No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the process of migration of medical doctors from Poland to the United Kingdom following the European Union expansion in 2004. The research covers all the stages of the process, from a study of the determinants, the decision-making process, through the channels of migration, to the reception in the host country and the impact on the sending country. The conceptual framework, largely based on the brain drain approach and push-pull model for evaluating mobility, is extended to include a more comprehensive study of the socio-political conditions, as well as micro, meso and macro theories from different disciplines in order to explain migration and its outcomes. A broad range of sources is used for the study, combining the analysis of statistical data and documents with original in-depth interviews with doctors who moved abroad and those who had no intention to do so, a quantitative survey measuring the migration propensity among medical students, as well as interviews with recruitment agents and key informants. The thesis concludes that the increased flows of medical doctors, though triggered by the EU expansion, occur primarily due to push factors, resulting from the deeply rooted problems in the healthcare system. Motivations for migration are universally recognised by respondents and no clear migrant profile can be identified. Recruitment agents are important for facilitating mobility in the early stages of the EU membership, though the development of migrant networks is also observed. The UK is found to be a welcoming environment for the new arrivals with strong retentive characteristics. In terms of the impact of migration on Poland, despite an interest in the phenomenon, the policy response remained limited. Nevertheless, the increased mobility of medical doctors has helped to highlight the challenges faced by the Polish healthcare system, which need to be addressed to prevent skill shortages.

The study of labour markets is often limited to labour market institutions themselves and the link to other areas in economics, in particular product markets, is scarce. The purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the interaction between economic conditions and explicit contracting in labour markets. Chapters One and Two investigate how wages change in the face of changes in product market competition and propose a hypothesis for recent increases in wage inequality. In Chapter One I explain why firms competing in an oligopolistic market alter how much they are willing to pay to attract good workers and how wage inequality within industries (and observed skill groups) may arise from these changes in product market competition. I then look at the actual impact of product market competition using a panel of individuals for the U.K. and concentration measures and two natural experiments as measures of competition. The results point to the fact that increased competition raises the returns to skills and hence wage inequality. Chapter Two takes investigates the impact of product market competition on performance related pay. I analyse compensation equations of US managers and obtain that increased competition implies increased steepness of the performance pay relationship that raises the variance of wages. Chapter Three assesses whether there is a systematic relationship between the type of contract held and an aspect of workers welfare. I analyse whether the large difference between the work accident rates of fixed-term and permanent contract workers in Spain is not just the result of a compositional effect but that a pure contractual effect exists. The results indicate there is a pure contractual effect that increases the individual accident probability by 5 percentage points. Finally Chapter Four is an analysis of the relative impact of household income and unemployment benefit on unemployment duration, with a particular focus on female behaviour.

This thesis explores how career concerns and information affect organizational performance. Its first two chapters analyze a principal-agent model in which the agent has career concerns along the lines of Holmstrom (1999) and in which the principal observes the agent's performance but the agent and the outside labor market do not. The first chapter shows that the presence of career concerns with asymmetric information creates a trade-off between turnover and incentives: in order for career concerns to increase, the firm must release talented workers in the future. The chapter applies its theoretical framework to examine the optimal level of labor market competition and firms' willingness to make general and firm-specific human capital investments. In the second chapter, the agent works for the principal for two periods, after which labor market competition for talent occurs. Within this environment, it explores the firm's incentives to disclose the agent's performance to the agent in between the two periods. It finds that a profit-maximizing disclosure policy (1) always provides some information to workers; (2) never identifies the worst performers; and (3) sometimes does not identify the best performers. In contrast to the first two, the third chapter (joint with Michael McMahon) explores information and career concerns on monetary policy committees. In particular, we ask whether a heterogeneous committee of experts can outperform a homogeneous one. We find that giving voting rights to members with different beliefs can improve social welfare due to moderation. We then examine whether differences in voting behavior between internal and external members on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee are consistent with moderation, and find that they are not. In particular, some external members do not contradict internal ones. We present evidence that career concerns can explain this finding.

