Labor Economics – Page 74 – artdiamondblog.com

Tax Rates Have Big Effect on Labor Supply and Rate of Entrepreneurial Start-Ups

(p. A23) Higher taxes will produce long-term changes in social norms, behavior and growth. Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, found that, in the 1950s when their taxes were low, Europeans worked more hours per capita than Americans. Then their taxes went up, reducing the incentives to work and increasing the incentives to relax. Over the next decades, Europe saw a nearly 30 percent decline in work hours.
The rich tend to be more sensitive to tax-rate changes because they’ve got advisers who are paid to be. Martin Feldstein, an economics professor at Harvard, looked into tax changes in the 1980s and concluded that raising rates causes people to shift compensations to untaxed fringe benefits and otherwise suppresses their economic activity. A study last year by the economists Michael Keane and Richard Rogerson found that tax rates can have a surprisingly large influence on how much people invest in education, how likely they are to create businesses and which professions they go into.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Progressive Shift.” The New York Times (Tues., March 19, 2013): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 18, 2013.)

The Keane and Rogerson paper summarized by Brooks is:
Keane, Michael, and Richard Rogerson. “Micro and Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom.” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 2 (June 2012): 464-76.

“The Ante for Being in the Room” at Apple Was Brutal Honesty

The following passage is Steve Jobs speaking, as quoted by Walter Isaacson.

(p. 569) I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some rip-roaring arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying “Ron, that store looks like shit” in front of everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the engineering on this” in front of the person that’s responsible. That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet codewords, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.

I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like (p. 570) for that person to tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Unemployment Increases Risk of Heart Attack

As a defender of the process of innovation through creative destruction, I try to be alert to evidence on creative destruction’s benefits and costs. The highest cost is usually viewed as technological unemployment. The evidence below will have to be examined and, if sound, added to the costs.

(p. D6) Unemployment increases the risk of heart attack, a new study reports, and repeated job loss raises the odds still more.
. . .
After adjusting for well-established heart attack risks — age, sex, smoking, income, hypertension, cholesterol screening, exercise, depression, diabetes and others — the researchers found that being unemployed also increased the risk of a heart attack, by an average of 35 percent.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS BAKALAR. “Job Loss Raises Threat of Heart Attack.” The New York Times (Tues., November 27, 2012): D6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 26, 2012.)

The Dupre article mentioned above, is:
Dupre, Matthew E., Linda K. George, Guangya Liu, and Eric D. Peterson. “The Cumulative Effect of Unemployment on Risks for Acute Myocardial Infarction.” Archives of Internal Medicine 172, no. 22 (Dec. 10, 2012): 1731-37.
(Note: the Archives of Internal Medicine has been re-named JAMA Internal Medicine.)

Steve Jobs’ “Nasty Edge” Helped Him Create an Apple “Crammed with A Players”

(p. 565) . . . I think . . . [Jobs] actually could have controlled himself, if he had wanted. When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.
The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed “Jobs” added.)

IKEA Says Government Bureaucracy Slows Job Creation

“The economy ‘will remain challenging for a long time,’ says IKEA Chief Executive Mikael Ohlsson.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) MALMO, Sweden–IKEA is poised to embark on a global spending spree, but its departing chief executive says red tape is slowing how fast the home-furnishings retailer can open its pocket book.

With the company set to report record sales on Wednesday, CEO Mikael Ohlsson said the amount of time it takes to open a store has roughly doubled in recent years.
“What some years ago took two to three years, now takes four to six years. And we also see that there’s a lot of hidden obstacles in different markets and also within the [European Union] that’s holding us back,” he said in an interview recently at an IKEA store on Sweden’s western coast.
. . .
IKEA plans to invest €2 billion in stores, factories and renewable energy this year. But the company fell €1 billion short of its goal of investing €3 billion in new projects last year, largely because of bureaucratic obstacles, he said. For 10 years IKEA has tried unsuccessfully to relocate a store in France, for example. The company also is challenging German policy dictating what can be sold and where, saying the rules are out of sync with EU legislation.
“It’s a pity, because it can help create jobs and investments at a time when unemployment is high in many countries,” Mr. Ohlsson said. A new IKEA store creates construction and store jobs for about 1,000 workers, he said.
. . .
The company’s highest-profile headaches have come in India, an untapped market where IKEA wants to open a first store in at least five years and roll out an additional three soon thereafter.

