The authors study the distributional consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on employment, both during the onset of the pandemic and over subsequent months. Using cross-sectional and matched longitudinal data from the Current Population Survey, they show that the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities. Although employment losses have been widespread, they have been substantially larger—and more persistent—in lower-paying occupations and industries. Hispanics and non-White workers suffered larger increases in job losses, not only because of their over-representation in lower-paying jobs but also because of a disproportionate increase in their job displacement probability relative to non-Hispanic White workers with the same job background. Gaps in year-on-year job displacement probabilities between Black and White workers have widened over the course of the pandemic recession, both overall and conditional on pre-displacement occupation and industry. These gaps are not explained by state-level differences in the severity of the pandemic nor by the associated response in terms of mitigation policies. In addition, evidence suggests that older workers have been retiring at faster rates.
Abstract This article examines the motivations behind Sweden’s longstanding commitment to refugee resettlement, contributing to broader debates about state-led humanitarian action and global responsibility sharing. Drawing on parliamentary debates from the 1950s to the 2020s, the study identifies key shifts in how Swedish policymakers have framed and implemented resettlement as a durable solution in collaboration with the UNHCR. Initially driven by labor market needs and humanitarian concerns post-World War II, Sweden’s policy shifted towards more diverse, non-European refugee groups in the 1970s and beyond, showcasing a broader commitment to international solidarity and responsibility sharing. The parliamentary debates reflect a political consensus to support the growth of the international refugee resettlement regime by showing humanitarian leadership and leading by example. The recent 2022 policy shift to reduce the refugee quota signals a recalibration influenced by domestic concerns.
Parameter control and dynamic algorithm configuration study how to dynamically choose suitable configurations of a parametrized algorithm during the optimization process. Despite being an intensively researched topic in evolutionary computation, optimal control policies are known only for very few cases, limiting the development of automated approaches to achieve them. With this work we propose four new benchmarks for which we derive optimal or close-to-optimal control policies. More precisely, we consider the optimization of the \LeadingOnes function via RLS$_{k}$, a local search algorithm allowing for a dynamic choice of the mutation strength $k$. The benchmarks differ in which information the algorithm can exploit to set its parameters and to select offspring. In existing running time results, the exploitable information is typically limited to the quality of the current-best solution. In this work, we consider how additional information about the current state of the algorithm can help to make better choices of parameters, and how these choices affect the performance. Namely, we allow the algorithm to use information about the current \OneMax value, and we find that it allows much better parameter choices, especially in marginal states. Although those states are rarely visited by the algorithm, such policies yield a notable speed-up in terms of expected runtime. This makes the proposed benchmarks a challenging, but promising testing ground for analysis of parameter control methods in rich state spaces and of their ability to find optimal policies by catching the performance improvements yielded by correct parameter choices.
We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies projected into a finite-dimensional parameter space (e.g., the weights of a neural network), leading to a simple and completely general closed-form update. The resulting algorithm combines many properties of deterministic and classic policy gradient methods. Like deterministic policy gradients, it exploits knowledge of the gradient of the action-value function with respect to the action. Like classic policy gradients, it can be applied to stochastic policies with arbitrary distributions over actions -- without using the reparameterization trick. We show results on the DeepMind Control Suite and a magnetic confinement fusion task which compare favorably with state-of-the-art continuous control methods.
In China’s transitional economy, one of the major objectives of the government is to maintain social stability. We hypothesize that, through state ownership and appointment of executives, Chinese government officials can influence firms’ labor employment decisions by limiting layoffs when firms’ sales decline. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have stickier labor costs than non-SOEs, and the presence of politically connected managers makes labor costs even stickier in SOEs while having little effect in non-SOEs. Such effects are stronger in regions with weak market institutions and during time periods when government officials are to be promoted. We also show that the government reciprocates SOEs’ sticky labor policies with subsequent subsidies. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.
