Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 18 - May 2018): Labor Economics

Publisher : Oxford

The book collects articles published by Daniel Hamermesh between 1969 and 2013 dealing with the general topic of the demand for labor. The first section presents empirical studies of basic issues in labor demand, including the extent to which different types of labor are substitutes, howfirms' and workers' investments affect labor turnover, and how costs of adjusting employment affect the dynamics of employment and patterns of labor turnover. The second section examines the impacts of various labor-market policies, including minimum wages, penalty pay for using overtime hours orhours worked on weekends or nights, severance pay for displaced workers, and payroll taxes to finance unemployment insurance benefits. The final section deals with general questions of discrimination by employers along various dimensions, including looks, gender and ethnicity, in all cases focusingon the process of discrimination and the behavior that results. Throughout the focus is on the development of theoretically-based hypotheses and testing them using the most appropriate data, often data collected uniquely for the particular project.

Publisher : Routledge

Employment is a critical part of the macro-economy and a key driver of economic development. India's employment policy over the past three decades provides an important case study for understanding how government attitudes to the labour market contribute to an emerging economy's growth and development. This study contains important insights on the policy challenges faced by one of the world's most populous, labour abundant economies in securing employment in a context of structural change. The book considers India's approach to employment policy from a national and global perspective and whether policy settings promote employment intensive growth. Chapters in the first half of the volume evaluate India's approach to employment policy within the national and international context. This includes the ILO Decent Work program, the national agenda for inclusive growth, and national regulatory frameworks for labour and education. Chapters in the second half of the volume focus on how employment policy works in practice and its impact on manufacturing workers, the self-employed, women, and rural workers. These chapters draw attention to the contradictions within the current policy regime and the need for new approaches. Employment Policy in Emerging Economieswill interest scholars, policy makers and students of the Indian economy and South Asia more generally. It will support undergraduate and postgraduate academic teaching in courses on economic development, global political economy, the Indian economy and global labour.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Globalization, as commonly understood, limits policy choices of a nation by creating structural-institutional constraints. This leads to an important question: are political actors still relevant in shaping policy in the interest of domestic socio-economic concerns? This book draws attentionto the continuing relevance of local politics in influencing public policy, through a study of labour market reforms. Labour, unlike other factors of production, is not only a resource but also an important social group capable of political manifestation. Drawing on evidence from states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal, this book shows that despite pressures of policy convergence, labourreforms vary across states, depending on partisan governments, dynamics of interest group negotiations, and party competition. Using both qualitative and quantitative evidence, the book argues that "who governs" matters for how globalization unfolds in any society and that public policies continueto be nuanced, if not shaped, by politics.

Publisher : Palgrave macmillan

The second title in the Palgrave Studies in Global Human Capital Management series, this book explores how human capital contributes to innovation within the context of an inter-connected and globalized world. Investigating globalization as a phenomenon reflected within increasing cross-border flows of goods, services, know-how and talent, Human Capital and Innovation: Examining the Role of Globalization illustrates various facets of innovation at individual, team and organizational level.  It highlights the influence of new economic realities, such as technological advances and the rise of emerging economies, on human capital and innovation.

Publisher : Oxford

This book is a sequel to the World Bank's World Development Report 2013: Jobs. The central message of that report was that job creation is at the heart of development. Jobs raise living standards and lift people out of poverty, they contribute to gains in aggregate productivity, and they mayeven foster social cohesion. In doing so, jobs may have spillovers beyond the private returns they offer to those who hold them. Poverty reduction is arguably a public good, making everybody better off; higher productivity spreads across co-workers, clusters, and cities; and social cohesion improvesthe outcomes of collective decision-making. But which jobs make the greatest contribution to development and what policies can facilitate the creation of more of these jobs? There is no universal answer - it depends on the country's level of development, demography, natural endowments, and institutions. This volume explores the diversity ofjobs challenges and solutions through case studies of seven developing countries. These countries, drawn from four continents, represent seven different contexts - a small island nation (St. Lucia), a resource-rich country (Papua New Guinea), agrarian (Mozambique), urbanizing (Bangladesh), andformalizing (Mexico) economies, as well as young (Tunisia) and aging (Ukraine) populations. Using methods drawn from several branches of economics and the social sciences more broadly and analyzing a wide range of data, the authors show the different ways in which jobs have contributed to social andeconomic development in the countries they have studied and how they can contribute in the future. The policy priorities vary accordingly. They often extend well beyond traditional labor market instruments to include policy areas not typically considered in national growth strategies.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Across Europe, market mechanisms are spreading into areas where they did not exist before. In public administration, market governance is displacing other ways of coordinating public services. In social policy, the welfare state is retreating from its historic task of protecting citizens fromthe discipline of the market. In industrial relations, labor and management are negotiating with an eye to competitiveness, often against new non-union market players.What is marketization, and what are its effects? This book uses employment services in Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain as a window to explore the rise of market mechanisms. Based on more than 100 interviews with funders, managers, front-line workers, and others, the authors discuss the internalworkings of these markets and the organizations that provide the services.This book gives readers new tools to analyse market competition and its effects. It provides a new conceptualization of the markets themselves, the dilemmas and tradeoffs that they generate, and the differing services and workplaces that result. It is aimed at students and researchers in the appliedfields of social policy, public administration, and employment relations and has important implications for comparative political economy and welfare states.

Publisher : Oxford

Unpaid work, across the world, is an area that has generally been neglected by economists as well as development actors. Yet the amount of unpaid work done and the manner in which its burden is distributed have important implications for the well-being of individuals and households, as well asfor any economys growth and dynamism. This book establishes that there is an urgent need to measure unpaid work and incorporate it in analysing the critical concerns of an economy. As a first step, it focuses on gathering quality statistics and methodologies required to conduct time-use surveys in moving towards integrating unpaid workin policymaking. Assessing various time-use surveys from the global South - Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Africa - the book moves on to address critical socioeconomic concerns such as poverty alleviation, employment, gender equality, womens empowerment, as also the overall well-being anddevelopment of a nation. With in-depth theoretical foundations and empirical analysis, it builds the case for aggregating quality time-use data for sustainable development of the global South.