David Weil
Biographic Data
| ID | 979281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Weil |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Weil |
| SIGNATURE | WEIL D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1092-6056 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Future of Occupational Safety and Health Protection in a Fissured Economy
The Future of Occupational Safety and Health Protection in a Fissured Economy David Weil PhD Affiliation David Weil is dean and professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Dean David Weil, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, 415 South St, MS 035, Waltham, MA 02453 (e-mail: [email protected]). Reprints can be ordered …
Understanding the Present and Future of Work in the Fissured Workplace Context
The fissuring of business structures fundamentally changes the nature of employment and work in industries and the economy as a whole. This article describes the core elements comprising fissuring, distinguishes them from the narrower concepts of contingent work and alternative work arrangements, and provides an estimate of its size. Work restructuring arising from fissuring alters wage determination inside and outside firms affected by it and pr…
The Global Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade1
We explore the role of natural characteristics in determining the worldwide spatial distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, observed across 240,000 grid cells. A parsimonious set of 24 physical geography attributes explains 47% of worldwide variation and 35% of within-country variation in lights. We divide geographic characteristics into two groups, those primarily important for agriculture and those primarily important …
Malaria and Early African Development: Evidence From the Sickle Cell Trait
We examine the effect of malaria on economic development in Africa over the very long run. Using data on the prevalence of the mutation that causes sickle cell disease, we measure the impact of malaria on mortality in Africa prior to the period in which formal data were collected. Our estimate is that in the more afflicted regions, malaria lowered the probability of surviving to adulthood by about ten percentage points, which is twice the current…
Income Inequality, Wage Determination, and the Fissured Workplace
Economic Growth: International Edition
Why are some countries rich and others poor? David N. Weil, one of the top researchers in economic growth, introduces students to the latest theoretical tools, data, and insights underlying this pivotal question. By showing how empirical data relate to new and old theoretical ideas, Economic Growth provides students with a complete introduction to the discipline and the latest research. With its comprehensive and flexible organization, Economic G…
African Successes, Volume IV: Sustainable Growth
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series l…
African Successes, Volume II: Human Capital
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series l…
The Impact of Franchising on Labor Standards Compliance
Recent studies document pervasive noncompliance with basic labor standards in industries with high concentrations of low-wage workers. The authors examine how franchising, a common form of business organization in low-wage industries, affects compliance. They estimate the effect of franchise ownership on compliance with federal minimum wage and overtime standards in the fast food industry using unique data on Top 20 branded restaurants. Franchise…
The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of out…
The Effect of Fertility Reduction on Economic Growth
We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous reductions in fertility on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for effects that run through schooling, the size and age structure of the population, capital accumulation, parental time input into childrearing, and crowding of fixed natural resources. The model is parameterized using a combination of microeconomic estimates and standard components of quantitative macroeconomic theory. We …
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventionally measured growth and growth predicted from lights. Our estimates differ from official data by up to three percentage points annually. Using lights, empirical analyses of growth need no longer u…
A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth
The quantity of human-generated light visible from outer space reflects variation in both population density and income per capita. In this paper we explore the usefulness of the change in visible light as a measure of GDP growth. We discuss the data, and then present a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, assuming that measurement errors in the two series are uncorrelated. For some countries w…
On the dynamics of the age structure, dependency, and consumption
Post-1500 Population Flows and The Long-Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality
We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators to predict current GDP. The variance of early development history of a…
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Governments employ public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, these policies are freque…
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, …
The Future of the Apparel and Textile Industries: Prospects and Choices for Public and Private Actors
The expectation that Chinese apparel and textile exports will swamp the US and EU retail markets now that international quotas on those products have been eliminated has fueled much of the discussion of the future of these industries. Although imports from China have surged since the elimination of quotas on 1 January 2005, this conventional wisdom masks important choices that remain for public and private policies over time. In particular, two f…
The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies
Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies ar…
