David Kucera - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by David Kucera
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2004
The designations employed in ILO publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practi... more The designations employed in ILO publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practice, and the presentation of material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the International Labour Office concerning the legal status of any country, area or territory or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers. The responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles, studies and other contributions rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the International Labour Office of the opinions expressed in them. Reference to names of firms and commercial products and processes does not imply their endorsement by the International Labour Office, and any failure to mention a particular firm, commercial product or process is not a sign of disapproval.
Review of International Economics, 2006
The paper uses a gravity trade model to evaluate the effects of trade union rights and democracy ... more The paper uses a gravity trade model to evaluate the effects of trade union rights and democracy on exports for the 1993 to 1999 period for four classifications of manufacturing industries by labor-intensity. The model includes data for 162 countries and used eight indicators of trade union rights and democracy, including those constructed by the authors. The paper finds robust relationships between stronger trade union rights and higher total manufacturing exports and between stronger democracy and higher total exports, total manufacturing exports, and labor-intensive manufacturing exports. The paper finds that the relationship between trade union rights and labor-intensive manufacturing exports is highly sensitive to the classification of laborintensive manufacturing industries and to model specification, yielding statistically significant results of opposite sign depending on assumptions.
Working papers are preliminary documents circulated to stimulate discussion and obtain comments
Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2001
National level measures of fundamental rights at work are being developed by the International In... more National level measures of fundamental rights at work are being developed by the International Institute for Labour Studies (of the International Labour Organization) as part of its Decent Work research programme. The measures address freedom of association and collective bargaining, child labour, forced labour, and discrimination in employment. The measures are constructed from information in published sources, both quantitative and textual, emphasizing de facto more than de jure considerations. The paper summarizes previous work on these issues (the construction of measures and their application in empirical analysis) and then the methods employed by the Institute in constructing measures to quantify rights at work. The measures are being developed for two main reasons. First, in order to examine possible trade-offs and complementarities among rights at work and other employment objectives, these measures will be incorporated as explanatory variables into cross-sectional and panel data statistical models. Second, the measures will enable one to identify countries that have been able to achieve both greater rights at work as well other employment objectives, relative to these countries' level of economic development. Information on such success stories will be used to motivate country case studies aimed at identifying the causal mechanisms linking fundamental rights at work with other employment objectives as well as with economic development more generally.
Revista Internacional del Trabajo, 2019
Revue internationale du Travail, 2019
Droits réservés © auteur, 2019. Compilation et traduction des articles © Organisation internation... more Droits réservés © auteur, 2019. Compilation et traduction des articles © Organisation internationale du Travail, 2019. * Département des politiques de l'emploi du Bureau international du Travail (BIT); kucera@ ilo.org. ** Labor and Worklife Program (programme sur le monde du travail et la vie profession
International Labour Review, 2018
The paper describes a new method of constructing indicators of freedom of association and collect... more The paper describes a new method of constructing indicators of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights as defined by the International Labour Organization's (ILO) supervisory bodies and based on the coding of violations in nine textual sources, including six from the ILO as well as national legislation. Central to the method are 108 evaluation criteria representing different violations of FACB rights, with weights derived from the Delphi method of expert consultation, yielding overall, in law and in practice Labour Rights (LR) indicators. The method is applied to 185 ILO member states for five years between 2000 and 2015. Global trends in the LR indicators are described and key drivers of these trends are identified by main categories of violations and regions. Both the LR indicators and the number of coded violations suggest a sustained worsening of FACB rights in law over this period across most categories of violations and regions, but no evident global trend in FACB rights in practice. The LR indicators are accompanied by a website housed at the Center for Global Workers' Rights at Penn State University, in which indicators for any given country and year can be readily traced to specific violations of FACB rights and the passages of text on which coding is based.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2002
Globalization, Flexibilization and Working Conditions in Asia and the Pacific
Development Centre Studies, 2009
Hundreds of millions of women work around the world but the types of job they do are often inform... more Hundreds of millions of women work around the world but the types of job they do are often informal, of lower quality, worse paid and more precarious than those performed by men. They face cultural, social and legal obstacles. They are often casualties of economic structuring.
