Labor

This paper analyses the marriage decisions of natives and migrants focusing on the role of legal status  and cultural distance. We exploit a natural experiment, the successive enlargements of the European Union, that shifted the incentives of some groups of foreigners to marry natives. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of marriages and separations, we show that it profoundly changed the composition of mixed marriages. Access to legal status reduces by half the probability of immigrants intermarrying with natives. Building on this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a multidimensional equilibrium model of marriage and separation allowing for trade-offs between cultural distance, legal status, and other socio-economic spousal characteristics, where individuals match on observed and unobserved characteristics. We quantify the role of legal status and the strength of cultural affinity and show how it relates to linguistic, religious or genetic distance.

This paper analyzes the career progression of workers over their life cycle. We develop a model that allows for wage growth to be determined by the accumulation of human capital, unobserved ability, and mobility. We add three important extensions. First, workers move between two occupational sectors that require cognitive-abstract (CA) and routine-manual (RM) skills. Second, we allow for endogenous job mobility induced by non-pecuniary job attributes. Third, individuals have the possibility to acquire vocational education at the start of their career. We estimate this model using longitudinal administrative data over three decades and exogenous variation to instrument initial choices. We confirm the importance of job mobility for early wage growth, but show that the contribution of search capital diminishes in the longer run due to spells of non-employment. Moreover, we show that RM skills are a key driver of early wage growth while CA skills become important later on, when opportunities materialize that require such skills for career progression. Further, job amenities are an important determinant of mobility decisions of young workers. Our results also suggest that vocational training has longer term effects on career outcomes, through the type and quality of matches that they obtain.

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model where individuals differ in ability and location preference to evaluate the mechanisms that affect the evolution of immigrants’ careers in conjunction with their re-migration plans. Our analysis highlights a novel form of selective return migration where those who plan to stay longer invest more into skill acquisition, with important implications for the assessment of immigrants’ career paths and the estimation of their earnings profiles. Our study also explains the willingness of immigrants to accept jobs at wages that seem unacceptable to natives. Finally, our model provides important insight for the design of migration policies, showing that policies which initially restrict residence or condition residence on achievement shape not only immigrants’ career profiles through their impact on human capital investment but also determine the selection of arrivals and leavers. 

This paper assesses the effect of import competition on the labor market and health outcomes of US workers. We first show that import shocks affect employment and income, but only in areas where jobs are more intense in routine tasks.  Exploiting over 40 million individual observations on health and mortality, we find that import had a detrimental effect on physical and mental health that is concentrated in those areas and exhibits strong persistence. It worsened health behaviour, decreased health care utilisation and  increased hospitalisation for a large set of conditions, more difficult to treat. The mortality hazard of workers in manufacturing increased by up to 6  percent per billion dollar import increase.

This paper evaluates the effect of increased trade on the mortality of workers in the manufacturing sector. We exploit the large increase of Chinese exports in the last two decades to assess its effect in two different countries, Italy and the US. Exploiting longitudinal individual data, we find that trade leads to an increased mortality rate among these populations, the effect being higher in Italy than in the US. A one billion dollar increase in imports leads to a 4 percent mortality increase in the US and up to 7 percent in Italy. We show that mortality patterns are different across occupational groups, with a more pronounced effect on blue collar workers in the US and in Italy, a marked effect on managers of small firms. We show that there are important spatial inequalities in the mortality burden of trade.

We estimate a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply, fertility, and savings, incorporating occupational choices, with specific wage paths and skill atrophy that vary over the career. This allows us to understand the trade-off between occupational choice and desired fertility, as well as sorting both into the labor market and across occupations. We quantify the life cycle career costs associated with children, how they decompose into loss of skills during interruptions, lost earnings opportunities, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We analyze the long-run effects of policies that encourage fertility and show that they are considerably smaller than short-run effects.

We evaluate the impact on crime of a localized policing experiment that depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth. We find that depenalization policy caused the police to reallocate effort toward nondrug crime. Despite the overall fall in crime attributable to the policy, we find that the total welfare of local residents likely fell, as measured by house prices. We shed light on what would be the impacts on crime of a citywide de- penalization policy by developing and calibrating a structural model of the market for cannabis and crime.

This paper analyzes the effects on firms of a ban on smoking in public places. Our empirical strategy relies on comparing outcomes in Scotland before and after the Scottish smoking ban (introduced in March 2006) with those in northern England, where such a ban was not in place. Our analysis of survey data collected from public houses finds that the Scottish smoking ban reduced pub sales with no concomitant effect on prices. An event study analysis of the stock market performance of pub-holding companies corroborates the negative effect of the smoking ban on firm performance.

