Studies in Labor Economics

该项目考察了劳动经济学中的两个重要主题。第一个问题是如何确定每年的工作时间，特别强调了带薪和无薪休假这一基本上未被研究过的问题。本研究的目的之一是对工作休假进行全面的实证分析。收入动态小组研究、健康和退休调查以及其他来源用于提供关于带薪休假周数和总休假周数如何随工资率、工时限制指标、每周工作时间、劳动力市场经验、工作资历、工会地位、监管地位、公司规模、种族、性别、职业和行业特征而变化的基本事实。该研究衡量了员工换工作时带薪休假的情况，并确定了休假在多大程度上是公司整体政策的刚性功能，还是员工个人可以讨价还价的东西。该项目更广泛的目标是提高对人们在更高的报酬和更短的工作时间之间做出选择的程度的理解，以及在两者之间进行权衡的条款。该分析将为有关如何调整劳动力市场以更好地适应寻求平衡职业目标与家庭义务的男女的政策讨论提供信息。该项目的第二部分考察了名义工资刚性下降对劳动经济学中一系列广泛问题的影响。有相当多的证据表明，企业非常不愿意降低名义工资率，但很少有研究表明，降低工资的障碍如何影响企业的人事决策。这项研究的核心是开发和估计一个理性的、前瞻性的企业的雇佣、工资设定和裁员行为模型，当削减在职员工的名义工资成本太高而无法实施时。在选择填补职位空缺的工资标准和确定后续工资标准时，这样的企业必须考虑到这样一个事实，即今天选择的名义工资为工人未来的工资设定了一个底线。在当前和未来的生产力存在不确定性的情况下，支付更高的工资来增加雇佣率和保留率，会增加在随后的一段时间内不得不向工人支付过高工资或产生裁员成本的风险。该模型被用来评估和重新审视劳动经济学中的一些重要主题，在这些主题中，名义工资刚性的后果在以前的研究中被忽视了。这些研究包括收入随劳动力市场经验和工作资历的增长程度的研究，工作内部和工作之间的工资动态研究，最近关于雇主学习和工资动态的研究，基于种族、民族或性别的统计歧视研究，以及关于通货膨胀对收入分配影响的研究。这项研究使用了收入动态小组研究的数据。

The project examines two important topics in labor economics. The first concerns how annual hours of work are determined, with a special emphasis on the largely unresearched issue of paid and unpaid leave. One objective of the study is to provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of work leave. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Survey, and other sources are used to provide a basic set of facts about how paid weeks of leave and total weeks of leave vary with wage rates, indicators of hours constraints, weekly work hours, labor market experience, job seniority, union status, supervisory status, firm size, race, gender, and occupation and industry characteristics. The study measures what happens to paid leave when workers change jobs and determines the degree to which leave is a rigid function of firm wide policy or is something that individual employees can bargain over. The broader goal of the project is to improve understanding of the extent to which people can choose between higher compensation and shorter hours and the terms of the tradeoff between them. The analysis will inform policy discussions concerning how the labor market can be modified to better accommodate men and women who are seeking to balance career goals with family obligations. The second part of the project examines the implications of downward nominal wage rigidity for a broad set of questions in labor economics. There is considerable evidence suggesting that firms are very reluctant to cut nominal wage rates, but there is little research on how barriers to wage cuts influence the personnel decisions of firms. The heart of the study is the development and estimation of a model of the hiring, wage setting, and layoff behavior of a rational, forward looking firm when nominal wages cuts for incumbent workers are too costly to impose. When choosing a wage to fill a vacancy and when setting subsequent wages, such a firm must take account of the fact that the nominal wage chosen today sets a floor on a worker's future wages. In the presence of uncertainty about current and future productivity, paying higher wages to increase hiring rates and retention increases the risk of having to either overpay the worker in a subsequent period or incur the cost of a layoff. The model is estimated and used to revisit a number of important subjects in labor economics where the consequences of nominal wage rigidity have been ignored in previous research. These include studies of the degree to which earnings rise with labor market experience and job seniority, studies of wage dynamics within jobs and across jobs, recent research on employer learning and wage dynamics, studies of statistical discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex, and research on the effects of inflation on the distribution of earnings. The study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.