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The author feels that the income advantage of a male college graduate has fallen during the past 10 years. This is due in part to the difficulty college graduates have encountered in obtaining college-type jobs. He states that the job market for new graduates in the 1980s should improve. (CT)

The age-earnings profile of male workers is significantly influenced by the age composition of the workforce. The dependence of the age-earnings profile on demographically induced movements along a relative demand schedule suggests that standard human capital models of the profile are incomplete. (MF)

The job market for scientists and engineers has moved to the forefront of national policy concerns for the first time since the launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Diverse [...]

The article offers a perspective on the possible changes in occupations, employment and the labor market based on a shift-share analysis of data gathered from 2005-2015 in the U.S. Topics discussed include impact of technological innovations such as artificial intelligence and robotics on employment, threat in the use of computer algorithms based on artificial intelligence, and job characteristics based on the Occupational Information Network database developed by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The article analyzes the extent to which a measure of employment opportunities for doctorate workers, a proportion of new doctorate graduates seeking work but with no specific prospects, varies with supply and demand for doctorates and its relation to graduate enrollments in the U.S. The findings suggest that the employment opportunities for doctorate workers is positively affected by the number of graduates and negatively affected by measures of demand for doctorate workers. A proportion of new doctorate graduates seeking work but have no specific prospects is a useful measure of the state of the doctorate market and has implications for manpower policy and analysis.

Although the engineering profession has grown steadily over the past several decades, the labor market for engineers has exhibited marked cyclical fluctuation. A shortage of engineers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was followed by a surplus in the late 1900s and early 1970s. This paper uses a cobweb model — which focuses on the relatively fixed time; delay between the decision to enroll in engineering and entrance into the labor market — to explain the supply of new engineers and their starting salaries over the period 1948–72. Regression analysis indicates that the supply of new entrants to engineering is highly responsive to economic conditions, as measured either by salaries or by factors that determine job opportunities, such as spending on research and development and durable goods output. Forecasts of future engineering enrollments and degrees, using the cobweb model, produce quite different results from those based on extrapolation methods, [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the operation of the U.S. labor market in the 2001 recovery. Recovery of the U.S. in terms of job creation; Findings on the growth of employment; Labor market for educated and skilled workers in 2001; Performance of the U.S. in the international economy.

The rules governing trade and capital flows have been at the centre of controversy as globalisation has proceeded. One reason is the belief that trade and capital flows have massive effects on the labour market – either positive, per the claims of international financial institutions and free trade enthusiasts, or negative, per the ubiquitous protestors at WTO, IMF and World Bank meetings demanding global labour standards. Comparing the claims made in this debate with the outcomes of trade agreements, this paper finds that the debate has exaggerated the effects of trade on economies and the labour market. Changes in trade policy have had modest impacts on the labour market. Other aspects of globalisation – immigration, capital flows and technology transfer – have greater impacts, with volatile capital flows creating great risk for the well-being of workers. As for labour standards, global standards do not threaten the comparative advantage of developing countries nor do poor labour standards create a ‘race to the bottom’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extension of information and communication technologies (ICT) to economic activity is changing the labour market in important ways, This article shows that computerization and use of the Internet are associated with greater hours worked as well as higher wages; that ICT occupations are rapidly increasing their share of employment; that job search and recruitment are moving rapidly to the Web, with consequences for matching employers and employees; and, possibly most important of all, that trade unions have begun to use the Internet as a tool for servicing members and carrying their messages to the public, raising the possibility of a major change in the nature of the union movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares the gap in employment records between the U.S. and major European Union (EU) countries in the 1980s and 1990s. The employment population rate in the early 1970s was similar in both continents while unemployment rates were lower in EU. Evidence shows that EU produces relatively more goods and services through household production and less through the market than U.S. Many studies have tried to find the inverse relation between wages and employment growth at the sectoral level.

