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The pressures of traditional jobs on working families, along with an aging population facing financial need, have contributed to heightened interest in the percentage of workers participating in alternative work arrangements. These include working as an independent contractor or self-employed, and those employed by others on-call, through temp agency, or as contractors. Examining job satisfaction across work arrangements by occupation and gender is one way to investigate a potential increase in the supply of such workers. Higher job satisfaction may indicate that more workers will select into these work arrangements and away from traditional jobs in the future. If this is particularly true for women, it has important implications for firms that would like to retain more women. Moreover, changes in how individuals earn a living may impact the social safety nets of such workers and their families given the nature of how such benefits are provided in the U.S. economy. This study utilizes recent waves of the General Social Survey to explore job satisfaction for workers in disaggregated alternative work arrangements, while controlling for both occupation and gender. The study finds that female workers who are independent contractors and self-employed are more satisfied with their jobs than those in regular salaried jobs, even those in nonprofessional occupations. Job satisfaction for those who work in temp agencies, do on-call work or work for contractors is no different than for those in regular jobs, regardless of occupation and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence on the effect of minimum wages on youth employment is inconclusive, with studies pointing to negative, positive or insignificant effects. In trying to explain some of the conflicting evidence, this research paper examines synergies of minimum wages with other labour market institutions using an unbalanced panel dataset of 19 OECD countries over 1985-2013. Institutions that enforce labour market rigidity, such as unemployment benefits and union density, are found to exacerbate the negative effect of minimum wages on youth employment, while government expenditure on training programmes for the unemployed dampen it. This finding of significant synergy effects indicates that panel data models which omit interactive terms between minimum wages and institutions might be misspecified. In addition, the analysis suggests that the negative effect of minimum wages is most severe in rigid labour markets with high unemployment benefits and union density. Therefore, policymakers need to consider the full spectrum of institutions they face before adjusting minimum wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses development of optimal solutions for monopsony in the labour market for the long run (when labour and capital are both flexible). It is shown that binding minimum wages up to a certain degree pushes the monopsonists to choose a high capital intensity of production, just as high as or even higher than that chosen when there is no regulation for minimum wages. Thereby, we demonstrate the existence of re-switching effects in the tradition of Piero Sraffa. The second part of the paper recalculates and analyzes earlier results by making use of the rather general constant elasticity of substitution production function. Based on a numerical solution for optimal monopsony under different regimes (no minimum wage, minimum wages of different values, etc.), we formulate a two-period game between the government and the monopsonistic firm ('minimum wage game'). Finally, we analyze the relationship between the elasticity of substitution on the one hand and likely levels of employment on the other hand, after introduction of minimum wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]