Search results

"In Zeiten eines hohen wirtschaftlichen Wachstums war der Zusammenhang von Produktivitäts- und Beschäftigungsentwicklung kein Thema politischer Auseinandersetzungen. Doch je länger die gegenwärtige hohe Arbeitslosigkeit andauert, um so unglaubwürdiger wird es, sie mit Verweis auf konjunkturelle Ursachen erklären zu wollen. Wirtschaftliche Wachstumsraten, die hinter den Produktivitätsfortschritten zurückbleiben, werfen die Frage nach einer technologischen Arbeitslosigkeit auf." (Autorenreferat)

Job crafting can be viewed as changes that employees initiate in the level of job demands and job resources in order to make their own job more meaningful, engaging, and satisfying. As such, job crafting can be used to complement top-down approaches to improve jobs in order to overcome the inadequacies of job redesign approaches, to respond to the complexity of contemporary jobs, and to deal with the needs of the current workforce. This review aims to provide an overview of the conceptualizations of job crafting, the reasons why individuals craft their jobs, as well as the hypothetical predictors and outcomes of job crafting. Furthermore, this review provides suggestions to organizations on how to manage job crafting in their processes, and how to stimulate more beneficial job crafting behavior. Although research on job crafting is still in its infancy, it is worthwhile for organizations to recognize its existence and to manage it such that it has beneficial effects on the employees and the organization at large.

We develop prototype job-to-job flow measures to provide new evidence on labor turnover and earnings dynamics in the Great Recession. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earnings penalties for job transitions with an intervening nonemployment spell. Focusing on residential construction separators in particular, we find increasing rates of industry change and higher earnings penalties from job change in the Great Recession.

Globalization threatens "good jobs at good wages", according to overwhelming public sentiment. Yet professional discussion often rules out such concerns a priori. We instead offer a framework to interpret and address these concerns. We develop a model in which monopolistically competitive firms pay efficiency wages, and these firms differ in both their technical capability and their monitoring ability. Heterogeneity in the ability of firms to monitor effort leads to different wages for identical workers - good jobs and bad jobs - as well as equilibrium unemployment. Wage heterogeneity combines with differences in technical capability to generate an equilibrium size distribution of firms. As in Melitz (2003), trade liberalization increases aggregate efficiency through a firm selection effect. This efficiency-enhancing selection effect, however, puts pressure on many "good jobs", in the sense that the high-wage jobs at any level of technical capability are the least likely to survive trade liberalization. In a central case, trade raises the average real wage but leads to a loss of many "good jobs" and to a steady-state increase in unemployment.