This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of foreign trade expansion on men and wo... more This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of foreign trade expansion on men and women's employment and earnings in Germany and Japan since the early-1970s. The analysis is prompted by trade studies identifying manufacturing industries appearing most vulnerable to foreign trade, industries in which German and Japanese women are disproportionately represented. Evidence is found that foreign trade expansion had a more adverse effect on women's than men's manufacturing employment in Japan and a more equal effect in Germany. In spite of this, demand shifted away from women's employment in Germany after the early-1970s, for both the manufacturing sector as a whole and for manufacturing industries with high female percentages of employment. No such demand shifts occurred in Japan. In the face of these differences in demand and of remarkable similarity in female labor supply, male-female wage differences narrowed in Germany and widened in Japan, for both manufacturing and non-agricultural employees. These diverging patterns of male-female wage differences are explained by the more marginal basis on which Japanese women were integrated into the workforce, reflected in the character of women's part-time and temporary employment as well as union representation. To some extent, the more marginal basis on which Japanese women were integrated into the workforce resulted from the explicit policies of Japanese firms, referred to as "Operation Scale-Down" (genryo keiei). In Germany, too, the character of women's integration into the workforce appears to result in part from explicit policies undertaken by The Federation of German Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerkshaftsbund), the largest German federation of unions.
World Development, 2014
ABSTRACT
Beyond Macroeconomic Stability
World Development, 2012
The paper estimates the effects of the 2008-09 trade contraction on employment in India and South... more The paper estimates the effects of the 2008-09 trade contraction on employment in India and South Africa, using social accounting matrices (SAMs) in a Leontief multiplier model. Employment results are presented at aggregate and industry levels and examine gender and skills biases. The most notable finding is that India and South Africa experienced substantial employment declines as a result of trade contraction with the European Union and the United States. A large share of these declines occurred in the nontradable sector and resulted from income-induced effects, illustrating how a shock originating in the tradable goods sector had strong ripple effects throughout these economies.
World Development, 2004
This paper addresses the hypothesis that higher labor standards-in particular freedom of associat... more This paper addresses the hypothesis that higher labor standards-in particular freedom of association and collective bargaining rights-and higher wages in the formal sector reduce employment in that sector and thereby contribute to the informalization of employment. This issue is explored using panel data on specific categories of formal and informal employment for 14 Latin American countries in the 1990s, evaluating both crosscountry and time-series variation. Our most robust finding is that countries with higher labor standards tend to have higher shares of formal employment and lower shares of informal employment.
International Review of Applied Economics, 2001
ABSTRACT
Revue internationale du Travail, 2008
Cet article traite de deux questions controversées, importantes en termes de politiques: les effe... more Cet article traite de deux questions controversées, importantes en termes de politiques: les effets de la réglementation du travail sur l'emploi informel, et ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler l'emploi informel «volontaire». Les auteurs exposent brièvement les théories sur le sujet et présentent les résultats d'analyses empiriques des effets de la réglementation du travail sur l'emploi informel. Ils concluent par des commentaires sur la pertinence des quatre objectifs du travail décent de l'OIT pour l'emploi informel et le développement économique, en mettant l'accent sur l'organisation des travailleurs de l'économie informelle. * Groupe de cohérence des politiques, Département de l'intégration des politiques et statistiques, BIT.
Revue internationale du Travail, 2002
L'auteur utilise de nouveaux indicateurs des normes du travail - elabores a partir de sources... more L'auteur utilise de nouveaux indicateurs des normes du travail - elabores a partir de sources textuelles et mettant l'accent sur l'application effective des droits - comme variables explicatives des IED dans les annees quatre-vingt-dix. Les normes fondamentales du travail considerees sont celles qui s'appliquent a la liberte syndicale et a la negociation collective, au travail des enfants, aux discriminations professionnelles entre hommes et femmes. Conformement aux resultats d'etudes anterieures, il n'existe aucun element de preuve a l'appui de l'opinion commune selon laquelle les investisseurs etrangers privilegieraient les pays ou les normes du travail sont basses; de fait, tous les parametres statistiquement significatifs iraient meme dans le sens contraire.
Revista Internacional del Trabajo, 2002
En este articulo se emplean los nuevos indicadores nacionales de las normas del trabajo para elab... more En este articulo se emplean los nuevos indicadores nacionales de las normas del trabajo para elaborar un analisis econometrico de las corrientes de inversiones extranjeras directas registradas pais por pais durante el decenio de 1990. Los citados indicadores se han confeccionado codificando la informacion escrita disponible y procurando reflejar la situacion real en cada caso. Abarcan varias normas laborales fundamentales, relativas a la libertad de asociacion y negociacion colectiva, el trabajo infantil, la discriminacion sexual y la desigualdad en el trabajo. Al igual que ocurrio en otros estudios anteriores, se llega a la conclusion de que no hay pruebas solventes que respalden la creencia tan arraigada de que los inversores extranjeros prefieren poner sus capitales en los paises con menos derechos laborales; en realidad, todos los datos estadisticos significativos indican lo contrario.
