Assembling Women. The Feminization of Global Manufacturing – Edited by Teri L. Caraway
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00728_3.x |
| Author | Katherine Brickell |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
BOOK REVIEWS
Extended review: Labour economics: a personalised tour
Recent Developments in Labor Economics edited by John T. Addison. An Elgar
Reference Collection, The International Library of Critical Writings in Econom-
ics, no. 207, Cheltenham, UK, 2007, 3 volume set, 1912 pp., ISBN 978 1 84064
925 3, £450.00.
This is a very substantial compendium, in three volumes comprising a total of 70
papers featuring 82 authors. It comes at the very substantial price of £450 for the set.
It follows the format now well established by the publisher, Edward Elgar; with this
new set, their International Library of Critical Writings in Economics reaches number
207, with many further volumes in preparation. The publisher clearly must perceive
them as serving a profitable purpose. This is hardly surprising as the costs of prepa-
ration will be slight — essentially the editorial work, plus requesting copyright
clearance, as all the papers are replicated exactly from their original source. Largely
without exception, the papers have appeared in leading economics journals within the
last 20 years. Few potential readers will not have access to these in electronic archive.
The justification for library (or individual) purchase of the set must therefore be in the
insights gained from the editor’s selection and its structuring, along with the editorial
commentary on these.
The declared purpose is ‘to provide the reader with a “feel” for many of the more
important recent contributions in labor economics, as well as convey the excitement
of the modern labor literature’. This is an objective which any teacher on an advanced
course would certainly share. With labour now firmly established as one of the most
active and densely populated fields of economics, it is a particularly ambitious objec-
tive. ‘Recent’ contributions are being interpreted as from the last 20 years (the only
outlier is the seminal paper from 1984 by Lazear and Moore on the rising tenure-
earnings profile as an incentive device). This precludes contributions from the field’s
various Nobel Laureates including George Akerlof, Gary Becker, Michael Spence
and George Stigler. Arguably, their intellectual contributions are appropriately rep-
resented through the inclusion of work building on their insights, notably the com-
plete section on human capital. Nobel prizes always excite, but it is left to the reader
to speculate which, if any, of the selected contributions will come to be seen as having
definitively shaped the content or methods of labour economics.
More generally, the balance of authors across the selected papers is curious. The
leading contributor to Recent Developments in Labor Economics, by a substantial
margin, is John Addison, the editor, with nine included papers; the next most fre-
quent, authoring five papers, are Pedro Portugal (three co-authored with Addison)
and Barry Hirsch; followed by Dan Hamermesh and Steve Machin with four each;
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00728.x
47:2 June 2009 0007–1080 pp. 444–466
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
and David Card, Alan Krueger and Ed Lazear with three. Many who have contrib-
uted much to the intellectual excitement of the field in recent years — Orley Ashen-
felter, Richard Freeman, James Heckman, Derek Neal, Steve Nickell — each have a
single entry only. The Heckman paper included is his six-page ‘What have we learned
about Labor Supply in the Past Twenty Years?’; this is a very useful paper but hardly
an adequate gauge of his contributions to labour economics.
The potential usefulness of the books rides on the editor’s selection and the quality
of the accompanying Introduction. Disappointingly, the Introduction gives no
general perspective in support of either the sectionalization adopted or the criteria for
the selection of the included papers, before launching into a paper-by-paper commen-
tary. Everyone who works in the field will have their own approach to organizing and
sequencing the literature, and selecting key contributions; discussion of the principles
guiding the editor’s own approach would have been an interesting contribution. The
broad themes of the three volumes can be roughly summarized as ‘core topics’, wage
outcomes and institutional dimensions. This structuring is largely conventional.
Within these, many topics of individual sections come naturally — labour demand,
labour supply, human capital, unions, minimum wages, and discrimination — but the
structuring and interrelationship are unusual in several respects.
Volume I comprises four sections, on labour demand, minimum wages, labour
supply and human capital. Three of these — demand, supply, human capital — are
obvious core themes, but the appearance of minimum wages at this juncture will strike
many readers as somewhat odd, given that Volume III largely focuses on institutions,
labour market regulation and unions; implicitly, and in the selection of papers,
minimum wages are being treated as an addendum to labour demand, a rather
restricted perspective on an intervention which also impacts on labour supply/
participation and the wage structure more widely. Labour demand is a natural start-
ing point and the selected papers here represent what most practitioners will see as key
recent developments — identification of labour demand through exogenous shocks
(Angrist), the extensive and intensive employment/hours margins through overtime
premia and hours reductions (Hamermesh and Trejo; Hunt) and the specification of
adjustment costs (Hamermesh, Rota). These papers are all well known and widely
cited, with the possible exception of Rota, which well deserves the attention drawn to
it. Most of us would then follow (or even precede) this by a review of developments in
the specification of labour supply. The nine papers selected give a comprehensive
representation of the state of the art in regard to income-leisure choices, time use,
intra-household decision making, and life-cycle aspects of consumption and labour
supply. Human capital is the natural next topic and the six included papers represent
the human capital versus signalling debate on the return to education (Bedard),
controlling for unobservable ability (Blackburn and Neumark with test scores; Ash-
enfelter and Rouse with identical twins), allowing for nonlinearity in the return to
years of schooling (Belzil and Hansen), the intergenerational transmission of educa-
tional attainment (Currie and Moretti) rounded out by a brief gesture towards the
extensive literature on education and growth (Kreuger and Lindahl). Surprising
omissions in this section are the masterly critique by Card (2001) on estimating the
returns to education, and the influential paper of Angrist and Krueger (1991) using
variations in the duration of compulsory schooling due to birth date as an identifi-
cation strategy (or even their more recent overview paper of 2001).
The second volume moves on to four dimensions of wage outcomes: compensating
differentials, the returns to experience and tenure, discrimination, and job search and
unemployment. This reviewer would have preferred a structure with the returns to
Book Reviews 445
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009.
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