Research

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IMPROVEMENTS IN ELECTRONIC JOB ALERTS AND THE LABOUR MARKET EXPERIENCE OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS: EVIDENCE FROM THE CONNECTING CANADIANS WITH AVAILABLE JOBS INITIATIVE

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY TALENT: THE SKILLS WE NEED-FRAMING THE ISSUES

TRENDS IN EARNINGS INEQUALITY AND EARNINGS INSTABILITY AMONG US COUPLES: HOW IMPORTANT IS ASSORTATIVE MATCHING?

Researchers

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Sebastian Portrait

Sebastian Fossati

Associate Professor

University of Alberta

 Andrew Portrait

Andrew McGee

Associate Professor

University of Alberta

 Laurel Wheeler Portrait

Laurel Wheeler

Assistant Professor

University of Alberta

New Economics Papers (from NEP)

The following works presented are external working papers published to the NEP-LMA and NEP-LAB RSS feeds. This content is provided to show a wider view of research being conducted across the areas of Labor Markets - Supply, Demand, and Wages, as well as Labour Economics. Works listed may have no relation to ACLMR or the ACLMR team and are published out of academic interest only.

Labour Markets

2024-10

Minimum Wages in Concentrated Labor Markets

Economists increasingly refer to monopsony power to reconcile the absence of negative employment effects of minimum wages with theory. However, systematic evidence for the monopsony argument is scarce.…

2024-10

Work Pay, Contractual Changes and Employee Attrition: Evidence from NHS Trainee Doctors

Retention of skilled workers is critical for the delivery of public services in high-stakes environments such as hospital care. We study how contractual pay terms affect the retention of trainee doctors…

2024-10

AI Adoption and Workplace Training

This paper investigates the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in production processes on workplace training practices, using firm-level data from the BIBB establishment panel on training…

2024-09

Establishment Size and the Task Content of Jobs: Evidence from 46 Countries

Using a mix of household- and employer-based survey data from 46 countries, we provide novel evidence that workers in larger establishments perform more non-routine analytical tasks, even within narrowly…

2024-09

Monopsony Power and Poverty: The Consequences of Walmart Supercenter Openings

Prior research suggests that Walmart Supercenters exert substantial power over the low-wage labor market, though the consequences of Supercenter openings on household incomes and public finances are less…

2024-10

Work Hours Mismatch

Using a revealed preference approach applied to administrative data from Washington we document that workers have limited discretion over hours at a given employer, there is substantial mismatch between…

2024

Do Capital Incentives Distort Technology Diffusion? Evidence on Cloud, Big Data and AI

The arrival of cloud computing provides firms a new way to access digital technologies as digital services. Yet, capital incentive policies present in every OECD country are still targeted towards investments…

2024

The Rise of Generative AI: Modelling Exposure, Substitution, and Inequality Effects on the US Labour Market

How exposed is the labour market to ever-advancing AI capabilities, to what extent does this substitute human labour, and how will it affect inequality? We address these questions in a simulation of 711…

2024-09

The Importance of Luck in Executive Promotion Tournaments: Theory and Evidence

We empirically test whether executives' increases in base salary when promoted to CEO result from the wage bids of competing firms (i.e., "market-based tournaments") or from the strategic choices…

2024-10

The Scarring Effect of Graduate Underemployment: Evidence from the UK

The UK has one of the highest proportions of tertiary educated workers in Europe but also one of the highest rates of graduate underemployment. Little is known however about the extent to which there…

2024-10

When Protectionism Kills Talent

We examine the repercussions of protectionist policies implemented in the United States since 2018 on the composition of workforce and career choices within the semiconductor industry. We find that the…

2024-10

The Health and Employment Effects of Employer Vaccination Mandates

Health care facilities considering mandating staff vaccination face a difficult tradeoff. While additional vaccination coverage will directly reduce disease transmission within the facility, the imposition…

2024

Tax System Design, Tax Reform, and Labor Supply

This study examines how tax system design and reform affect labor supply. We conduct an online experiment with 522 participants to assess labor responses to tax reforms that introduce or remove a notch,…

2024-09

The Motherhood Penalty: Gender Norms, Occupational Sorting, and Labor Supply

In this paper, we examine how pre-birth gender norms shape women's labor market trajectories and occupational choices around motherhood in the United Kingdom. Using data from the British Household Panel…

2024-10-21

The Effect of Military Base Closures on Young Adults

This study examines the response among young adults to the closure of a large local employer. By using military base closures in Sweden, I find that men experience lower earnings and enroll in tertiary…

2024-11

Long-Term Employment Effects of the Minimum Wage in Germany: New Data and Estimators

We investigate the long-term effects of the introduction of the German minimum wage in 2015 and its subsequent increases on regional employment. Using comprehensive survey data, we are able to measure…

2024-09

The New Wave? The Role of Human Capital and STEM Skills in Technology Adoption in the UK

Which types of human capital influence the adoption of advanced technologies? We study the skill-biased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across two waves in the UK. Specifically,…

2024-10-08

Home Production and Gender Gap in Structural Change

We document that the gender gap in non-agricultural work in developing countries exists primarily among rural married workers, not singles. Rural married women dedicate a much larger portion of time to…

2024-10

Do Big Inequalities in Executive Pay Hurt Firm Performance?