This article focuses on the job market for professionals with doctorate degrees in the U.S. The recent evidence on the job market for new doctorate scientists reveals a number of problems in the science labor market. In several fields, salaries are relatively low. New doctorate graduates face uncertain job prospects upon graduation and often end up in postdoctoral positions with low pay and limited futures rather than in any other professional jobs. Similar problems in the biomedical fields, have led the National Research Council to declare a crisis in expectation for young scientists in that area and to recommend that graduate schools maintain rather than increase doctorate graduates in biomedical sciences. These grim prospects are in stark contrast to the claims made few years ago by members of the scientific establishment that the country needed more doctorate scientists. However, economics appears to be enjoying a better job market than most doctorate sciences, including two of the most important scientific areas, mathematics and physics. Economics graduates obtain real jobs, not postdoctorate positions which nominally extend the period of human capital investment for students by three to seven years at low wages and with limited benefits. Hence, it is incurred that the salaries of doctorate economists increased upon graduation.

Argues that changes in labor market institutions have contributed to the rise in earnings inequality overall and to the increase in inequality within groups in the United States. Failure of the United States economy to reward its workers in the past two decades; Reflection of the country's diversity in the earnings inequality; Reliance on market forces compared to labor market institutions.

Do particular types of labour market institution hold the key to economic success? Should other countries try to emulate the flexibility of the American labour market or the centralization of Swedish-style corporatism? Since 1970 within the OECD there has been a sharp divergence both of economic performance and of indicators of labour market structure. The paper uses union density and the degree of wage dispersion across industries to proxy a country's underlying labour marked institutions. In assessing economic performance, it is argued that cross-country differences in output growth were much smaller than differences in employment growth. For given output growth, there is a clear negative relationship between employment growth and real wage growth across countries. Why do different countries find themselves at different points on this trade-off? The final part of the paper examines the correlation between indicators of labour market structure and the position on the wage-employment trade-off. It concludes that the degree of wage dispersion across industries is the most important indicator of market angers and that countries with very high or very low dispersion, typically the countries with highly centralized or highly decentralized bargaining in the labour market, have better employment performance than countries with intermediate degrees of centralization and wage dispersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980 6.4 percent of the American work force was foreign-born, in 1994, 9.7 percent of the work force was foreign-born. A disproportionate number of immigrants are high-school dropouts, increasing the supply of less-educated workers and potentially contributing to the observed decline in their relative pay. Over the same period, imports brought the output of less-skilled foreign workers into the U.S., while the export of skill-intensive products raised the demand for skilled workers, further altering the skill content of the U.S. labor supply/demand. There are two ways to examine the effect of immigration on labor-market outcomes. Exploiting the fact that immigration is geographically concentrated, area analyses contrast the level or change in immigration by area with the level or change in the earnings or employment of nonimmigrant workers. Area studies have generally found that immigration has had only a slight effect on native outcomes, native earnings or employment do not differ much between the gateway areas that receive immigrants and other parts of the country. Factor proportions analyses take a general-equilibrium perspective, treating immigrants as a source of increased national supply of workers of the relevant skill, and treating trade as a source of changes in the supply of skills as well. It applies an elasticity of substitution to estimate the effect of these changes in labor supply on relative wages.

There are three great puzzles in interpreting European experience with large welfare states. Supportive government regulations of markets and related social partner centralized bargaining arrangements in the labor market. Consider for example, how tax reductions might affect the Swedish economy. They would make it more cost-effective to widen wage differences. They would give greater incentive for workers to increase hours worked, through overtime or through reductions in vacations or holidays, with consequences for employment as firms would need fewer workers in a given category to do the same amount of work. The tax cuts would induce greater search unemployment and would affect human-capital formation. The reductions would require less spending on benefit programs that may have induced high labor participation or that funded the public- sector employment that kept the economy at full employment policy could also lead to changes in savings or investment behavior and so on.

