Category Labour markets
Videogames and the sexual division of labour
Consider a model in which individuals have a fixed amount of time to allocate between three activities: paid work, household production, and gaming. Each one of these activities requires an investment of effort and human capital, and each provides rewards, either monetary or non-monetary.
Partial vs General equilibrium lumps of labour
Does an increase in productivity cause labour demand to increase or decrease? The answer to that question, and how we go about answering it, depends on whether we are talking about one small sector of the economy (partial equilibrium), or the economy as a whole (general equilibrium). (I was doing general equilibrium in my previous […]
International comparisons of construction employment in the recession
Many participants in the ongoing discussion ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], etc) on international comparisons of the evolution of output and employment have raised the point that construction employment has played a more prominent role than usual in the most recent recession. I've put together a few graphs that may be useful. I'd also like […]
Productivity, labour demand, and employment
This topic has come up a couple of times in comments on previous posts. Suppose there's an increase in labour productivity. Maybe because of improved technology. How will that affect labour demand, and employment? I'm just going to work through the absolutely standard long-run classical textbook analysis of this question, with the help of a […]
Spain, Ireland, and the US. All breaking Okun’s Law.
In my last post I noted that the US was abnormal in comparison to the other G7 countries. In all the other countries GDP fell by more than employment, so labour productivity fell. That's what normally happens in a recession. Okun's Law says so. But US GDP fell by less than employment, so labour productivity […]
US Productivity Exceptionalism
Stephen's got standards. So I'm going to steal his graphs from his last post, and write the post he could easily have written. Before you look at Stephen's graphs, ask yourself this question. How well did the US fare in the Great Recession, in terms of GDP and employment, compared to other G7 countries? Now […]
More evidence on minimum wages, employment and poverty: a continuing series
A couple of months ago, I brought attention to recent work in Quebec on just who is affected by the minimum wage. An important result was that the proportion of minimum wage earners who were in poverty (13.5%) was almost exactly the same as it is for the incidence of poverty in the general population […]
Robots, slaves, horses, and Malthus
I think this is the model that Karl Smith has in mind. Assume robots are the same as humans. Robots can do all the work that humans can do. Robots need the same amount of energy/food to stay functioning as humans do, but robots themselves can produce that energy/food just like humans can. Robots will […]
Trends in job tenure
I've written before on an important and yet not-widely-enough-known feature of the Canadian labour market: the remarkable amount of churn in and out of employment: [1], [2]. Another way of looking at the dynamics in the labour market is job tenure, which the Labour Force Survey measures as the length of time a worker has […]
Income Effects don’t really exist
I'm an expert on how non-economists think. That's because every year I try to teach 300 non-economists to think like economists. Non-economists think in terms of income effects. Economists think in terms of substitution effects. That's a stereotype that isn't 100% true, but it still contains a lot of truth. Here's how non-economists think:
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