Ann P. Bartel

Where Do the New U.S. Immigrants Live

Analyzing the location choices of the post-1964 U.S. immigrants results in three main findings: (1) these immigrants are more geographically concentrated than natives of the same age and ethnicity and reside in cities with large ethnic populations; (2) education plays a key role in location choice, reducing geographic concentration and the likelihood of being in cities with a high concentration of fellow countrymen and increasing the probability of changing locations after arrival in the Unites States; (3) internal migration within the United States occurs more frequently among immigrants than natives and facilitates the process of assimilation for the more educated individuals.

Training, Wage Growth and Job Performance: Evidence from a Company Database

A unique dataset collected from the personnel records of a large company is used to study the relationship between on-the-job training and worker productivity. The analysis shows how information contained in a company database is useful for eliminating heterogeneity bias in the estimation of trainings impact on wages and job performance. Even when selection bias in assignment to training programs is eliminated, training is found to have a positive and significant effect on both wage growth and the change in job performance scores, thereby confirming the robustness of the relationship between training and productivity.

Technological Change and the Skill Acquisition of Young Workers

Since technological change influences the rate at which human capital obsolesces and also increases the uncertainty associated with human capital investments, training may increase or decrease at higher rates of technological change. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that production workers in manufacturing industries with higher rates of technological change are more likely to receive formal company training. At higher rates of technological change, the training gap between the more and less educated narrows, low‐skilled nonproduction workers receive significantly more training than higher‐skilled nonproduction workers, and the proportion of individuals receiving training increases.

Technological Change and Retirement Decisions of Older Workers

According to human capital theory, technological change will influence the retirement decisions of older workers in two ways. First, workers in industries with high rates of technological change will retire later if there is a net positive correlation between technological change and on-the-job training. Second, an unexpected change in the rate of technological change will induce older workers to retire sooner because the required amount of retraining will be an unattractive investment. We matched industry data on productivity growth and occupational data on required training with data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Older Men to test these hypotheses. Our results support both hypotheses.

Some Economic and Demographic Consequences of Mental Illness

This article uses a unique data set to measure the economic and demographic consequences of mental illness. We find that mental illness significantly reduces an individuals earnings and that in some cases this effect lasts as long as 15 years. Mental illness is also shown to affect an individuals ability to marry or stay married, lowers the number of children that he has, and encourages his wife to work.

Ownership versus Environment: Disentangling the Sources of Public Sector Inefficiency

An unanswered question in the debate on public-sector inefficiency is whether reforms other than government divestiture can effectively substitute for privatization. Using a 19811995 panel data set of all public and private manufacturing establishments in Indonesia, we analyze whether public-sector inefficiency is primarily due to agency-type problems or to the environment in which public-sector enterprises (PSEs) operate, as measured by the soft budget constraint and the degree of internal and external competition. The results, obtained from fixed-effects specifications, provide support for both models. Ownership matters because, for a given level of government financing or competition, PSEs perform worse than their private-sector counterparts. The environment matters because only PSEs which received government financing or those shielded from import competition or foreign ownership performed worse than private enterprises. The results suggest that the efficiency of PSEs can be increased through privatization, through manipulation of the environment, or through a combination of both approaches.

Wages, Nonwage Job Characteristics, and Labor Mobility

This paper examines the effects of a set of nonwage job characteristics on the quit decisions of young and middle-aged men. The data set was constructed by merging data in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young and Mature Men with data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles file and the Bureau of Economic Analysis file on fringe benefits. The empirical analysis shows that some nonwage job attributes have significant influence on worker quit behavior and that there are important differences in the effects of the nonwage job characteristics across age groups. Young men are significantly more likely than older men to quit repetitive jobs, for example, whereas the presence of bad working conditions is a more important factor in the quit decisions of the older cohort. The results also indicate that, for the older men, fringe benefits have a stronger effect on quit decisions than wages do. Further evidence on age differences is provided through an analysis of panel data from the Quality of Employment Survey.

Wages and Unionism in the Public Sector: The Case of Police

ONE of the most important developments in government during the last two decades has been the growth of public employee unions. Because personnel expenditures comprise a substantial portion of the cost of providing public services, there has been considerable concern that unionization has severely exacerbated budgetary problems of governments, especially local governments. Consequently, a large literature on the wage effects of public employee unionism has developed in recent years. 1 In general, these studies have found rather modest union wage impacts in the public sector, with unions raising the wages of municipal employees by about 5%, on average. There are several reasons, however, why these estimates may be misleading. First, much public sector union wage impact research has focused on teachers and the demand for teacher services is considerably more elastic than the demand for other public services such as police protection, fire protection and medical care. Second, previous studies have treated public employee unionism as an exogenous variable, and studies of private sector unionization have shown that the estimated wage impacts of unions change substantially when unionism is treated as an endogenous variable.2 Finally, the earlier studies have not considered how public employee unionism has affected fringe benefits, which represent a substantial and growing component of governmental compensation. This paper attempts to deal with each of these problems. First, we focus on the effects of unionism on the wages of municipal police officers.3 Because police services are commonly thought to be among the most essential of all public services, organized police should be in an especially powerful position when bargaining with local governments. Second, we estimate a system of equations in which wages and unionism are simultaneously determined and compare these results to the estimated wage impacts from a single equation model. Finally, some estimates of the effects of unionism on police fringe benefits are presented.

The Age Of Technology And Its Impact On Employee Wages

This paper examines the relationship between wages and the ‘age’ or ‘newness’ of technology using pooled cross-sectional industry-level data and several alternative indicators of the age of technology. Our main finding is that industries with relatively young or immature technologies pay higher wages to workers of given age and education than industries with mature technologies. A one standard deviation decrease in the mean age of the industrys equipment leads to a three-percent increase in wages within demographic groups. This is consistent with the notion that the demand for employee learning is a decreasing function of the age of the technology, that learning is a function of employee ability and effort, and that increases in wages are required to elicit increases in ability and effort. A related finding is that the wages of highly educated workers (especially recent graduates) relative to those of less educated workers are highest in industries using the newest technology; this is consistent with the...

Technological Change and the Make-or-Buy Decision

A central decision faced by firms is whether to make intermediate components internally or to buy them from specialized producers. We argue that firms producing products for which rapid technological change is characteristic will benefit from outsourcing to avoid the risk of not recouping their sunk cost investments when new production technologies appear. This risk is exacerbated when firms produce for low volume internal use, and is mitigated for those firms that sell to larger markets. Hence, products characterized by higher rates of technological change will be more likely to be produced by mass specialized firms to which other firms outsource production. Using a 1990–2002 panel data set on Spanish firms and an exogenous proxy for technological change, we provide causal evidence that technological change increases the likelihood of outsourcing. JEL Codes: O33, L24.