Fall 2005 Colloquia



» View photos 		September 26, 2005

IMPLICATIONS OF THE "NEW" MODELOF EMPLOYER ASCENDANCY

Not Yet Dead at the Fed: Unions, Worker Bargaining, and Economy-Wide Wage Determination

De-Unionization and Macro Performance: What Freeman and Medoff Didn't Do

Daniel J.B. Mitchell
Ho-su Wu professor at the Anderson Graduate School of Management and the School of Public Affairs, UCLA
DANIEL J.B. MITCHELL, chaired the Department of Policy Studies (now the Department of Public Policy) during 1996-97. Prof. Mitchell was formerly director of the U.C.L.A. Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (1979-90) and continues to serve on the Institute’s advisory committee. During Phase II of the federal wage/price controls program of the early 1970s, Prof. Mitchell was chief economist of the Pay Board, the agency that administered wage controls. He was twice associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., including a stint as a senior fellow in the economic studies program (1978-79), and participated in several Brookings-sponsored research projects.

Prof. Mitchell is the author of Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly: Historic Social Movements and Their Lessons for Our Aging Society (M.E. Sharpe, 2000). The book uses California’s colorful experience with “pensionite” movements of the state’s seniors during the period from the 1920s through the 1940s to draw implications for the upcoming retirement of the baby boom".

 




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October 10, 2005

“PHYSICAL” SPACE, “DIGITAL” SPACE: A NEW VISION FOR THE Institute for Research on Labor and Employment LIBRARY

Terry Huwe
Director of Library and Information Resources, IRLE
University of California, Berkeley
IRLE Librarian Terry Huwe discusses current plans to reconfigure the IRLE Library in the context of systemwide goals and priorities that are underway within the University of California Libraries. These include the University’s commitment to the “Open Access” movement; responding to the “crisis” in scholarly communications; print and digital collection strategies that extend the UC Libraries’ reach; and the growing importance of “dim” and “dark” archives. From this context, he will describe the Library’s plans for an “Electronic Commons” and other community-enhancing features, which will improve access to digital resources—while retaining the core print collections. He concludes with some forecasts about the roles libraries may play within research universities, and how the IRLE Library can advance the Institute’s overall objectives as a “print-plus-digital” library.

Terence K. Huwe is Past President of the Librarians Association of the University of California, and Director of Library and Information Resources at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley. His responsibilities include library administration, reference, and oversight of Web services. He is a columnist in Computers in Libraries magazine, and a frequent presenter at Internet Librarian USA, Internet Librarian International, and the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, DC.

 




 October 24, 2005

EARLY-LIFE EVENTS AND HEALTH AND LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES IN ADULTHOOD

Rucker Johnson (co-authored with Bob Schoeni)
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley
Rucker Johnson recently joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, as an Assistant Professor. He received a Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan in 2002, where his training focused on areas of applied microeconomics. He was honored to be the recipient of three national dissertation awards: APPAM dissertation award, Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award, and National Economics Association Dissertation Award. Rucker has been a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at the University of Michigan for the past two years. His research emphasizes issues of poverty and inequality in the fields of labor, urban, and health economics.

 




 October 31, 2005

THE DISSIPATION OF MINIMUM WAGE GAINS FOR WORKERS THROUGH LABOR SUBSTITUTION

David Fairris
Professor of Economics Associate Dean of Student Academic Affairs, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
University of California, Riverside


 




 November 7, 2005

OFFSHORING, INTERFACES, AND GOVERNANCE: THE CASE OF AUTOMOTIVE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Susan Helper
Professor of Economics
Case Western Reserve University, Ohio
Susan Helper, Professor of Economics, Case Western Reserve University Susan Helper is Professor of Economics, Case Western Reserve University. She is spending the academic year 2005-2006 as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University. She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of long-term, information-rich relationships, between suppliers and customers and management and labor. Current projects include a study of offshoring automotive design and engineering to India, and the development of supplier capability in the US and Mexico. She has published in journals such as American Economic Review, Sloan Management Review, and Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BA from Oberlin College.

 




 November 14, 2005

OFFSHORING: OUTLOOK AND IMPLICATIONS

Ashok Bardhan & Cynthia Kroll
Senior Researcher, Haas School of Business
Senior Regional Economist, Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley

This talk will center on issues relating to potential labor market impact, both in the United States and India,and the future outlook of offshoring, including of R & D activity.


 




 November 22, 2005

IMPACT OF WAL-MART GROWTH ON EARNINGS THROUGHOUT THE RETAIL SECTOR

Arindrajit Dube
Research Economist
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UC Berkeley
Using a database of Wal-Mart store openings and the county level Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, we estimate the effect of Wal-Mart on earnings of retail workers during the 1990s economic expansion (1992-2000). We exploit the pattern of Wal-Mart expansion (expanding outward from Arkansas over time) to predict Wal-Mart store openings, allowing us to control for endogeneity using both instrumental variable and control function approaches. We find that in urban counties, a Wal-Mart store opening led to a 0.5% to 0.8% reduction in average earnings of workers in the general merchandise sector, and a 0.8% to 0.9% reduction in average earnings of workers in the grocery sector. This translated into a combined 1.3% reduction in total earnings (wage bill) of workers in these sectors.

Endogeneity causes the OLS estimates to be biased downwards in magnitude, primarily from an omitted variables bias. No earnings impact was found for rest of the retail sectors or for restaurants (the latter being an auxiliary test of our identification strategy). In contrast, in non-MSA (i.e., rural) counties, a Wal-Mart store opening was associated with an increase in earnings of general merchandise workers, and a decrease in earnings of grocery workers, but no significant change in the wage bill. We estimate that in 2000, total earnings of retail workers nationwide was reduced by $4.7 billion due to Wal-Marts presence.

 




 December 5, 2005

INFANT MORTALITY AFTER WELFARE REFORM

Alexandre Mas
Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy Group
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley