Abstract Technology has changed the way we work, creating and destroying employment but especially modifying the occupational tasks we perform. This paper seeks to analyze the contribution of technology to changes in the distribution of wages in Uruguay and its differences between genders. We address this question from the task-based approach perspective. We use the recentered influence function regression decomposition method to analyze men and women wages and the gender wage gap over the period 2005–2015. Our estimates suggest that introducing occupational tasks linked to technology into the analysis contributes to explain changes in the wage distribution as well as in the gender wage gap. Contrary to the routinization hypothesis predictions we find that technology has an overall equalizing effect but, it pushes up the gender wage gap among private employees except at the very top of the wage distribution.
We contribute to the literature by exploring the variation in the trade-creating effect of migration networks across historical migrants and recent migrants by applying a micro-founded gravity model of trade. Both the stock of historical migrants and recent migrants variables are constructed by merging Canadian Census data with the migration data available in Statistics Canada. We address the endogeneity issue by applying IV estimators including two-step feasible GMM and PPML with IV and fixed effects by utilizing the imputed annual migration flow, the historical stock, and recent stock of migrants as instrumental variables proposed by Peri and Requena (2010). Taking Canadian geographical features into account, this study also applies carefully measured gravity variables. We control for the time-varying, exporter-year fixed effects, and importer-year fixed effects in a panel estimation. Estimated results show that annual migration, recent provincial stock of migrants, and historical stock of migrants significantly increase Canadian interprovincial trade. This impact is stronger for the stock of historical migrants relative to the stock of recent migrants and annual migration flow. Sub-sample analysis shows that both recent and historical migration consistently increase interprovincial service trade, only but not interprovincial goods trade. A greater combination of English and French-speaking provinces-pair significantly increases interprovincial trade. Regional trade agreements significantly impact the interprovincial trade of Canada. Our estimated results are robust to different estimation methods and alternative measures for the migrants’ stock and flow variables.
We study gender differences in changes in labor market dynamics before the pandemic and during the COVID-19 pandemic in four Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries: Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Specifically, we look at differences in labor market states and at differences in the transitions of workers across labor market states. To identify the pandemic's impact, we compare labor market stocks and labor market flows for a number of balanced panels of workers during the pandemic and before the pandemic. We find that the pandemic has negatively affected employment and labor market participation of both men and women, but that the effect is significantly stronger for women, magnifying the already large gender gaps observed in LAC countries. The main channel generating this stronger impact is the increase in child care work performed by women with school-age children.
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has not only led to a health crisis, but also to economic and labor market crises. In an effort to avert the public health threat, countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) initially put in place some of the world's most stringent government responses. This paper explores how labor market outcomes for MENA workers have evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper uses the Economic Research Forum (ERF) COVID-19 MENA Monitor (CMM) phone surveys in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia, with waves spanning November 2020 to August 2021. Analyses examine outcomes of employment, unemployment, and labor force participation, along with hours of work and hourly wages. Results show differences in the evolution of pandemic-era labor markets by workers’ gender, age, and education, along with their February 2020 labor market status and industry, as well as their pre-pandemic income. Employment rates have largely recovered and hours of work generally increased. Inequality in wages was initially exacerbated by the pandemic, but there has been at least some recovery on this margin as well.
The employment structure of India's formal manufacturing sector has undergone substantial changes since the early 2000s with a steep rise in the use of contract workers in place of directly hired workers. Much of the existing literature has attributed the widespread use of contract labour to India's rigid employment protection legislation. The resulting informalisation of the workforce in the organised sector raises concerns about the sustainability of employment growth. Using a 14-year plant-level panel data from the Annual Survey of Industries, we find that in addition to labour market rigidities and the existence of a wage differential between contract and directly hired workers, plants in the organised manufacturing sector have another important incentive to hire contract workers. Plants appear to be using contract workers to their strategic advantage against the directly hired workers to keep their bargaining power and wage demand in check. Importantly, the strength of this bargaining channel varies across plants depending on their capital intensity of production, size and existing contract worker intensity.