Research Question/ Issue: Do large, within-firm executive pay differences hurt firm performance? Prior literature shows mixed results concerning the sign of the relationship between executive pay disparity…

2024-10

Environmental Awareness and Occupational Choices of Adolescents

This paper analyzes the impact of environmental awareness on the occupational choices of adolescents. To do so, we exploit the apprenticeship system in Switzerland, where about two-thirds of adolescents…

2024

How Do You Find A Good Manager?

This paper develops a novel method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance. The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individual…

2024

Explaining Benefit Take-up Behavior – The Role of Financial Incentives

Take-up of social benefits is a central issue in poverty alleviation and fiscal evaluations of policy reforms. However, it is difficult to find exogenous variation in the benefit level, and little is…

2024-10

Health Insurance and Part-Time Employment: The Influence of the Affordable Care Act

Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), part-time workers were much less likely than full-time workers to have health insurance. The ACA included multiple provisions intended to raise health…

2024-10

Dual labor markets and the equilibrium distribution of firms

We study the effects of dual labor markets (i.e. the co-existence of fixed-term and open-ended contracts) on the allocation of workers within and across firms, the equilibrium distribution of firms, aggregate…

2024-09

Noncognitive Human Capital and Misreporting Behavior in Online Surveys

In this study, we investigate misreporting behavior in online surveys based on the field experiments in a large-scale online training program for rural teachers. We link the digitally recorded data with…

2024

All Hat and No Cattle? ESG Incentives in Executive Compensation

This paper examines the integration of ESG performance metrics into executive compensation using a detailed panel dataset of European executives. Despite becoming more widespread, most ESG metrics are…

2024-10-30

The hidden reserve of nurses and teachers in the Netherlands

Like in many other high-income countries, the Netherlands experiences significant staff shortages in both healthcare and education. The key shortage occupations in these sectors are nurses and teachers.…

2024-10

Entry Conditions and the Transition from Tertiary Education to Employment: A Cross-Country Perspective

This paper uses monthly data on tertiary education graduates in 19 European countries covering 2004-2017 to assess the short-run effects of entry conditions on the transition into employment. Using an…

2024

Vetting for Virtue: Democracy’s Challenge in Excluding Criminals from Office

This paper assesses the effectiveness of democratic systems in preventing individuals with criminal backgrounds from holding political office. Unlike many countries, Norway has no legal restrictions against…

2024

The New Wave? The Role of Human Capital and STEM Skills in Technology Adoption in the UK

Which types of human capital influence the adoption of advanced technologies? We study the skill-biased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across two waves in the UK. Specifically,…

2024-09

A Few Bad Apples? Criminal Charges, Political Careers, and Policy Outcomes

We study the prevalence and effects of individuals with past criminal charges among candidates and elected politicians in Brazil. Individuals with past criminal charges are twice as likely to both run…

2024-10

Revisiting the Phillips and Beveridge Curves: Insights from the 2020s Inflation Surge

This paper reexamines the Phillips and Beveridge curves to explain the inflation surge in the U.S. during the 2020s. We argue that the pre-surge consensus regarding both curves requires substantial revision.…

Labour Economics

2024

The Evolution of Child-Related Gender Inequality in Germany and the Role of Family Policies, 1960-2018

Using German administrative data from the 1960s onward, this paper (i) examines the long-term evolution of child-related gender inequality in earnings and (ii) assesses the impact of family policies on…

2024-10

Spousal Labor Supply: Decoupling Gender Norms and Earning Status

Many household labor supply models divide couples by sex and identify separate male and female labor supply parameters. However, institutional factors in the labor market suggest that men are more likely…

2024-10

Modeling Migration-Induced Unemployment

Immigration is often blamed for increasing unemployment among local workers. However, standard models, such as the neoclassical model and the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides matching model, inherently assume…

2024-10

Feeling Observed? A Field Experiment on the Effects of Intense Survey Participation on Job Seekers' Labour Market Outcomes

We ran a field experiment to causally identify the effects of intense survey participation on key labour market outcomes. We randomly excluded individuals willing to sign up for the German Job Search…

2024-10

Layoff Costs and Learning about Employer Financial Distress

While many employees risk losing their job and having their career disrupted due to employers' financial distress, it is widely recognized that many leave their employer in anticipation of layoff. In…

2024-10-24

Reservation Wages Revisited: Empirics with the Canonical Model

Using innovative longitudinal data from a survey of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients, we test several implications of a canonical job search model for reservation wages during unemployment spells.…

2024-10

Polluted Job Search: The Impact of Poor Air Quality on Reservation Wages

This paper investigates the impact of air pollution on reservation wages. We use rich survey data on unemployed job seekers in Germany and exploit variation in individual exposure to fine particulate…