The contemporary industrial relations system in construction: Analysis, observations and speculations
The construction industry experienced deep transformations coinciding with its three-decade decline in unionization from the 1970s to the present. Several factors shaping its industrial relations system have changed so fundamentally that it would be extremely difficult to recreate the workplace rules and governance mechanisms (e.g. apprentice systems; hiring halls; multi-employer funds) long associated with the industry. This essay provides a pro…
Public Enforcement/Private Monitoring: Evaluating a New Approach to Regulating the Minimum Wage
This paper examines compliance with federal minimum wage laws in the U.S. apparel industry and analyzes the impact of new methods of intervention designed to improve regulatory performance. Drawing on data from a randomized survey of apparel contractors, the author evaluates the impact of agreements between manufacturers and the government used to monitor contractor behavior as a means of improving compliance outcomes. Several non-regulatory vari…
Building More Effective Unions
Assessing Osha Performance: New Evidence from the Construction Industry
The determinants of OSHA performance can be examined by breaking the regulatory process into three elements relating to enforcement, compliance behavior, and the adequacy of standards in addressing safety outcomes. This paper develops and applies this framework to the U.S. construction industry during the period 1987 to 1993. Enforcement activity among the firms in the sample was substantial, with firms facing a high probability of annual inspect…
Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond
This paper develops a unified growth model that captures the historical evolution of population, technology, and output. It encompasses the endogenous transition between three regimes that have characterized economic development. The economy evolves from a Malthusian regime, where technological progress is slow and population growth prevents any sustained rise in income per capita, into a Post-Malthusian regime, where technological progress rises…
A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth
This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The paper also examines the implications of the Solow model for convergence in standards of living, that is, for whether poor countries tend to grow faster than …
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, …
The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies
Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies ar…
Mortality decline, human capital investment, and economic growth
Public Enforcement/Private Monitoring: Evaluating a New Approach to Regulating the Minimum Wage
This paper examines compliance with federal minimum wage laws in the U.S. apparel industry and analyzes the impact of new methods of intervention designed to improve regulatory performance. Drawing on data from a randomized survey of apparel contractors, the author evaluates the impact of agreements between manufacturers and the government used to monitor contractor behavior as a means of improving compliance outcomes. Several non-regulatory vari…
The Effect of Fertility Reduction on Economic Growth
We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous reductions in fertility on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for effects that run through schooling, the size and age structure of the population, capital accumulation, parental time input into childrearing, and crowding of fixed natural resources. The model is parameterized using a combination of microeconomic estimates and standard components of quantitative macroeconomic theory. We …
The Future of the Apparel and Textile Industries: Prospects and Choices for Public and Private Actors
The expectation that Chinese apparel and textile exports will swamp the US and EU retail markets now that international quotas on those products have been eliminated has fueled much of the discussion of the future of these industries. Although imports from China have surged since the elimination of quotas on 1 January 2005, this conventional wisdom masks important choices that remain for public and private policies over time. In particular, two f…
Assessing Osha Performance: New Evidence from the Construction Industry
The determinants of OSHA performance can be examined by breaking the regulatory process into three elements relating to enforcement, compliance behavior, and the adequacy of standards in addressing safety outcomes. This paper develops and applies this framework to the U.S. construction industry during the period 1987 to 1993. Enforcement activity among the firms in the sample was substantial, with firms facing a high probability of annual inspect…
The contemporary industrial relations system in construction: Analysis, observations and speculations
The construction industry experienced deep transformations coinciding with its three-decade decline in unionization from the 1970s to the present. Several factors shaping its industrial relations system have changed so fundamentally that it would be extremely difficult to recreate the workplace rules and governance mechanisms (e.g. apprentice systems; hiring halls; multi-employer funds) long associated with the industry. This essay provides a pro…
Are Mandated Health and Safety Committees Substitutes for or Supplements to Labor Unions
A subject of recurring debate in both academia and the business world is whether workplace committees and other forms of employee participation are substitutes for or supplements to labor unions. One well-established effect of unionization is increased enforcement of government labor policies such as OSHA; this study investigates the enforcement effects of mandated safety and health committees. A comparison of OSHA inspection records for the two …
Malaria and Early African Development: Evidence From the Sickle Cell Trait