This paper analyzes the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions. Using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerous birth cohorts across different regions, we follow workers from labor market entry onwards and estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of vocational training choice, labor supply, and wage progression. Most particularly, our model allows for labor market frictions that vary by skill group and over the business cycle. We find that sources of wage growth differ: learning-by-doing is an important component for unskilled workers early on in their careers, while job mobility is important for workers who acquire skills in an apprenticeship scheme before labor market entry. Likewise, economic downturns affect skill groups through very different channels: unskilled workers lose out from a decline in productivity and human capital, whereas skilled individuals suffer mainly from a lack of mobility.

This paper evaluates the long-term consequences of parental death on children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills, as well as on labor market outcomes. We exploit a large administrative data set covering many Swedish cohorts. We develop new estimation methods to tackle the potential endogeneity of death at an early age, based on the idea that the amount of endogeneity is constant or decreasing during childhood. Our method also allows us to identify a set of death causes that are conditionally exogenous. We find that the loss of either a father or a mother on boys' earnings is no higher than 6-7 percent and slightly lower for girls. Our examination of the impact on cognitive skills (IQ and educational attainment) and on noncognitive skills (emotional stability, social skills) shows rather small effects on each type of skill. We find that both mothers and fathers are important, but mothers are somewhat more important for cognitive skills and fathers for noncognitive ones.

We study the effect of permanent income innovations on health for a prime-aged population. Using information on more than half a million individuals sampled over a 25-year period in three different cross-sectional surveys we aggregate data by date-of-birth cohort to construct a “synthetic cohort” data set with details of income, expenditure, socio-demographic factors, health outcomes, and selected risk factors. We then exploit structural and arguably exogenous changes in cohort incomes over the 1980s and 1990s to uncover causal effects of permanent income shocks on health. We find that such income innovations have little effect on a wide range of health measures, but do lead to increases in mortality and risky health behaviour.

This paper assesses the impact of Swedish welfare-to-work programmes on labour market performance including wages, labour market status, unemployment duration and future welfare-to-work participation. We develop a structural dynamic model of labour supply which incorporates detailed institutional features of these policies and allows for selection on observables and unobservables. We estimate the model from a rich administrative panel data set and show that training programmes - which account for a large proportion of programmes - have a little effect on future outcomes, whereas job experience programmes have a beneficial effect.

Background We estimated the short-run economic impacts of the Scottish smoking ban on public houses. Previous findings on the effect of smoking bans on the hospitality sector have mainly focused on the United States. These studies have mostly found no negative economic effects of such legislation on the hospitality sector in the long run. However, differences in the social use of public houses in Great Britain in comparison with the United States may lead to different findings.

Methods We used a quasi-experimental research design that compared the sales and number of customers in public houses located in Scotland before and after the Scottish smoking ban was introduced, relative to a control group of establishments across the English border where no ban was imposed. To perform this analysis, we collected data on 2724 pubs, 1590 in Scotland and 1134 in Northern England by phone interviews using quota sampling.

Results We found that the Scottish ban led to a 10% decrease in sales [P = 0.02, 95% confidence interval (CI) −19% to −2%] and a 14% decrease in customers (P = 0.02, 95% CI −26% to −2%).

Conclusion Our study suggests that the Scottish smoking ban had a negative economic impact on public houses, at least in the short run, due in part to a drop in the number of customers.

This paper studies the role of economic policy for the transition from analogue to digital television, with particular attention to the switch off of the analogue terrestrial signal. The analogue signal cannot be credibly switched off until almost all viewers have migrated to digital, due to the policy objective of universal access to television. But before switch off, only part of the population can be reached with the digital signal. In addition, those who are reached need to spend more to upgrade their reception equipment than after switch off, because the capacity to increase the power of the digital signal will be made available only then.

After reviewing the competitive structure and the role of government intervention in television markets, we present the early experience of a number of industrialized countries in the transition to digital television. We then formulate a micro-econometric model of digital television adoption by individual viewers. The model is calibrated to UK data and simulated to predict the impact of government policies on the take-up of digital television. Policy makers can affect the speed of take up of digital television by: (1) controlling the quality of the signals and the content of public service broadcasters; (2) intervening in the market for digital equipment with subsidies; and (3) publicizing the conditions and date of switch off of the analogue signal. We find that if the analogue terrestrial signal is switched off only when certain aggregate adoption targets are reached, strategic delays may arise and expectations may affect the success of the switch off policy.

In this paper, the conclusions of Adams et al.(2002) are investigated further by replicating their methodology on two different panel data sets, the Whitehall II study in the UK and the ULF study in Sweden. Given the universal nature of health care coverage in these countries (both in terms of coverage for all age groups and types of illnesses), these data could provide an interesting comparison with the AHEAD results in the US. Futhermore, some of the assumptions and implications underlying the conclusions made by Adams et al.(2002) are discussed and their results and the results of this paper are reinterpreted in terms of pathways from SES to health and mortality.