Revista Internacional del Trabajo, 2011
ABSTRACT
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2004
The designations employed in ILO publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practi... more The designations employed in ILO publications, which are in conformity with United Nations practice, and the presentation of material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the International Labour Office concerning the legal status of any country, area or territory or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers. The responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles, studies and other contributions rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the International Labour Office of the opinions expressed in them. Reference to names of firms and commercial products and processes does not imply their endorsement by the International Labour Office, and any failure to mention a particular firm, commercial product or process is not a sign of disapproval.
Review of International Economics, 2006
The paper uses a gravity trade model to evaluate the effects of trade union rights and democracy ... more The paper uses a gravity trade model to evaluate the effects of trade union rights and democracy on exports for the 1993 to 1999 period for four classifications of manufacturing industries by labor-intensity. The model includes data for 162 countries and used eight indicators of trade union rights and democracy, including those constructed by the authors. The paper finds robust relationships between stronger trade union rights and higher total manufacturing exports and between stronger democracy and higher total exports, total manufacturing exports, and labor-intensive manufacturing exports. The paper finds that the relationship between trade union rights and labor-intensive manufacturing exports is highly sensitive to the classification of laborintensive manufacturing industries and to model specification, yielding statistically significant results of opposite sign depending on assumptions.
Working papers are preliminary documents circulated to stimulate discussion and obtain comments
Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2001
National level measures of fundamental rights at work are being developed by the International In... more National level measures of fundamental rights at work are being developed by the International Institute for Labour Studies (of the International Labour Organization) as part of its Decent Work research programme. The measures address freedom of association and collective bargaining, child labour, forced labour, and discrimination in employment. The measures are constructed from information in published sources, both quantitative and textual, emphasizing de facto more than de jure considerations. The paper summarizes previous work on these issues (the construction of measures and their application in empirical analysis) and then the methods employed by the Institute in constructing measures to quantify rights at work. The measures are being developed for two main reasons. First, in order to examine possible trade-offs and complementarities among rights at work and other employment objectives, these measures will be incorporated as explanatory variables into cross-sectional and panel data statistical models. Second, the measures will enable one to identify countries that have been able to achieve both greater rights at work as well other employment objectives, relative to these countries' level of economic development. Information on such success stories will be used to motivate country case studies aimed at identifying the causal mechanisms linking fundamental rights at work with other employment objectives as well as with economic development more generally.
Revista Internacional del Trabajo, 2019
Revue internationale du Travail, 2019
Droits réservés © auteur, 2019. Compilation et traduction des articles © Organisation internation... more Droits réservés © auteur, 2019. Compilation et traduction des articles © Organisation internationale du Travail, 2019. * Département des politiques de l'emploi du Bureau international du Travail (BIT); kucera@ ilo.org. ** Labor and Worklife Program (programme sur le monde du travail et la vie profession
International Labour Review, 2018
The paper describes a new method of constructing indicators of freedom of association and collect... more The paper describes a new method of constructing indicators of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights as defined by the International Labour Organization's (ILO) supervisory bodies and based on the coding of violations in nine textual sources, including six from the ILO as well as national legislation. Central to the method are 108 evaluation criteria representing different violations of FACB rights, with weights derived from the Delphi method of expert consultation, yielding overall, in law and in practice Labour Rights (LR) indicators. The method is applied to 185 ILO member states for five years between 2000 and 2015. Global trends in the LR indicators are described and key drivers of these trends are identified by main categories of violations and regions. Both the LR indicators and the number of coded violations suggest a sustained worsening of FACB rights in law over this period across most categories of violations and regions, but no evident global trend in FACB rights in practice. The LR indicators are accompanied by a website housed at the Center for Global Workers' Rights at Penn State University, in which indicators for any given country and year can be readily traced to specific violations of FACB rights and the passages of text on which coding is based.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2002
Globalization, Flexibilization and Working Conditions in Asia and the Pacific
Development Centre Studies, 2009
Hundreds of millions of women work around the world but the types of job they do are often inform... more Hundreds of millions of women work around the world but the types of job they do are often informal, of lower quality, worse paid and more precarious than those performed by men. They face cultural, social and legal obstacles. They are often casualties of economic structuring.