For the full story, see:
ANNA MOLIN. “IKEA Chief Takes Aim at Red Tape.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 23, 2013): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 22, 2013.)

Apple’s Corporate Culture Under Jobs: “Accountability Is Strictly Enforced”

(p. 531) In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal.
Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. You should hate each other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Ending College Affirmative Action Would Only Cause Minor Lowering in Black Admissions

(p. 113) This research examines the determinants of the match between high school seniors and postsecondary institutions in the United States. I model college application decisions as a nonsequential search problem and specify a unified structural model of college application, admission, and matriculation decisions that are all functions of unobservable individual heterogeneity. The results indicate that black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly–by 2%–if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by 10%.

Source of abstract:
Howell, Jessica S. “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education.” Journal of Labor Economics 28, no. 1 (January 2010): 113-66.

Socialism Failed in Jamestown

(p. 226) Stephen Slivinski discusses “Economic History: The Lessons of Jamestown.” In the years after the Jamestown settlement of 1607, the settlers often lacked food. “The company sent Sir Thomas Dale, a British naval commander, to take over the office of colony governor in 1611. Yet, upon arrival in May–a time when the farmers should have been tending to their fields–Dale found virtually no planting activity. Instead, the workers were devoted mainly to leisure and ‘playing bowls.’ . . . All land was owned by the company and farmed collectively. . . . The workers would not hope to reap more compensation from a productive farming of the land any more than the farmers would be motivated by an interest in making their farming operations more efficient and, hence, more profitable. Seeing this, Dale decided to change the labor arrangements: When the seven-year contracts of most of the original surviving settlers were about to expire in 1614, he assigned private allotments of land to them. Each got three acres, 12 acres if he had a family. The only obligation was that they needed to provide two and a half barrels of corn annually to the company so it could be distributed to the newcomers to tide them over during their first year. Dale left Jamestown for good in 1616. By then, however, the new land grants had unleashed a vast increase in agricultural productivity. In fact, upon returning to England with Dale, John Rolfe–one of the colony’s former leaders–reported to the Virginia Company that the Powhatans were now asking the colonists to give them corn instead of vice versa.”

As quoted in:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.
(Note: ellipses added by Taylor.)

The Slivinski article is:
Slivinski, Stephen. “The Lessons of Jamestown.” Region Focus 14, no. 1 (First Quarter 2010): 27-29.

Descartes Saw that a Great City Is “an Inventory of the Possible”

(p. 226) Joel Kotkin writes about “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.” “A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, represented ‘an inventory of the possible,’ a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. In the 21st Century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility will become ever more critical.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.

Government Job Protection Regulations Reduce Youth Jobs

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) Socialist President François Hollande has come up with a plan to ease the problem: give €4,000 ($5,276) a year for three years to small companies that hire a young person on a permanent contract while committing to keep an employee age 57 or over.
. . .
The French government hopes as many as half a million youths will find permanent jobs over the next five years due to the measure, which could cost the government about €1 billion a year when it is in place.
Economists say the number of real new jobs is likely to be much lower because the government will be subsidizing jobs that would have been created anyway. Only around 100,000 new jobs will be created, according to OFCE, an economic-research think tank in Paris.
French companies say they are reluctant to hire young people on permanent contracts because it gives employees a level of protection the companies say they can’t afford to grant–even if they get the subsidy proposed by Mr. Hollande.
“It’s great to have €4,000, but if the new recruit isn’t good, we don’t know how long we’ll be stuck with them,” said Philippe Lehmann, who runs Lehmann Sarl, a mechanical-parts factory in Molsheim, eastern France that employs seven people.

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM HOROBIN. “France Pins Hopes on Youth Jobs Plan.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 24, 2012): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 23, 2012.)
(Note: the online version of the last two paragraphs quoted above contains a few extra words of elaboration at the end of each paragraph, as compared to the print version. I have underlined these words in the passages quoted above.)

How Chavez Punished Those Who Opposed Him

(p. 196) In 2004, the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters who had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chávez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chávez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.3 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released.

Source:
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, and Francisco Rodriguez. “The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela’s Maisanta.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 2 (2011): 196-214.