, and it therefore requires a broad, public response. Because low-wage workers live economically precarious lives and are so dependent on their jobs to survive, they almost never take formal legal action over violations of their rights. Government bodies cannot continue to rely on workers themselves to enforce their rights, but must take on a new role as robust, active, and strategic enforcers. Unless and until they do, millions of people will continue to suffer violations of their basic workplace rights with no meaningful recourse.