Vasilios D. Kosteas

Job Satisfaction and Promotions

This paper estimates the impact of promotions and promotion expectations on job satisfaction using the 1996-2006 waves of the NLSY79 dataset. Having received a promotion in the past two years leads to increased job satisfaction, even while controlling for the worker’s current wage, wage relative to her peer group and wage growth. Thus, the effect of promotion receipt on job satisfaction is independent from any accompanying wage increase. This finding indicates that employers may be able to use promotions as another mechanism to raise worker satisfaction. Workers who believe a promotion is possible in the next two years also report higher job satisfaction. Additionally, past promotions have a lingering, but fading impact on job satisfaction. Higher job satisfaction and belief that a promotion is possible in the near future are both associated with a lower probability an employee with quit his job.

Job Level Changes and Wage Growth

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of job level changes on wages accounting for both the potential endogeneity of promotions and measurement error in job level changes. Design/methodology/approach - Instruments for job level changes the workers use belief about the possibility of a promotion from the previous period. Reasons why the respondent believes that a promotion is not possible are used as a second set of instruments. Also, the paper estimates separate wage effects for men and women. Findings - The paper indicates that promotions carry a roughly 18 percent wage increase; compared to a 7 percent premium when using ordinary least squares estimation. The paper also finds that men receive much larger wage increases when promoted, compared with women. Originality/value - This is the first paper to account for the endogeneity of promotions in wage estimates. Accurately estimating the relationship between job level changes and wages helps people to understand wage growth over a workers lifetime.

Foreign direct investment and productivity spillovers: a quantile analysis

This paper estimates the within-plant and spillover productivity effects of foreigninvestment in Mexican manufacturing plants. It contributes to the existing literature by analyzing whether FDI of North American origin differs from FDI from the rest of the world. I also use quantile regression analysis to determine whether spillovers are equal for plants of different productivity levels. The results indicate positive and significant spillovers from the presence of foreign firms. However, these spillovers accrue only to plants at the upper end of the productivity distribution. Furthermore, North American based FDI appears to yield slightly larger spillovers relative to FDI from the rest of the world; however the difference is not statistically significant. A deeper look at this issue reveals that Canadian FDI yields large productivity spillovers relative to both US and rest of the world FDI. These differences are highly statistically significant.

Manufacturing Wages and Imports: Evidence from the NLSY

This paper analyses the effect of imports on US manufacturing wages using the NLSY79 data-set, estimating differential impacts on blue- and white-collar wages. I find that rising imports put downward pressure on wages between 1979 and 1988. This correlation holds for both white- and blue-collar workers, with a somewhat stronger impact on the latter group. Evidence suggests that imports from low-wage countries are responsible for the negative relationship between imports and wages, but only for blue-collar wages. A one-percentage-point increase in the low-wage import share is associated with a 2.8% decline in blue-collar wages. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2007.

Plan choice, health insurance cost and premium sharing

We develop a model of premium sharing for firms that offer multiple insurance plans. We assume that firms offer one low quality plan and one high quality plan. Under the assumption of wage rigidities we found that the employees contribution to each plan is an increasing function of that plans premium. The effect of the other plans premium is ambiguous. We test our hypothesis using data from the Employer Health Benefit Survey. Restricting the analysis to firms that offer both HMO and PPO plans, we measure the amount of the premium passed on to employees in response to a change in both premiums. We find evidence of large and positive effects of the increase in the plans premium on the amount of the premium passed on to employees. The effect of the alternative plans premium is negative but statistically significant only for the PPO plans.

High School Clubs Participation and Future Supervisory Status

This article examines the relationship between high school clubs participation and the probability that a worker will become a supervisor and the types of responsibility she will have, using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 dataset. While other articles have tried to explain what affects a workers probability of being a supervisor, this article focuses on the impact of participation in extracurricular activities during high school. Both probit and household fixed effects estimates show that clubs participation raises the probability that an individual will be a supervisor and have high‐level supervisory responsibilities.

High School Clubs Participation and Earnings

This paper estimates the effect of participation in high school extracurricular activities on future earnings, making three important contributions to the existing literature: 1) it compares the earnings effects of participation in different types of clubs; 2) it investigates whether the effect of clubs participation is constant over time; and 3) it employs an instrumental variables approach in order to identify a causal link between clubs participation and wages. Using the NLSY79 dataset, I find that participation in high school clubs leads to higher future earnings. While previous studies have focused on athletics, I show that participation in both athletics and academic clubs have positive earnings effects. These results are robust to various estimation routines and robustness checks.

Gender Role Attitudes, Labor Supply, and Human Capital Formation

This study examines the relationship between attitudes toward womens roles in the labor force and human capital acquisition. I analyze both educational attainment and post schooling training spells. Holding more traditional attitudes about gender roles is associated with both lower educational attainment and lower probability of participating in post schooling training episodes. Also, gender role attitudes appear to have significant indirect effects on human capital acquisition, operating through a lower probability of labor market participation.

Employment Disruptions and Supervisors

This study estimates the effect of past career disruptions on the probability a worker has supervisory status and responsibility for determining promotions or setting pay, paying particular attention to gender differences. Past unemployment spells are negatively correlated with supervisory status; however, the correlation is economically small. Differences in employment history cannot explain the difference in rates of supervisor status between men and women.

Predicting long-run citation counts for articles in top economics journals

We examine the relative strength of short-term citation counts, bibliometric measures such as journal impact factors, and journal rankings in terms of predicting long-run citations. Using a set of articles published in sixty of the highest reputation economics journals in 1994, we find that citations received over fairly short windows (between 1 and 2xa0years after publication) are much stronger predictors of long-run citation counts compared with journal impact factors or other journal rankings. Our results are robust to a series of robustness checks. These findings suggest department heads and tenure and promotion committees should place greater weight on short-term citations as opposed to article placement when making personnel decisions.