This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of foreign trade expansion on men and wo... more This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of foreign trade expansion on men and women's employment and earnings in Germany and Japan since the early-1970s. The analysis is prompted by trade studies identifying manufacturing industries appearing most vulnerable to foreign trade, industries in which German and Japanese women are disproportionately represented. Evidence is found that foreign trade expansion had a more adverse effect on women's than men's manufacturing employment in Japan and a more equal effect in Germany. In spite of this, demand shifted away from women's employment in Germany after the early-1970s, for both the manufacturing sector as a whole and for manufacturing industries with high female percentages of employment. No such demand shifts occurred in Japan. In the face of these differences in demand and of remarkable similarity in female labor supply, male-female wage differences narrowed in Germany and widened in Japan, for both manufacturing and non-agricultural employees. These diverging patterns of male-female wage differences are explained by the more marginal basis on which Japanese women were integrated into the workforce, reflected in the character of women's part-time and temporary employment as well as union representation. To some extent, the more marginal basis on which Japanese women were integrated into the workforce resulted from the explicit policies of Japanese firms, referred to as "Operation Scale-Down" (genryo keiei). In Germany, too, the character of women's integration into the workforce appears to result in part from explicit policies undertaken by The Federation of German Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerkshaftsbund), the largest German federation of unions.
World Development, 2014
ABSTRACT
Beyond Macroeconomic Stability
World Development, 2012
The paper estimates the effects of the 2008-09 trade contraction on employment in India and South... more The paper estimates the effects of the 2008-09 trade contraction on employment in India and South Africa, using social accounting matrices (SAMs) in a Leontief multiplier model. Employment results are presented at aggregate and industry levels and examine gender and skills biases. The most notable finding is that India and South Africa experienced substantial employment declines as a result of trade contraction with the European Union and the United States. A large share of these declines occurred in the nontradable sector and resulted from income-induced effects, illustrating how a shock originating in the tradable goods sector had strong ripple effects throughout these economies.
World Development, 2004
This paper addresses the hypothesis that higher labor standards-in particular freedom of associat... more This paper addresses the hypothesis that higher labor standards-in particular freedom of association and collective bargaining rights-and higher wages in the formal sector reduce employment in that sector and thereby contribute to the informalization of employment. This issue is explored using panel data on specific categories of formal and informal employment for 14 Latin American countries in the 1990s, evaluating both crosscountry and time-series variation. Our most robust finding is that countries with higher labor standards tend to have higher shares of formal employment and lower shares of informal employment.
International Review of Applied Economics, 2001
ABSTRACT
Revue internationale du Travail, 2008
Cet article traite de deux questions controversées, importantes en termes de politiques: les effe... more Cet article traite de deux questions controversées, importantes en termes de politiques: les effets de la réglementation du travail sur l'emploi informel, et ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler l'emploi informel «volontaire». Les auteurs exposent brièvement les théories sur le sujet et présentent les résultats d'analyses empiriques des effets de la réglementation du travail sur l'emploi informel. Ils concluent par des commentaires sur la pertinence des quatre objectifs du travail décent de l'OIT pour l'emploi informel et le développement économique, en mettant l'accent sur l'organisation des travailleurs de l'économie informelle. * Groupe de cohérence des politiques, Département de l'intégration des politiques et statistiques, BIT.
Revue internationale du Travail, 2002
L'auteur utilise de nouveaux indicateurs des normes du travail - elabores a partir de sources... more L'auteur utilise de nouveaux indicateurs des normes du travail - elabores a partir de sources textuelles et mettant l'accent sur l'application effective des droits - comme variables explicatives des IED dans les annees quatre-vingt-dix. Les normes fondamentales du travail considerees sont celles qui s'appliquent a la liberte syndicale et a la negociation collective, au travail des enfants, aux discriminations professionnelles entre hommes et femmes. Conformement aux resultats d'etudes anterieures, il n'existe aucun element de preuve a l'appui de l'opinion commune selon laquelle les investisseurs etrangers privilegieraient les pays ou les normes du travail sont basses; de fait, tous les parametres statistiquement significatifs iraient meme dans le sens contraire.
Revista Internacional del Trabajo, 2002
En este articulo se emplean los nuevos indicadores nacionales de las normas del trabajo para elab... more En este articulo se emplean los nuevos indicadores nacionales de las normas del trabajo para elaborar un analisis econometrico de las corrientes de inversiones extranjeras directas registradas pais por pais durante el decenio de 1990. Los citados indicadores se han confeccionado codificando la informacion escrita disponible y procurando reflejar la situacion real en cada caso. Abarcan varias normas laborales fundamentales, relativas a la libertad de asociacion y negociacion colectiva, el trabajo infantil, la discriminacion sexual y la desigualdad en el trabajo. Al igual que ocurrio en otros estudios anteriores, se llega a la conclusion de que no hay pruebas solventes que respalden la creencia tan arraigada de que los inversores extranjeros prefieren poner sus capitales en los paises con menos derechos laborales; en realidad, todos los datos estadisticos significativos indican lo contrario.
Revista Internacional del Trabajo, 2011
ABSTRACT