Volumen 9 (2020): Heft 1 (March 2020)

Using within-family variation from twins and siblings, I find that smokers earn approximately 16% less than nonsmokers. Possible explanations for this earning difference are addiction-related productivity declines and earning reductions from higher health insurance costs. To investigate further, I use variation in the provision of employer-supplied health insurance (ESHI) to examine the mechanism of whether the addiction or insurance component has a larger influence on earnings. While I generally observe a larger earning penalty for smokers with ESHI than smokers without ESHI, the earning difference is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

In many countries, labor courts play a central role in the determination of firing costs by monitoring and supervising the procedures for dismissals, and, eventually, deciding severance payments mandated by the employment protection legislation (EPL). To get some insights about the impact of labor courts on effective firing costs, we explore a new database that contains information on labor courts’ intervention in firings before and after the implementation of significant EPL reforms modifying severance payments and procedures for dismissals. Our results suggest that labor court rulings on economic dismissals did not fully translate the reduction of firing costs mandated by the new EPL to effective firing costs.

Looking at the decentralized provision of public education in a middle-income country, this paper estimates the impact of local autonomy on service quality, finding large heterogeneity in the effect across different levels of local development. In the year 2002, Colombian municipalities were entrusted with autonomous management of their local public education based solely on a population threshold. I estimate the impact that autonomy has had on education performance across the territory, using a municipality and time fixed-effects model. I find a quality gap arising between highly developed and low-developed autonomous municipalities, in a trend that reinforces over time: the reform has induced regional inequality in education quality. I am able to support the hypothesis that autonomous and nonautonomous municipalities were on similar performance trends before decentralization was implemented, even when looking within different local development ranges. Based on the analysis of detailed municipal balance sheet data and administration indicators, I argue that local administration capacity represents the most likely explanation of why the autonomy-related discrepancies have been arising.

I use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to measure the extent to which an unemployment spell increases the likelihood that a worker receives a cash transfer from family. I examine the prevalence of cash transfers from family, the demographic distribution of unemployed receivers, and the variation between family supported and not family supported spells. I further investigate how this informal, private assistance relates to public transfers from Unemployment Insurance using state-by-year variation in the UI program. I find that unemployment increases the probability a worker receives financial assistance from their family, inclusive of all demographic subgroups, that family cash transfer receipt is growing over time, and is weakly related to UI availability.

In many countries, collective bargaining coverage is enhanced by government-issued extensions that widen the reach of collective agreements beyond their signatory parties to all firms and workers in the sector. This paper analyzes the causal impact of extensions using a natural experiment in Portugal that resulted in a sharp and unanticipated decline in the extension probability of agreements. Our results, based on a regression discontinuity design, indicate that extensions had a negative impact on employment growth. This effect is concentrated among nonaffiliated firms, which may reflect the limited representativeness of employer associations.

The primary objective of this study is to examine the contribution of available information constrained by parents’ fields of study to the observed assortative preferences in their children’s choice of major. Comparable to panel models, we define within-family transmission functions with 1-to-2 matches (1 for each parent). Using the confidential major file of the 2011 National Household Survey from Canada, the results show that children’s choice of field of study exhibits significant assortative preferences isolated from ability sorting and unobserved differences across majors and other family characteristics. With some caution, we attribute this persisting assortative tendency to the information asymmetry across alternative majors built on by parents’ educational backgrounds within families.

Over the last 30 years, researchers have disputed the mixed evidence of the effect of the minimum wage on teenage employment in the United States. Whenever the minimum wage has positive or no effects on employment, they appeal to monopsony models to explain their results. However, very few of these studies have empirically tested whether their results are due to monopsonistic characteristics in the labor markets. In this article, I estimate the effects of the minimum wage for the United States under concentrated labor markets and low-mobility jobs (two variables that measure monopsony), identify heterogeneous effects among different scenarios derived from the monopsony model, and provide a plausible explanation of the mixed results about the minimum wage effects in the literature. My main findings indicate that minimum wages have an elasticity to teenage employment of −0.418 under perfect competition, which is, as expected, much higher than the usual results in the literature. If the monopsony variable is one standard deviation higher than the baseline, it implies a positive change in elasticity of 0.05. The minimum wage has a positive insignificant effect between 0.04 and 0.29 under full monopsonistic labor markets. The results are consistent among different specifications and in controlling for possible external shocks and omitted variables.

We address the presence, magnitude, and composition of wage gains related to former co-workers and discuss the mechanisms that could explain their existence. Using Hungarian linked employer–employee administrative data and proxying actual co-workership with overlapping work histories, we show that the overall wage gain attributable to former co-workers consists of multiple elements: a contact-specific, an individual-specific, a firm-specific and a match-specific component. Former co-workers, besides the direct effect of their presence, may funnel individuals into high-paying firms, enhance the sorting of good quality workers into firms, and may contribute to the creation of better employer–employee matches. By introducing and applying a wage-decomposition technique, we demonstrate that there are non-negligible differences between linked and market hires in all empirically separable wage elements. By focusing on specific scenarios, we provide additional empirical evidence in favor of employee referral and information transmission as the main drivers of co-worker gains.