Family Values and the Regulation of Labor

By A. Alesina, Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, Paola Giuliano. Social Science Research Network, 2015

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To be efficient, flexible labor markets require geographically mobile workers. Otherwise firms can take advantage of workers' immobility and extract rents at their expense. In cultures with strong family ties, moving away from home is costly. Thus, to limit the rents of firms and to avoid moving, individuals with strong family ties rationally choose regulated labor markets, even though regulation generates higher unemployment and lower incomes. Empirically, we find that individuals who inherit stronger family ties are less mobile, have lower wages and higher unemployment, and support more stringent labor market regulations. We find a positive association between labor market rigidities at the beginning of the 21st century and family values prevailing before World War II, and between family structures in the Middle Ages and current desire for labor market regulation. Both results suggest that labor market regulations have deep cultural roots.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a6edb79f2a802a8ef0f4707e760907b01a9b1d9

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Citations in the corpus

Is Short-Time Work a Good Method to Keep Unemployment Down? (2011, background): “For instance, it might be true that countries in which workers have a strong aversion for geographic mobility, because they have strong family ties (Alesina et al., 2010) or strong local ties (Janiack and Wasmer, 2010), favor adjustments of hours of work and income at the expense of layoffs.”
Entrepreneurship and Market Size - The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy (2010, background): “Besides cultural reasons (see, for instance, Alesina et al., 2010), the strong family ties in Italy are due to the lack of a good welfare system, leaving parental care largely to offspring and child care to grandparents.”
Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices (2021, background): “…the effects of gender-related cultural traditions (Fernández, 2007; Fernández, 2011; Fernández and Fogli, 2009; Tertilt, 2006; Alesina et al., 2013; Giuliano, 2014; Alesina et al., 2015; Corno et al., 2016; Corno et al., 2015; Gneezy et al., 2009; Becker, 2018; Jayachandran and Pande, 2017).”
Politico-Economic Regimes and Attitudes: Female Workers under State Socialism (2019, methodology): “3See Aghion, Algan, and Cahuc (2011), Michau (2013), and Alesina et al. (2015) for theoretical analyses of the two-way causality between policies and cultural attitudes.”
Labor Market Regulations: What Do We Know About Their Impacts in Developing Countries? (2014, unknown): “The endogeneity problem stems from the fact that institutions themselves are not exogenous variables but reﬂect the legal and cultural fabric of the societies in which they have evolved (Botero et al. 2004; Algan and Cahuc 2006; Aghion et al. 2010; Alesina et al. 2010).”
Boarding a Sinking Ship? An Investigation of Job Applications to Distressed Firms (2016, background): “When a prospective employer’s financial future is uncertain, the desirability of open positions may be particularly weak for workers who have to relocate for the job; strong local familial and social ties can act as geography-specific investments that reduce worker mobility (Alesina et al. 2013).”
Culture and Institutions (2015, unknown): “Two of the papers (Aghion, Algan, and Cahuc 2011; Alesina et al. 2015) empirically adopt an identification strategy in which cultural traits are measured in the past as a result of cultural transmission across generations.”
Global Evidence on Economic Preferences* (2018, unknown): “Another related literature has investigated the role of culture or geography in shaping economic behavior, but focusing on variables such as female labor force participation, fertility, individualism, and futureorientation (Giuliano, 2007; Fernández and Fogli, 2009; Gorodnichenko and Roland, 2011; A”