This book demonstrates how rethinking and adapting basic employment services into labor intermediation services can help address the many labor market disconnections of developing country economies. It addresses how scarce resources required to escape poverty – good jobs, schools, and training - more often go to the privileged and well-connected than to those who need them most. With jobs now at the top of development debates, this is a rare book on how to practically adapt one key labor market policy to very different developing and emerging country markets. It shows through examples how developing countries can build in stages from basic employment services to diverse labor intermediation services – opening up job listings, stimulating public-private partnerships, and making job connections for those who don’t have a "cousin Vinny who knows a guy". This book is for policy practitioners, development organizations, and academics who are ready to think differently about one of the policies that needs to change so that developing economies can better meet the employment and higher skill challenges of the global age.

From the traditional craft hiring hall to the Web site Monster.com, a multitude of institutions exist to facilitate the matching of workers with firms. The diversity of such Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) encompasses criminal records providers, public employment offices, labor unions, temporary help agencies, and centralized medical residency matches. Studies of Labor Market Intermediation analyzes how these third-party actors intercede where workers and firms meet, thereby aiding, impeding, and, in some cases, exploiting the matching process. By building a conceptual foundation for analyzing the roles that these understudied economic actors serve in the labor market, this volume develops both a qualitative and quantitative sense of their significance to market operation and worker welfare. Cross-national in scope, Studies of Labor Market Intermediation is distinctive in coalescing research on a set of market institutions that are typically treated as isolated entities, thus setting a research agenda for analyzing the changing shape of employment in an era of rapid globalization and technological change.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics, WINE 2010, held in Stanford, USA, in December 2010. The 52 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. The papers are organized in 33 regular papers and 19 short papers.

Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) are entities or institutions that interpose themselves between workers and firms to facilitate, inform, or regulate how workers are matched to firms, how work is accomplished, and how conflicts are resolved. This paper offers a conceptual foundation for analyzing the market role played by these understudied institutions, and to develop a qualitative and, in some cases, quantitative sense of their significance to market operation and welfare. Though heterogeneous, I argue that LMIs share a common function, which is to redress -- and in some cases exploit -- a set of endemic departures of labor market operation from the efficient neoclassical benchmark. At a rudimentary level, LMIs such as online job boards reduce search frictions by aggregating and reselling disparate information at a cost below which workers and firms could obtain themselves. Beyond passively supplying information, a set of LMIs forcibly redress adverse selection problems in labor markets by compelling workers and firms to reveal normally hidden credentials, such as criminal background, academic standing, or financial integrity. At their most forceful, LMIs such as labor unions and centralized job matching clearinghouses, resolve coordination and collective action failures in markets by tightly controlling -- even monopolizing -- the process by which workers and firms meet, match and negotiate. A unifying observation of the analytic framework is that participation in the activities of a given LMI are typically voluntary for one side of the market and compulsory for the other; workers cannot, for example, elect to suppress their criminal records and firms cannot opt out of collective bargaining. I argue that the nature of participation in an LMI's activities -- voluntary or compulsory, and for which parties -- is dictated by the market imperfection that it addresses and thus tells us much about its economic function.

From the traditional craft hiring hall to the Web site Monster.com, a multitude of institutions exist to facilitate the matching of workers with firms. The diversity of such Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) encompasses criminal records providers, public employment offices, labor unions, temporary help agencies, and centralized medical residency matches. Studies of Labor Market Intermediation analyzes how these third-party actors intercede where workers and firms meet, thereby aiding, impeding, and, in some cases, exploiting the matching process. By building a conceptual foundation for analyzing the roles that these understudied economic actors serve in the labor market, this volume develops both a qualitative and quantitative sense of their significance to market operation and worker welfare. Cross-national in scope, Studies of Labor Market Intermediation is distinctive in coalescing research on a set of market institutions that are typically treated as isolated entities, thus setting a research agenda for analyzing the changing shape of employment in an era of rapid globalization and technological change.

Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -- are often of-the-mark, and unconvincing. A key alternative to the one big machine mindset is to recognize how the economy is instead an evolutionary system, with constantly-changing patterns of specialization and trade. This book introduces you to this powerful approach for understanding economic performance. By putting specialization at the center of economic analysis, Arnold Kling provides you with new ways to think about issues like sustainability, financial instability, job creation, and inflation. In short, he removes stiff, narrow perspectives and instead provides a full, multi-dimensional perspective on a continually evolving system.