Essays On The Political Economy Of Labor Market Regulation

(Cont.) This argument is evaluated in a dynamic model of labor turnover and employment protection. The third chapter presents an argument according to which employment protection is a policy that is difficult to introduce. If a country decides to introduce employment protection, it is reasonable to assume that firms can adjust employment levels before protection is actually implemented. Firms then have an incentive to dismiss some workers today in order to avoid high employment protection in the future. Anticipating this, these workers may oppose the introduction of employment protection. Delayed implementation can give rise to situations in which both low and high employment protection are stable political outcomes.

This dissertation compiles three empirical studies in Labor Economics and Political Economy. Overall, the manuscript focuses on policy evaluation, and in understanding the hurdles in policy implementation in developing countries. The first study estimates the effects of minimum wage on employment in India, filling an important gap in the empirical minimum wage literature by accounting for the imperfect nature of law enforcement rampant in developing countries. The results are consistent with a model of imperfect competition and imperfect enforcement. The second study employs a semi-structural model using a 13-year firm-level panel dataset from India, and estimates the contemporaneous and lagged productivity effects of firms hiring contract workers. Results indicate that although firms benefit from hiring contract workers through increased productivity in the current period, lagged productivity effects are negative, reflecting the tradeoff in hiring workers on temporary contracts. The last study, a joint paper with two coauthors, develops a model on political clientelism to show that politicians may not only target swing voters to buy support, as shown in previous studies, but can additionally simultaneously target politically active households who can inturn indirectly influence other swing voters. Our empirical results based on a household survey in a southern Indian state, are consistent with these predictions.

Prominent economists discuss internal labor markets, the dynamics of immigration, labor market regulation, and other key topics in the work of Michael J. Piore. In Economy in Society, five prominent social scientists honor Michael J. Piore in original essays that explore key topics in Piore's work and make significant independent contributions in their own right. Piore is distinctive for his original research that explores the interaction of social, political, and economic considerations in the labor market and in the economic development of nations and regions. The essays in this volume reflect this rigorous interdisciplinary approach to important social and economic questions. M. Diane Burton's essay extends our understanding of internal labor markets by considering the influence of surrounding firms; Natasha Iskander builds on Piore's theory of immigration with a study of Mexican construction workers in two cities; Suzanne Berger highlights insights from Piore's work on technology and industrial development; Andrew Schrank takes up the theme of regulatory discretion; and Charles Sabel discusses theories of public bureaucracy.

This volume collects original contributions and recent research in economic theory and the political economy of unemployment and inflation from a team of internationally renowned scholars. These essays, collected in honour of John Cornwall, demonstrate the importance of economic institutions for economic outcomes and share his focus on the need for high level economic theory to be socially relevant. The book includes an intellectual biography of the honouree by Geoff Harcourt and Mehdi Monadjemi and a full bibliography of his work.

This comprehensive and instructive study examines the relative success or failure of government policies in preventing and alleviating unemployment. Choosing two contrasting cases--West Germany and the United States--Thomas Janoski probes the causes and consequences of two very different orientations toward labor market policy. In West Germany, labor, employers, and government cooperate in the running of a powerful and effective employment service. In the United States, by contrast, one finds little state involvement, organizational confusion, a long history of poor funding, and legislative resistance to intervention in the labor market. In the author's mind, these inadequate policies have had deleterious consequences for the American labor force. Whereas a skilled and flexible labor force exists in West Germany, Americans are poorly trained and barely assisted in finding jobs and training. To remedy this situation Janoski puts forth bold and useful policy recommendations, including the creation of a new organization to operate in national labor markets, the development of technical training programs in high schools, and the creation of a youth service to prevent teenage crime. The Political Economy of Unemployment offers a trenchant examination of how modern industrialized nations deal with the vicissitudes of the economy and how they might develop and implement more effective labor market policies. Meticulously researched, it is an important contribution which policymakers and social scientists will find provocative and useful. This comprehensive and instructive study examines the relative success or failure of government policies in preventing and alleviating unemployment. Choosing two contrasting cases--West Germany and the United States--Thomas Janoski probes the causes and consequences of two very different orientations toward labor market policy. In West Germany, labor, employers, and government cooperate in the running of a powerful and effective employment service. In the United States, by contrast, one finds little state involvement, organizational confusion, a long history of poor funding, and legislative resistance to intervention in the labor market. In the author's mind, these inadequate policies have had deleterious consequences for the American labor force. Whereas a skilled and flexible labor force exists in West Germany, Americans are poorly trained and barely assisted in finding jobs and training. To remedy this situation Janoski puts forth bold and useful policy recommendations, including the creation of a new organization to operate in national labor markets, the development of technical training programs in high schools, and the creation of a youth service to prevent teenage crime. The Political Economy of Unemployment offers a trenchant examination of how modern industrialized nations deal with the vicissitudes of the economy and how they might develop and implement more effective labor market policies. Meticulously researched, it is an important contribution which policymakers and social scientists will find provocative and useful.