This article focuses on the role of labor markets and institutions in economic development. New developments in development in the 1980s contravened several widely held tenets about how labor markets and other institutional arrangements affect the performance of low-income countries. Conventional wisdom holds that developing countries should aspire to an essentially institutionless competitive ideal world. It views most labor institutions and interventions as impediments to the ideal, leaving little scope for analyses that illuminate how these institutions actually function and much room for "surprises" when they do more or less than act as flies in the pure-competitive ointment. More speculatively, the 1980s developments and analyses suggest that the institutions and policies that unleash or restrain sustained growth differ across settings and periods depending on country idiosyncrasies, initial institutional structures and the world economic environment. Rather than trying to force all experiences into a single competitive model, the domains in which different institutional arrangements produce better results, ought to be explored.

Significant differences between the unemployment and employment experiences of the U.S. and OECD-Europe have made views like the above popular overseas and led many European observers to look longingly at the American labor market as a paragon of decentralized wage and employment flexibility. The paper reviews the labor market outcomes that have led many Europeans to see the American economy as having no "real" unemployment problem, evaluates the claim that greater labor market flexibility underlies U.S.-OECD-Europe differences in outcomes and consider the costs that accompanied American employment expansion. The author's main claim is that the U.S. paid for its employment expansion with reduced growth of real wages and productivity rather than with relatively costless flexibility. It is found that some aspects of flexibility in relative wage setting helped limit U.S. unemployment while others did not, and argue that the disparate experiences of Great Britain and Sweden show that a decentralized labor market is neither necessary nor sufficient for employment-enhancing wage settlements.

This study develops a new and more general model of the demand for labor under cost minimization and uses the model to analyze the time series evidence on the magnitude of the elasticity of demand for labor in U.S. manufacturing. The principal finding is that, contrary to much of the literature, the fixed output elasticity of demand for labor in manufacturing is fairly sizeable. The common finding of negligible factor price effects appears due to the imposition of the constraint, which is strongly rejected by the data, that real capital prices have as large a positive effect on demand as the negative effect of real wages. It begins by examining the patterns of change in the principal variables that enter demand analysis: wages, prices, employment and output. The patterns of change in the principal demand variables in manufacturing are presented. Measure of the capital price takes into account the differential tax treatment of equipment and structures and the presence of both equity and debt finance, and adjusts the cost of capital for depreciation and expected capital gains.

The article presents information on the distribution of the unemployment burden. Recent theoretical and empirical analysis of unemployment has emphasized its dynamic character: flows into and out of unemployment are very substantial in relation to the stock of unemployed individuals and groups with high unemployment rates tend to be those whose members experience short but frequent spells of joblessness. This view of unemployment has afforded important new insights into the question of why average unemployment rates differ so markedly across certain labor force groups and has led to major shifts in the focus of labor market policy. Existing studies have focused almost exclusively on differences in the average values of the duration and frequency of spells of unemployment between certain labor market groups; none has examined systematically the variation in unemployment spell lengths and frequencies across individuals. This article seeks to fill this gap by examining the relative contributions of unemployment frequency and unemployment duration to the distribution of total hours of unemployment across individuals within each of several important labor force groups.

The principal findings of this study may be summarized. 1) The decision to enroll in law school is significantly affected by economic conditions in the profession, with elasticities of students to salaries of near unity in the short run and 3.0 to 4.0 in the long run. 2) Similarly, the number of students completing a legal course of study is influenced by the labor market, with elasticity of approximately 0.1 to 0.2 to annual salaries during the first and second years of study. 3) The salaries of young lawyers are inversely related to numbers of graduates, with a flexibility of about - .15 or, alternatively to the total stock of LLB's with a flexibility on the order of unity and positively linked to the level of activity in the legal sector. 4) Because of the recursive structure, the market undergoes highly dampened cobweb-type fluctuations with a peak-trough period of three to four years. 5) Finally and more speculatively the cobweb model suggests that the market for new lawyers will be depressed in the mid-seventies, when the large classes of the late sixties/early seventies graduate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of trade unionism on the exit behavior of workers in the context of Hirschman's exit-voice dichotomy. Unionism is expected to reduce quits and permanent separations and raise job tenure by providing a "voice" alternative to exit when workers are dissatisfied with conditions. Empirical evidence supports this contention, showing significantly lower exit for unionists in several large data tapes. It is argued that the grievance system plays a major rote in the reduction in exit and that the reduction lowers cost and raises productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of immigration and trade on the U.S. labor market. Trade has had small effects on the overall implicit labor supply of the less skilled. However, the trade effect is larger if one assumes that economic activities displaced by imports employ technologies comparable to the least skilled plants in U.S. manufacturing industries. The effect of immigration on native labor depends critically on the distribution of skills between immigrants and natives. If the skill distribution of immigrants matches that of natives, immigration will not affect the relative supply of skills and thus will not change the structure of wages.