La adaptación de la realidad judicial española del siglo XXI al marco tecnológico contemporáneo ha provocado que se acometa una oportuna reforma del orden jurisdiccional social, por vía del RD-ley 6/2023, de 19 de diciembre, especialmente, en términos de digitalización y eficiencia procesal como pasos fundamentales para un sistema judicial más ágil y accesible. En concreto, y en el pleno convencimiento de que la regulación de nuestro proceso laboral admite un claro margen de mejora en lo referente a la ejecución de sentencias y demás títulos ejecutivos, se ha procedido a la modificación de ciertos artículos de la Ley 36/2011, Reguladora de la Jurisdicción Social. Es, precisamente, la disección y evaluación crítica de esta reforma, al objeto de asegurar su suficiencia, así como que cumplen con los objetivos previstos, lo que motiva la existencia de este ensayo.
En este texto se realiza un análisis sobre los aspectos más relevantes que han caracterizado al gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador en los últimos cinco años. En el contexto de la llamada Cuarta Transformación, México ha transitado por una intensa etapa política en la que se han generado cambios importantes a pesar de no trastocar las estructuras del capitalismo. De igual forma, se ubica el proceso mexicano en el contexto regional destacando diferencias y similitudes con respecto a otros países que han transitado por gobiernos que se ubican del centro hacia la izquierda.
Palabras clave: México; AMLO; Izquierda; América Latina.
Special aspects of education, Labor market. Labor supply. Labor demand
Parand A. Alamdari, Soroush Ebadian, Ariel D. Procaccia
We consider the challenge of AI value alignment with multiple individuals that have different reward functions and optimal policies in an underlying Markov decision process. We formalize this problem as one of policy aggregation, where the goal is to identify a desirable collective policy. We argue that an approach informed by social choice theory is especially suitable. Our key insight is that social choice methods can be reinterpreted by identifying ordinal preferences with volumes of subsets of the state-action occupancy polytope. Building on this insight, we demonstrate that a variety of methods--including approval voting, Borda count, the proportional veto core, and quantile fairness--can be practically applied to policy aggregation.
Planning in real-world settings often entails addressing partial observability while aligning with users' requirements. We present a novel framework for expressing users' constraints and preferences about agent behavior in a partially observable setting using parameterized belief-state query (BSQ) policies in the setting of goal-oriented partially observable Markov decision processes (gPOMDPs). We present the first formal analysis of such constraints and prove that while the expected cost function of a parameterized BSQ policy w.r.t its parameters is not convex, it is piecewise constant and yields an implicit discrete parameter search space that is finite for finite horizons. This theoretical result leads to novel algorithms that optimize gPOMDP agent behavior with guaranteed user alignment. Analysis proves that our algorithms converge to the optimal user-aligned behavior in the limit. Empirical results show that parameterized BSQ policies provide a computationally feasible approach for user-aligned planning in partially observable settings.
We propose the Constraint-Generation Policy Optimization (CGPO) framework to optimize policy parameters within compact and interpretable policy classes for mixed discrete-continuous Markov Decision Processes (DC-MDP). CGPO can not only provide bounded policy error guarantees over an infinite range of initial states for many DC-MDPs with expressive nonlinear dynamics, but it can also provably derive optimal policies in cases where it terminates with zero error. Furthermore, CGPO can generate worst-case state trajectories to diagnose policy deficiencies and provide counterfactual explanations of optimal actions. To achieve such results, CGPO proposes a bilevel mixed-integer nonlinear optimization framework for optimizing policies in defined expressivity classes (e.g. piecewise linear) and reduces it to an optimal constraint generation methodology that adversarially generates worst-case state trajectories. Furthermore, leveraging modern nonlinear optimizers, CGPO can obtain solutions with bounded optimality gap guarantees. We handle stochastic transitions through chance constraints, providing high-probability performance guarantees. We also present a roadmap for understanding the computational complexities of different expressivity classes of policy, reward, and transition dynamics. We experimentally demonstrate the applicability of CGPO across various domains, including inventory control, management of a water reservoir system, and physics control. In summary, CGPO provides structured, compact and explainable policies with bounded performance guarantees, enabling worst-case scenario generation and counterfactual policy diagnostics.
