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FALL COLLOQUIA
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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December 5, 2005
INFANT
MORTALITY AFTER WELFARE REFORM
Alexandre Mas
Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy Group
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
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