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The Impact of Non-Wage Benefits on Job Quality and Labor Market Outcomes in the Developing World:
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Policies designed to protect female workers have controversial effects on labor market outcomes, both in theory and in practice. The analysis uses repeated cross-sections of household survey data for Taiwan to estimate the impact of working-hours restrictions and maternity benefits. Differential coverage across industrial sectors and demographic groups provides a unique opportunity to identify the impact of both policies in a single natural experiment framework. While working-hours restrictions have a negative impact on women's actual hours worked and employment, maternity benefits increase these labor inputs, implying that women value the opportunity to return to jobs they might otherwise have to leave.
Ecuadorian labor costs are said to be high because of the existence of many mandated benefits. Using the 1994 Living Standards Measurement Survey, the authors show that the effect of these benefits is actually mitigated by a reduction of base earnings, that is, of the foundation on which they are paid. The reduction is larger in the private than in the public sector and is negligible for unionized workers. The authors also show that, in spite of mandated benefits, interindustry wage differentials are comparable to those of Bolivia, a country characterized by 'flexible' labor markets but otherwise similar to Ecuador. Copyright 1997 by University of Chicago Press.
I consider the labor-market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group. The efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group-specific wages. I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age. I find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group. Correspondingly, I find little effect on total labor input for that group.
This paper compares the labor market implications of the health insurance system in Spain and in the United States. While most health insurance is privately provided to workers (by employers) in the United States, Spanish workers obtain health insurance coverage from the public social security system. The Spanish system is financed by a payroll (social security) tax shared between employers and employees. There is clear evidence, however, of widespread non-compliance with the social security tax. This paper empirically compares the incidence of health insurance coverage among U.S. workers to the pattern of compliance with the social security tax among Spanish workers. The main finding of this paper is that these two patterns are very similar. They both depend on the same supply and demand factors, which is consistent with basic economic models of private provision of benefits and of tax compliance. However, one important difference between the two systems is that in Spain, unlike the United States, essentially all heads of household work in the covered sector and thus have a full access to public health care for themselves and for their dependents.