Economics Working Paper Archive
Notification of new paper submissions
Sun, Oct 25, 1998
Titles of Papers appearing below
Unemployment, Inflation, and the Job Structure
Technology and the Demand for Skills
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ \\ Paper: ewp-mac/9810003 URL: http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/mac/papers/9810/9810003.abs From: kuchi at levy.org Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 09:22:27 -0500
Title: Unemployment, Inflation, and the Job Structure Author: A. James K. Galbraith (The Jerome Levy Economics Institute) Contact: kuchi at levy.org Comments: Type of Document - Acrobat PDF; prepared on IBM PC; to print on PostScript; pages: 31; figures: included Keywords: JEL: EWPA-references: Report-no: WP 154 \\ In this working paper James K. Galbraith, professor of economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, rejects the analytical construct within which many economists currently operate, that is, the construct in which in the extreme macroeconomic behavior is identical to the behavior reflected in microeconomic demand and supply curves. He rejects it on the theoretical and practical grounds that microeconomic categories (supply, demand, price, and quantities) "have little bearing on important policy questions." The markets that have a bearing on policy are either asset markets (for which the rules are dramatically different from those for flow markets) or are not really markets at all but, rather, a set of deeply structural social relations. According to such thinking, microeconomic issues become secondary in the policy arena and macroeconomic policy tools—spending, taxes, incomes policies, and interest rates—take the fore. \\ (ewp-mac/9810003 , 0kb + 1739kb) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ \\ Paper: ewp-mac/9810004 URL: http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/mac/papers/9810/9810004.abs From: kuchi at levy.org Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 09:41:59 -0500
Title: Technology and the Demand for Skills Author: A. Edward N. Wolff (The Jerome Levy Economics Institute) Contact: kuchi at levy.org Comments: Type of Document - Acrobat PDF; prepared on IBM PC; to print on PostScript; pages: 44; figures: included Keywords: JEL: EWPA-references: Report-no: WP 153 \\ The U.S. economy has undergone major structural changes since 1950. First, there has been a gradual shift of employment from goods-producing industries to service-providing industries. Second, since the 1970s at least, the availability of new information-based technologies has made possible substantial adjustments in operations and organizational re- structuring of firms. This has been accelerated, in part, by sharply increasing competition from imports. Evidence from industry level case studies indicate that this restructuring is likely to have important consequences for the level and composition of skills required in the U.S. workplace (see Adler, 1986, and Zuboff, 1988). The direction and extent of changes in skill levels over the longer run has, however, been more uncertain, with case studies often finding a deskilling of the content of production jobs and aggregate studies finding little change or at most a gradual upgrading in overall occupation mix (see Spenner, 1988, for a survey of this literature). These trends have considerable policy significance since they help determine education and training needs. One important result of this paper, for example, is that a growing mismatch has been occurring between skill requirements of the workplace and educational attainment of the workforce, with the latter increasing much more rapidly than the former. \\ (ewp-mac/9810004 , 0kb + 1555kb) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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