ABSTRACT The fixed coefficient "manpower requirements" model has the advantage of providing information on the effect of changes in the industrial composition of an economy on demand for labor in highly disaggregated occupations, although at the cost of neglecting factor substitution. This study examines the ability of the fixed coefficient model to explain changes in employment in 3-digit occupations in the United States from 1960 to 1970 and develops an "augmented requirements" model that uses changes in wages as well as fixed coefficient shifts in demand to analyze changes in employment. The study finds that (1) by themselves, the requirements shifts account for much of the change in employment among detailed occupations in the period studied; (2) demand for detailed skills is far from zero elastic; and (3) the fixed coefficient model seems to work, not because demand and supply are economically unresponsive, but because the variation in the wage structure and corresponding incentive to alter input coefficients is moderate relative to the variation in the shift in demand due to changes in industrial mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The college job market underwent an unprecedented downturn in the 1970s when the earnings of graduates relative to other workers, the rate of return to investing in higher education, and employment opportunities dropped sharply, especially for new graduates. This paper examines the quantitative dimensions, causes, and consequences of the "new depression" in the market. It explains the downturn by slackened demand due to changes in the industrial structure and continued growth of supply. A major finding is that the fraction of young men choosing college fell in the seventies, apparently the result of responsive supply behavior to the depressed market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we compare the changing pattern of unionization in OECD countries, reviewing existing evidence and presenting new information on union-nonunion differentials in labor market outcomes tn these countries. Our principal source of information are the micro data files of the International Social Survey Program cross-country surveys of 1985-87. Our analysis shows that U.S. unions have a larger effect on wages than on other outcomes than unions in other OECD countries, and we argue that the high union premium in the United States has contributed to the decline in union density and divergence of the U.S. industrial relations system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents comments on an article that analyses the labor market gains of black Americans during the postwar period. Discussion of the article; Criticism; Problems with the article; Response of the author to these comments.

This article investigates labor market discrimination in the United States during the 1960s. Labor market developments in the 1960s (and to a lesser extent earlier) are changing the traditional pattern of market discrimination against African Americans. Evidence is building of substantial improvements in the position of African American workers and, particularly, of the educated African American who has long suffered the greatest relative disadvantages. In some important markets. Such as that for women or college graduates, discriminatory differences appear to have virtually disappeared. Preferential hiring and information quotas favoring blacks are not uncommon. The extent and rapidity of these changes in the market raise several questions regarding the economic analysis of discrimination and interpretation of black/white differences. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to review the evidence of a collapse in market discrimination, to examine the problems of explaining the change with current theory and to suggest, as a working hypothesis, a view of the U.S. discriminatory system designed to account for observed phenomena.

Germany's more compressed wage structure is widely viewed as the main cause of the German-US difference in employment and unemployment, but part of the compression is due to Germany having a narrower distribution of skills than the US. Even adjusted for skills, however, we find that Germany has a more compressed wage distribution than the US. But relatively little of the US-German employment difference can be attributed to the compressed wage distribution. We find that jobless Germans have nearly the same skills as employed Germans and look more like average Americans than like low skilled Americans, which runs counter to the wage compression hypothesis. Given these patterns, the pay and employment experience of low skilled Americans is a poor counterfactual for assessing how reductions in pay might affect jobless Germans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]