Seminario de Doutoramento: Lucas López Manuel (Universidade de Vigo)
ABSTRACT:
Conventional wisdom suggests that conformity to social expectations provides organizations with the acceptance needed to remain entrenched in economic transactions. Otherwise, firms would not be able to obtain the necessary resources, with the consequent impact on its performance and survival. The leitmotiv of this work is thus to understand why many firms engage in environmental inaction with apparently no costs. Particularly, we explore how economic rationales of profit maximization and growth interact with environmental normative deviance.
Seminario do Departamento de Estatística e I. O: Juan D. Moreno-Ternero (Universidade Pablo de Olavide - Sevilla)
Posta a Punto de Propostas MSCA Fellowships: Revisión de candidaturas - Elena Shakina
ABSTRACT:
Worker-job match as one of the critical conditions of individual productivity and overall firm performance is far from being comprehensively studied. The vast majority of research endeavors fall into two categories: (1) on the macrolevel – structural unemployment conditioned by a temporary mismatch between qualifications of jobseekers and employers’ demand and (2) on microlevel – a separation propensity or insufficient productivity of a particular worker due to its low fit to position requirements or management styles. A seminal paper by Jovanovic (1979) suggests a solid theoretical grounding of job match and associated turnover phenomena. This paper essentially shifted the frontier and was followed by numerous empirical tests like those by Fredriksson et al. (2018); Kiyotaki & Lagos (2007); Sicilian (1995) demonstrating the economic antecedents and consequences of employee quits in light of so-called “permanent separations” and incomplete information. Along with the literature on economic dimensions of job-matching, organizational psychology has been developing theories on the behavioral fit between worker and management styles as well as perceiver expectations and motivation (McGregor, 2006). Originating from the work by Merton (1948), this theory suggests that both positive and negative perceiver expectations determine their performance. The behavioral perspective of job matching refers to self-fulfilling prophecies (so-called "Pygmalion" and" Golem" effects), psychological pressures, manifold discriminations, including gender gap. This continuum of behavioral responses draws up a substantive dimension of job match and mismatch.
In this research project, we propose a comprehensive examination based on theoretical advancements, several empirical tests, and practical implications of job matching mechanisms in both dimensions. We are currently witnessing a dramatic transformation of the job market which translates into substantially shifting roles of agents – jobseekers, workers, employers, mediators, and regulators. The development of online job boards, open peer-review screening platforms, and professional social networks significantly reduce information asymmetry and transaction costs and potentiate market efficiency. Though it leads to higher worker mobility and knowledge spillovers. That ultimately requires the development of a fundamentally new institutional environment.
The combination of economic and behavioral dimensions of job matching turns to the higher relevance due to the following reasons:
(1) Higher job market efficiency evidently mitigates the dominance of purely economic factors and reinforces behavioral factors to predict and interpret job matching parameters
(2) New wage-setting mechanisms occur as a response to structural shifts in the job market making specific skills and individual traits of jobseekers and their fit to employer identity significant drivers of job matching
(3) Job matching becomes more industry- and firm-specific and allows elaborating ad hoc tools to account for these distinctions and making use of vast unstructured data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) for data processing and prescriptive analytics.
The objectives of the project are accordingly developed to respond to these challenges:
(1) to measure economic consequences of job match and mismatch and to investigate behavior factors (incl, self-fulfilling prophecies, psychological pressures, discriminative biases) on individual and firm performance
(2) to explore alternative wage-setting mechanisms based on data published on major job boards:
(2.1) predicting the value of the domain and non-domain skills from the demand and supply side,
(2.2) discovering and interpreting behavior factors of gaps and market frictions
(3) to examine and run comparative analytics for various contexts of job markets with presumably specific conditions and to suggest effective AI tools for better job matching outcomes
JRC B2 Seminar: "How important are the unit of analysis and equivalence scales when measuring income poverty and inequality? Evidence from Ireland" - Mark Regan
Abstract
We analyse the effect of varying equivalization scales and income-sharing units (households, tax-units and benefit-units) on inequality and poverty statistics using Irish microdata. We find that benchmark equivalence scales result in substantial variation in the degree of income poverty estimated at the household level, particularly for young children and the elderly. We test multiple permutations of child and adult weights in a set of hypothetical equivalence scales. Our simulation results show that over a range of commonly observed adult-child equivalence weights –0.5 to 0.7 for adults and 0.3 to 0.5 for children, Irish income poverty rates in 2019 ranged from 15.0 per cent to 19.5 per cent– most of this variation is attributable to changes in the adult weight. Inequality statistics tend to be less sensitive to the choice of equivalence scale but are sensitive to the choice of income-sharing unit. At the household level, the Gini coefficient varies between 0.29 and 0.32. At the tax-/benefit-unit level the range is elevated, with the Gini remaining stable over time but between 0.33 and 0.35. Other inequality metrics, such as the p90p10 ratio, exhibit increased volatility over the business cycle at sub-household unit levels.
Speaker
Mark Regan is a researcher at the Economic and Social Research Institute (Dublin, Ireland) and is affiliated to Trinity College Dublin. He recently completed a PhD in Economics at University College Dublin and previously lectured in Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include tax-benefit policy analysis and labour market scarring.
Theano Kakoulidou is a researcher at the Economic and Social Research Institute (Dublin, Ireland) and she is also affiliated to Trinity College Dublin. Before that she has worked as a special advisor to the Greek Minister of Labour as well as members of the Hellenic Parliament, while finishing her PhD at the Athens University of Economics and Business. Her research interests include labour, public and welfare economics.