2024-10

Employee Performance and Mental Well-Being: The Mitigating Effects of Transformational Leadership During Crisis

The positive role of transformational leadership for productivity and mental wellbeing has long been established. Transformational leadership behavior may be particularly suited to navigate times of crisis…

2024-11

The Effect of Initial Job in Japanese Labor Market

We investigate the effect of being a regular employee in a job which a worker takes immediately after graduation (the initial job), on subsequent job status. We construct an assignment model that can…

2024-10

Affordable Housing and Individual Labor Market Outcomes

We investigate the employment effects of living in affordable housing. We develop a unique administrative data set of labor market biographies linked to affordable housing projects in five German cities.…

2024

The Labor Market Attainment of Immigrants in the Antebellum United States

This paper analyzes the occupational status of adult White foreign-born men in the antebellum United States, compared to White native-born men, and among the foreign born by country of origin. Hypotheses…

2024-10-01

Do Cost-of-Living Shocks Pass Through to Wages?

We develop a novel, tractable New Keynesian model where firms post wages and workers search on the job, motivated by microeconomic evidence on wage setting. Because firms set wages to avoid costly turnover,…

2024

Dividing Housework between Partners: Individual Preferences and Social Norms

Using UK longitudinal data on dual-earner couples, this paper estimates a model of intrahousehold housework decisions, which combines a randomized experimental framework eliciting counterfactual choices…

2024-10-01

Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students

We analyze 6, 400 letters of recommendation for more than 2, 200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates from 2018 to 2021. Letter text varies significantly by field of interest, with significantly less…

2024-09-01

The Pay and Non-Pay Content of Job Ads

How informative are job ads about the actual pay and amenities offered by employers? Using a comprehensive database of job ads posted by Norwegian employers, we develop a methodology to systematically…

2024-10

The Hidden Demand for Flexibility: a Theory for Gendered Employment Dynamics

Empirical evidence highlights women’s demand for flexible working hours as a crit-ical cause of the persistent gender disparities in the labor market. We propose a theory of how hidden demand for flexibility…

2024-10

Works Councils and Apprenticeship Training: Heterogeneous Works Councils, Heterogeneous Effects?

In Germany, works councils possess co-determination rights concerning apprenticeship training, which may influence training outcomes in firms. While the literature commonly assumes homogeneous effects…

2024

Do Americans Favor Female or Male Politicians? Evidence from Experimental Elections

Women are severely underrepresented in American politics, especially among Republicans. This underrepresentation may result from women being less willing to run for office, from voter bias against women,…

2024-10

The Declining Relative Quality of the Child Care Workforce

Although it is widely acknowledged that high-skilled teachers are integral to service quality and young children's well-being in child care settings, little is known about the qualifications and skills…

2024-10

Does Work-Based Learning Facilitate the School to Work Transition? Evidence from an Italian Reform

In 2015, school-work alternation programmes (alternanza scuola lavoro) became compulsory in all Italian high schools, with the purpose of enabling students to combine theoretical learning at school with…

2024-10

Return-to-Office Mandates, Health and Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We here exploit an exogenous shift in working conditions for public-sector workers in Italy to establish the causal effect of a return-to-office (RTO) mandate on worker health and well-being. In nine…

2024-10

The Demand-Side Story: Structural Change and the Decline in Female Labour Force Participation in India

Mainstream literature attributes the decline in female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) in India between 2004-05 and 2017-18 primarily to supply-side factors. In this paper, we show that, in fact,…

2024-10

Why Do Workers Dislike Inflation? Wage Erosion and Conflict Costs

How costly is inflation to workers? Answers to this question have focused on the path of real wages during inflationary periods. We argue that workers must take costly actions ("conflict") to…

2024-10-01

Wage Growth and Labor Market Tightness

Good measures of labor market tightness are essential to predict wage inflation and to calibrate monetary policy. This paper highlights the importance of two measures of labor market tightness in determining…

2024-10

The Migrant Penalty in Latin America: Experimental Evidence from Job Recruiters

We conducted an artifactual field experiment with human resource recruiters in Ecuador to investigate the extent to which migrants are penalized in the labor market. Human resource recruiters were hired…

2024-10-21

Fairness in a Society of Unequal Opportunities

Modern societies are characterized by widespread disparities in opportunities, creating income inequality between people whose choices were shaped by different circumstances. This paper investigates how…

2024-10-24

Pensions in Aging Asia and the Pacific: Policy Insights and Priorities

Asia and the Pacific has the most diverse regional pension landscape globally. Yet the region’s pension systems are facing common challenges as they attempt to expand coverage, and ensure adequacy and…

2024-10-01

Need for Speed: Quality of Innovations and the Allocation of Inventors

This paper studies how the speed-quality tradeoff in innovation interacts with firm dynamics, concentration, and economic growth. Empirically, we document long-run trends in the increasing speed of innovation…

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Research Questions

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What are the pathways to unlock the capacity of chronically under/unemployed Albertans, including youth, immigrants, indigenous, women, and people with disabilities?

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