ABSTRACT Taking advantage of an original firm-level survey carried out by the Banque de France, we empirically investigate how the employment of ICT specialists (in-house and external) and the use of digital technologies (cloud and big data) have an impact on firm productivity and labor share. Our analysis relies on the survey responses in 2018 of 1,065 French firms belonging to the manufacturing sector and with at least 20 employees. To tackle potential endogeneity issues, we adopt an instrumental variable approach as proposed by Bartik (1991, Who Benefits from State and Local Economic Development Policies? Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.). The results of our cross-section estimations point to a large effect: ceteris paribus, the employment of ICT specialists and the use of digital technologies improve a firm’s labor productivity by about 23% and its total factor productivity by about 17%. Conversely, the employment of in-house ICT specialists and the use of big data both have a detrimental impact on labor share, of about 2.5 percentage points respectively.
The COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions across the globe and government responses have led to tens of millions of jobs lost. This paper combines the SIR epidemic model with a frictional labor market to examine the interaction between infection, wages and unemployment. The labor market is not efficient during the pandemic. Optimal policies show that it is often optimal to shut down businesses and impose a quarantine before the pandemic peaks. A quarantine itself is not enough, however, and must be complemented by additional policies. The policies are not unique and include a Pigouvian “infection tax” on those infected, a tax on susceptible individuals, higher unemployment benefits and a tax on vacancy creation. All policies are state dependent and depend both on the number of unemployed and on the number of infected.
Using a double list experiment designed to elicit views free from social desirability bias, we find that support in the United States for transgender people in the labor market is significantly overreported by 8%–10%. After correcting for this overreporting, we still find that over two-thirds of respondents would be comfortable with a transgender manager and support employment nondiscrimination protection for transgender people. However, respondents severely underestimate this level of support. We also show that stated labor market support for transgender people is lower than support for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Our results advance our understanding of employment discrimination against transgender people. This paper was accepted by Marie Claire Villeval, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from The Vanderbilt LGBTQ+ Policy Lab. is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02567 .
The agenda of classical social theory has been formed to understand social and economic developments, the effects of these developments on society, and suggestions for solving social problems. The emergence of capitalist production and its impacts on society are areas where the intellectual activities of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, known as founding sociologists, are concentrated. Changes in labor characteristics and the principles that shape working life have found a place among the various concepts and discussions of the founding sociologists, and a theoretical ground for understanding modern labor has been formed. Based on relevant theoretical discussions, the main goal of this article is to develop an inquiry into the possibility of considering the concepts of labor and freedom together. Consideration of freedom, one of the most ancient and deeply rooted issues in the history of thought, in the context of labor will help us understand in which situations labor can create an opportunity for freedom or, on the contrary, a different form of slavery. The historical tracking of the relationship between labor and freedom is another element aimed in this article, from master–slave duality in Ancient Greece to the modern worker who has the right to freely sell his/her own labor power. In precapitalist societies, the structure of freedom that excludes labor made labor respectable, along with 19th-century social thinking. Contrary to the precapitalist freedom structure that excludes labor, the 19th-century social thought elevated labor to a respectable position. In this context, the relationship established by classical social theorists between labor and freedom has been effective in breaking away from the traditional definition of labor and becoming a reality that cannot be ignored for daily life, and in this reality, it becomes a necessary and desirable position in terms of freedom from time to time.
Industrial relations, Social insurance. Social security. Pension
O entrevistado deste número é o sociólogo italiano Pietro Basso que concedeu a entrevista na sua casa, em Mogliano Veneto, no dia 19 de junho de 2023, tendo sido revisada pelo mesmo após a transcrição.
