Exploring a new agenda to improve outcomes for American workers As the United States continues to struggle with the impact of the devastating COVID-19 recession, policymakers have an opportunity to redress the competition problems in our labor markets. Making the right policy choices, however, requires a deep understanding of long-term, multidimensional problems. That will be solved only by looking to the failures and unrealized opportunities in anti-trust and labor law. For decades, competition in the U.S. labor market has declined, with the result that American workers have experienced slow wage growth and diminishing job quality. While sluggish productivity growth, rising globalization, and declining union representation are traditionally cited as factors for this historic imbalance in economic power, weak competition in the labor market is increasingly being recognized as a factor as well. This book by noted experts frames the legal and economic consequences of this imbalance and presents a series of urgently needed reforms of both labor and anti-trust laws to improve outcomes for American workers. These include higher wages, safer workplaces, increased ability to report labor violations, greater mobility, more opportunities for workers to build power, and overall better labor protections. Inequality in the Labor Market will interest anyone who cares about building a progressive economic agenda or who has a marked interest in labor policy. It also will appeal to anyone hoping to influence or anticipate the much-needed progressive agenda for the United States. The book's unusual scope provides prescriptions that, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz notes in the introduction, map a path for rebalancing power, not just in our economy but in our democracy.

Abstract: There are several possible explanations for the observed changes in inequality, the returns to education, and the gap between the wages of informal and formal salaried workers in Argentina over the period 1980-2002. Largely due to the lack of evidence for competing explanations, skill-biased technical change is the most likely explanation for the increases in the returns to education that occurred in the 1990s. Using a semi-parametric re-weighting variance decomposition technique and data from the Permanent Household Survey, the authors show that during the same period there was an increase in the returns to unobserved skill. This finding lends support to the hypothesis that skill-biased technical change has been a main driver of increases in inequality in Argentina. The pattern of changes suggests that the growth in returns to unobserved skill may have been partly responsible for the relative deterioration of informal salaried wages during the 1990s.

As developing and transition economies enter the next phase of reforms, labor market issues increasingly come to the fore. With the increased competition from globalization, the discussion is shifting to the need for greater labor market flexibility and the creation of "good" jobs. Moreover, the greater actual and perceived insecurity in labor markets has generated a new agenda on how to structure safety nets and labor market regulation. The older questions of the links between the formal and informal labor market, reappear with new dimensions and significance. More generally, it is clear that an accurate understanding of how labor market structures function is essential if we are to analyze alternative policy proposals in the wake of these concerns. Oddly enough, in spite of this great importance, there are no recent monographs that bring together rigorous studies produced by academic researchers on these various issues. This book fills that gap. Under the steely editorship of Ravi Kanbur and Jan Svejnar, the contributors flourish in their attempts to enliven these debates.

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.

William Darity, Jr. In 1984 the Kluwer series in Modern Economic Thought, under the editorial direction of Warren Samuels, brought out a book under my editorship entitled Labor Economics: Modern Views. It consisted of a series of essays and commentaries that sought, in a critical fashion, to assess the state of the art in the field of labor economics with respect to several themes. These included methodology versus practice, the analysis of discrimination by gender and race, the phenomenon of persistent racial differences in un employment exposure, occupational safety and health regulation, dual versus segmented labor markets, and the remnants of the Phillips curve trade-off between unemployment and inflation. Nearly a decade later I was approached by Warren Samuels and Kluwer about editing a new book that would again address where things stand in labor economics. In proceeding with the development of this current book I was a struck by the extent to which the research thrust that was apparent in the early 1980s remains intact as we move toward the 21st century. The vast majority of scholarship in the labor subfield is dominated by the methodological orientation of applied neoclassical microeconomics, supplemented by incursions from the themes that occupy the so-called "pure theorists," particularly of the game theoretic variety.