Wages – The Economics, Tech, Health and Culture Remix (beta)

How the U.S. economy turned six good jobs into bad ones

September 5, 2018 Bilal 0

How the U.S. economy turned six good jobs into bad ones https://ift.tt/2wCqGOs Sue Sweeney works on a transmission at her garage in Upper Darby, Pa., on Aug. 7. Auto repair and auto dealerships both figure high on the list of professions that are no longer a ticket to the middle class. (Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images) (DOMINICK REUTER/AFP/Getty Images) Changes in the labor market have upended myriad jobs that used to pay well, dragging down wages and leaving millions of American workers feeling misled and frustrated. To illustrate this dynamic, we isolated six industries that provided an above-average weekly paycheck in the […]

Brad DeLong hops aboard the “Employers have a Taboo against raising Wages” bandwagon

September 4, 2018 Bilal 0

Brad DeLong hops aboard the “Employers have a Taboo against raising Wages” bandwagon https://ift.tt/2PvfnP4 – by New Deal democrat For Labor Day Prof. Brad DeLong posted a talk on the implications (or not) of the US being near “full employment.” The arguments on a few of the pages will be familiar to readers of this blog: My only significant quibble here is that “Job Openings” rates from both the JOLTS reports and the NFIB (Small Business) survey have been soaring for over 2 years. If employers knew that they had to pay higher wages to attract workers, but didn’t want […]

Robert Samuelson Says Our Wage Increases Went to Health Care, BLS Disagrees

September 4, 2018 Bilal 0

Robert Samuelson Says Our Wage Increases Went to Health Care, BLS Disagrees https://ift.tt/2LSerCk Robert Samuelson used his Labor Day column to tell us that our pay really didn’t end up in the pockets of rich people. The problem is that it all went to employer-provided health care insurance. The argument is that health care costs have vastly exceeded the overall rate of inflation. Since a standard health care benefit is larger as a share of the pay of a low-wage worker than a high-wage worker, the increased cost of the benefit took away the money that otherwise would have gone […]

Why We Should Worry About Monopsony

September 4, 2018 Bilal 0

Why We Should Worry About Monopsony https://ift.tt/2NLua7S By David Weil, Dean and Professor, Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website When a small group of companies can dominate a labor market, wages – and workers – suffer Center stage in the meeting of the Federal Research Bank of Kansas City’s annual symposium in Jackson, Wyoming this August was a discussion of the repercussions of having a small number of companies dominating the labor markets where they hire workers–what economists call “monopsony.” That agenda item on an annual meeting that […]

Study of 8000 workers finds that gender differences in “achievement motivation” may explain part of the gender pay gap

September 2, 2018 Bilal 0

Study of 8000 workers finds that gender differences in “achievement motivation” may explain part of the gender pay gap https://ift.tt/2wCkhCN By Alex Fradera In the UK, this has been a year of action on the gender pay gap (the, on average, lower pay for women compared with men), with cross-party MPs launching campaigns like #PayMeToo and the government taking steps to investigate and hold organisations to account on the issue. This has also attracted pushback from those that argue that the gender difference in average pay has many causes, including the different interests of, and life choices taken by, men and […]

The empirical studies are finding more and more hysteresis

September 2, 2018 Bilal 0

https://ift.tt/2OAcFaO The empirical studies are finding more and more hysteresis—more hysteresis in the sense of a persistent downward shadow cast by a recession than I would have believed likely. I keep hunting for something wrong with these studies. But there are too many of them. And they all—at least all those published that cross my desk—point in the same direction: Karl Walentin and Andreas Westermark: Stabilising the real economy increases average output: “DeLong and Summers (1989)… argue that (demand) stabilisation policies can affect the mean level of output and unemployment… …Hysteresis induced by insider-outsider wage bargaining is probably the most […]