Pietro Basso tem larga experiência acadêmica e militante. Lecionou sociologia no Instituto Universitário Oriental de Nápoles e na Universidade Ca’Foscari Veneza, Itália. Atualmente está aposentado e contribui como editor da revista “Il Cuneo rosso” e do blog internacionalista “Il pungolo rosso”. Foi por muitos anos diretor, na Ca’Foscari, do Master Sull’Immigrazione, a primeira experiência italiana de formação no âmbito da pós-graduação sobre o fenômeno migratório, que teve entre seus palestrantes estudiosos de alto nível de todo o mundo. É autor e organizador de muitos livros, edições de revistas e ensaios sobre temas da mundialização e do mercado de trabalho, desemprego, organização do trabalho e do tempo de trabalho, “raça” e racismo de Estado, islamofobia, imigração internacional, lutas do proletariado, história do movimento comunista. Algumas de suas obras foram traduzidas em vários idiomas. No Brasil, além de artigos e capítulos de livros, publicou o livro “Tempos modernos, jornadas antigas: vidas de trabalho no início do século XXI”, pela editora da UNICAMP, em 2018.
A sua produção acadêmica e ativismo político concentram-se na crítica marxista do capitalismo e nesta entrevista Pietro nos fala sobre a reprodução social do proletariado hoje no contexto do capital, global e nacional, indicando tendências gerais e contrastando com situações específicas regionais. Sobre a reprodução social da massa de trabalhadores imigrantes que compõem o proletariado, Pietro analisa como “o destino das trabalhadoras e dos trabalhadores imigrantes é o destino de todos”, ou seja, como a inferiorização dos imigrantes fomenta divisões na classe trabalhadora e funciona como alavanca para piorar a condição do proletariado como um todo. Ao mesmo tempo, as lutas dos imigrantes contra a discriminação e o racismo incidem também nas lutas dos trabalhadores em geral. Nosso entrevistado aborda ainda as dificuldades de organização dos trabalhadores italianos, recorrendo a elementos históricos, ao contexto social e político atual e indicando os setores e organizações que, de forma limitada, vêm se constituindo como vanguarda das lutas. Por fim, Pietro é desafiado a pensar sobre um novo Manifesto do Partido Comunista, analisando alguns aspectos, como o nível atual de destrutividade do capitalismo plenamente realizado, a atual composição do proletariado cada vez mais multinacional e multirracial, a crescente composição feminina do proletariado internacional e o vigor da concepção de Marx e Engels sobre a auto-organização da classe, necessária para orientar o protagonismo de massa dos trabalhadores diante das condições atuais.
A entrevista é acompanhada pela tradução do texto original em italiano Quarenta anos de ataques capitalistas: como mudaram a condição e o modo de pensar dos trabalhadores, publicado originalmente na revista Il cuneo rosso.
Special aspects of education, Labor market. Labor supply. Labor demand
The effectiveness of labor market matching affects the duration and natural rate of unemployment. In return, availability and prevalence of job search channels are important determinants of the effectiveness of the matching process. This study uses the Household Labor Force Survey (2014-2019) micro data to investigate the relationship between individual characteristics and choice of job search channel. The findings from the nonlinear econometric model show the use of the Turkish Employment Agency as a job search channel to have significantly increased over time. The results also show women to be more likely to apply to the Turkish Employment Agency or to private employment offices compared to men and to be less likely to apply to employers directly and search with the help of friends. Large heterogeneity also occurs across age groups. The results show directly applying to employers to be more common among young individuals under the age of 25, and looking for a job with the help of friends and relatives to be more common among individuals over 45. Finally, those who’ve been unemployed for 3 months or more are more likely to use any job search channel compared to those who have been unemployed for less than two months.
Industrial relations, Social insurance. Social security. Pension
This study compared the effectiveness of COVID-19 control policies, including wearing masks, and the vaccine rates through proportional infection rate in 28 states of the United States using the eSIR model. The effective rate of policies was measured by the difference between the predicted daily infection proportion rate using the data before the policy and the actual daily infection proportion rate. The study suggests that both mask and vaccine policy had a significant impact on mitigating the pandemic. We further explored how different social factors influenced the effectiveness of a specific policy through the linear regression model. Out of 9 factors, the population density, number of hospital beds per 1000 people, and percent of the population over 65 are the most substantial factors on mask policy effectiveness, while public health funding per person, percent of immigration have the most significant influence on vaccine policy effectiveness. This study summarized the effectiveness of different policies and factors they associated with. It can be served as a reference for future covid-19 related policy.