Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This paper uses a significant increase in the minimum wage in Spain between 2004 and 2010 as a case study to analyse the effects on the individual probability of losing employment, using a large panel of social security records. We show that this individual approach is important, as the possible effects for different types of individuals may differ from other estimates in the literature, based on aggregate or firm-level data, hence complementing them. Our main finding is that older people experienced the largest increase in the probability of losing their job, when compared with other age groups, including young people. The intuition is simple: among the affected (low-productivity) workers, young people are expected to increase their productivity more than older ones, who are in the flat part of their life-cycle productivity curve. Consequently, an employer facing a uniform increase in the minimum wage may find it profitable to retain young employees and to fire older ones.

AbstractIt is argued that the process of urbanisation in industrializing countries such as Mexico is basically productive, but the Government is reluctant to use the controls in its possession to contain the harm it does to the city environment. The state of Mexico City's environment is examined from a number of viewpoints – industry, transport, water supply, waste disposal, air pollution and health. Existing regulations and policies are poorly implemented. The authors argue, however, that the means and the technology exist for dealing with the environment, given political will and institutional reforms.

It is postulated that the process of urbanisation in industrializing countries, such as Mexico, is basically productive, but the government is reluctant to use the controls in its possession to contain the harm it does to the city environment. The state of Mexico City's environment is examined from a number of viewpoints: industry, transport, water supply, waste disposal, air pollution and health. Existing regulations and policies are poorly implemented. The authors argue, however, that the means and the technology exist for dealing with the environment, given political will and institutional reforms

AbstractThe response of human capital accumulation to changes in the anticipated returns to schooling determines the type of skills supplied to the labor market, the productivity of future cohorts, and the evolution of inequality. Unlike the USA, the UK or Germany, Spain has experienced between 1995 and 2008 a drop in the returns to medium and tertiary education and, with a lag, a drop in schooling attainment of recent cohorts, providing the setup to estimate the response of different forms of human capital acquisition to relative increases in low-skill wages. We measure the expected returns to schooling using skill-specific wages bargained in collective agreements at the province–industry level. We argue that those wages are easily observable by youths and relatively insensitive to shifts in the supply of workers. Our preferred estimates suggest that a 10% increase in the ratio of wages of unskilled workers to the wages of mid-skill workers increases the fraction of males completing at most compulsory schooling by between 2 and 6.5 percentage points. The response is driven by males from less educated parents and comes at the expense of students from the academic high school track—rather than the vocational training track.