Anna Josephson is an assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Arizona.
Labor economics is generally concerned with the patterns of income, employment, and wages, viewed through the lens of employers, markets, or employees themselves. At the CSAE 2019 conference on African economic development at Oxford, many sessions on labor, explored this latter category, discussing those looking for work and their circumstances. This, naturally, emphasized human capital and its development. To complement these sessions, I also attended a number of presentations on households, which also had an eye to individuals within a household.
These are four of my takeaways from the three days in Oxford.
- We need to understand how and why people are working
A number of papers dug into this idea, including papers which explored issues matching worker qualifications with firm needs (including work from Eliana Carranza, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Neil Rankin, as well as from Girum Abebe, Stefano Caria, Marcel Fafchamps, Paolo Falco, Simon Franklin, Simon Quinn, and Forhad Shilpi). Other work turned the view and considered this subject from the perspective of children: Patricia Espinoza Revollo and Catherine Porter explored trends in children’s labor, finding that factors including ethnicity, location, and household poverty influence the number of hours spent working, for children at age 8 and age 15.
- How we talk about and understand households is changing
The economics literature has long explored households as unitary (operating as a single unit) or collective (operating as multiple individuals, within a single unit) groups. However, both of these models conceive of a world with little collaboration and abstract away from the fact that people within a household interact among each other. Recent work suggests this is changing. Tanguy Bernard, Cheryl Doss, Melissa Hidrobo, Jessica Hoel, Caitlin Kieran explore household structures and decision making, expanding our understanding of the household decision making process, and thus women’s empowerment and intrahousehold bargaining. Ben D’Exelle and Charlotte Ringdal investigate the cognitive burden of decision making and find that husbands often decide what decisions can be delegated to his wife – rather than her taking on specific decisions within the household. Both of these papers change the typical economic conception of the household and suggest our understanding of households is expanding.
- Networks matter
Although we are all generally familiar with how online social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, function, we are still very much learning how networks in the real world operate and influence us. New work from A. Stefano Caria and Julien Labonne suggests that (real-life) social networks shape our labor markets and the work that we do and, in fact, may further influence wages. The authors find that these conclusions point to the existence of a labor market dividend of social diversity. This is extended further in work from Quynh Hoang, Laure Pasquier-Doumer, and Camille Saint Macary who find that inequalities among ethnic groups are sometimes rooted in the cultural and social distances between these groups.
- Decisions made by one are interconnected
Decisions we make are not always our own. As observed by Louise Fox, in an exploration of youth labor in rural areas: decisions of youth within a household are not necessarily the youth’s choice – but rather of the household more broadly. This idea, that our choices are deeply connected to those of others with whom we interact, was repeated across sessions: in the presentation from Cheryl Doss in talking about women and men within a household, and by Stefano Caria in speaking about understanding labor market participation. The choices made by one can influence the choices of the many.