This thesis consists of four essays on the determinants, the dynamics and the policy implications of simultaneous job creation and destruction in labour markets. Firstly, it proposes and solves a stochastic search model with endogenous job separation and it shows that the amplitude and time variation of job reallocation depend crucially upon the arrival rate of exogenous firing permissions. Tighter firing restrictions, albeit not directly relevant for differences in average unemployment rates, dramatically reduce the relative volatility of job creation and destruction. A parameterization of the model can rationalise cross-country differences in the cyclical behaviour of job creation and destruction. Secondly, it brings together aggregate data on job reallocation and labour market policy for nine OECD countries. It shows that long term unemployment and job reallocation are negatively correlated and that job reallocation is lower in countries that offer limited benefit for a limited period of time. Thirdly, it studies the role of time-consuming search in generating the size distribution of firms and the dynamics of firm-level turnover. It solves a dynamic matching model where the joint distribution of wages and employment results from interacting idiosyncratic shocks, firm-level asymmetries in job creation and destruction and time-consuming search on the part of workers. Theoretical results offer a structural interpretation of existing empirical evidence on firm-size wage differentials and point out novel empirical implications. Finally, it measures the relation between job flows and establishment size applying econometric techniques best suited for analysing the dynamics of large cross-sections. Using a balanced panel from the Mexican Manufacturing sector it finds no evidence of small establishments converging toward the mean, thus no evidence of convergence.

This thesis aims to investigate the process through which discourses promoted by one level of governance are diffused and become accepted in another. It defines the European Employment Strategy (EES) as an attempt to set member states' employment policy agendas by imposing a specific policy discourse defining the problems of European labour markets and the appropriate solutions and it looks at how, by who and under what conditions this was adopted or refused at the national level. It argues that existing accounts of the effects of the EES, which emphasise mechanisms relying on incentives and sanctions, policy-oriented learning and socialisation, do not pay enough attention to whether and why different domestic actors and groups might support it in the domestic arena and to the role of domestic institutional settings. The thesis holds, first, that the diffusion of the Strategy's discourse at the national level depended on the presence or absence of national coalitions of actors willing to adopt and advocate it. The empirical evidence collected in the case studies on France and Italy suggests that the Strategy's discourse was limited to narrow communities composed of civil servants, experts and social partner representatives. The second contention is that these coalitions' success depended on the institutional resources and constraints facing them. In both countries studied meeting the Strategy's requirements stimulated a measure of administrative adaptation, which provided supporting coalitions with additional resources and facilitated norm diffusion. Yet the diffusion of information on the Strategy was limited even within the central administration, among the rank-and-file of the social partners and at the regional and local levels of government. Thus the last contention of this work is that the coalitions promoting the EU discourse remained weak due to the scarce diffusion of information beyond restricted circles and the limited institutional resources provided by the Strategy. Supporting coalitions have only been influential when directly involved in specific policy choices made at the centre and, even then, implementation has proved difficult if actors other than the central government were involved.

This thesis consists of three independent research projects aimed at gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying labor markets. The unifying themes of the thesis are the theoretical modeling and estimation approaches, which are similar in all three chapters. In the first chapter, co-authored with Helene Turon and Fabien Postel-Vi nay, we develop and estimate a structural model that incorporates a sizable public sector in a labor market with search frictions. The wage distribution and the employment rate in the public sector are taken as exogenous policy parameters. The model is estimated on British data. We use the model to simulate the impact of various counterfactual public sector wage and employment policies. The next chapter, co-authored with Daniel Borowczyk-Martins and Linas Tarasonis, assesses racial prejudice as a source to explain employment and wage differentials between white and black workers. We estimate the model with US data using methods of indirect inference. Finally, I develop and estimate a general equilibrium model with the option of taking up self-employment. The model incorporates self-employed workers, some of whom hire paid employees, in an equilibrium model of the labor market. Employment rates and earnings distributions are determined endogenously and are estimated to match their empirical counterparts. The model is estimated using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS)

This research aims to understand how people respond to post-industrial change in places that are represented through a range of official measures and narratives as ‘declining’. Against a backdrop of pervasive policy assumptions about why people move from, or remain in, ‘declining’ places, this research explores in-depth the range of responses that people make to changing labour market contexts. It particularly seeks to understand why people remain in weaker labour market areas rather than moving to places that may offer greater employment opportunities. The case study approach focused on two areas in England: Nearthorpe,Sheffield, and Eastland, Grimsby. Stakeholders were interviewed to understand the area context and official narratives of place. The main data is drawn from indepth interviews with 18 households, comprising 25 individuals, who were interviewed twice during the research. Thematic and biographical interviewing and analysis was used. The research found that experiences of working in low-paid and insecure work reduced the impetus to residential mobility for many participants. Most people adjusted to labour market changes not through mobility but by remaining in-situ and drawing on place-based support. The extent to which networks of support were utilised to find work, provide childcare, and support those experiencing illhealth strongly suggests that immobility performed an important function. Mobility decisions did not draw on a simple cost-benefit calculation of the relative economic benefits. Participants foregrounded emotional connections to people and places, embedded experiences of work and places that guided responses to opportunities in the present, and revealed multiple motivations for (im)mobility within households. This research has demonstrated the importance of understanding how people relate to the places in which they live and the active processes of distinction that are used in order to construct a place in which they can belong and adjust in-situ to a changing labour market backdrop.