We examine the effect of malaria on economic development in Africa over the very long run. Using data on the prevalence of the mutation that causes sickle cell disease, we measure the impact of malaria on mortality in Africa prior to the period in which formal data were collected. Our estimate is that in the more afflicted regions, malaria lowered the probability of surviving to adulthood by about ten percentage points, which is twice the current…
The Impact of Franchising on Labor Standards Compliance
Recent studies document pervasive noncompliance with basic labor standards in industries with high concentrations of low-wage workers. The authors examine how franchising, a common form of business organization in low-wage industries, affects compliance. They estimate the effect of franchise ownership on compliance with federal minimum wage and overtime standards in the fast food industry using unique data on Top 20 branded restaurants. Franchise…
Understanding the Present and Future of Work in the Fissured Workplace Context
The fissuring of business structures fundamentally changes the nature of employment and work in industries and the economy as a whole. This article describes the core elements comprising fissuring, distinguishes them from the narrower concepts of contingent work and alternative work arrangements, and provides an estimate of its size. Work restructuring arising from fissuring alters wage determination inside and outside firms affected by it and pr…
The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of out…
On the dynamics of the age structure, dependency, and consumption
The Future of Occupational Safety and Health Protection in a Fissured Economy
The Future of Occupational Safety and Health Protection in a Fissured Economy David Weil PhD Affiliation David Weil is dean and professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Dean David Weil, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, 415 South St, MS 035, Waltham, MA 02453 (e-mail: [email protected]). Reprints can be ordered …
Retailing and supply chains in the information age
The baby boom, the baby bust, and the housing market
Macrobytes
Journal Article Macrobytes Get access Macrobytes. ( David Weil) IBM PC or Compatible. 512K memory. Worth Publishers Inc. 33 Irving place, New York 10003. $12.95. Site licence fee S125. Simon Price Simon Price University oj Essex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 102, Issue 415, 1 November 1992, Pages 1586–1587, https://doi.org/10.2307/2234839 Published: 01 November 1992
A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth
This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The paper also examines the implications of the Solow model for convergence in standards of living, that is, for whether poor countries tend to grow faster than …
The Effect of News on Bond Prices: Evidence from the United Kingdom, 1900-1920
We study the relationship of non-quantitative news to bond prices. We select a set of major news events based solely on their significance as judged by historians, and examine the corresponding bond price movements. We find strong evidence that news has some influence on bond price movements, but we find no evidence that news can explain more than a small fraction of those movements
Appropriate Technology and Growth
We model growth and technology transfer in a world where technologies are specific to particular combinations of inputs. Unlike the usual specification, our model does not imply that an improvement in one technique for producing a given good improves all other techniques for producing that good. Technology improvements diffuse slowly across countries, although knowledge spreads instantaneously and there are no technology adoption costs. However, …
A Stitch In Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation of Manufacturing –Lessons From The Apparel and Textile Industries
The textile and fashion industries have forever been at the mercy of rapidly changing styles and fickle customers who want the latest designs while they are still fashionable. The result for these businesses, often forced to forecast sales and deal with suppliers based on volatile demand, is a history of stock shortages, or costly markdowns. But, as the authors disclose in A Stitch in Time, technological advances that began in the 1980s introduce…
From Malthusian Stagnation to Modern Growth
This paper examines the historical evolution of the relationship between population growth, technological change, and the standard of living.It considers several unified models that encompass the transition between three distinct regimes that have characterized the process of economic development: ``The Malthusian Regime," ``The Post-Malthusian Regime," and the ``Modern Growth Regime".We view the unified modeling of this long transition process -…
Managing Tomorrow's High Performance Unions
Preface Basic Union Functions The Union Environment Management for Union Leaders High-Performance Unions--Attributes of Excellence Communication--The Essence of Excellence High-Performance Union Decision-Makers High-Performance Union Planners and Organizers High-Performance Union Directors and Controllers Glossary Bibliography Index
Are Mandated Health and Safety Committees Substitutes for or Supplements to Labor Unions
A subject of recurring debate in both academia and the business world is whether workplace committees and other forms of employee participation are substitutes for or supplements to labor unions. One well-established effect of unionization is increased enforcement of government labor policies such as OSHA; this study investigates the enforcement effects of mandated safety and health committees. A comparison of OSHA inspection records for the two …
Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond
This paper develops a unified growth model that captures the historical evolution of population, technology, and output. It encompasses the endogenous transition between three regimes that have characterized economic development. The economy evolves from a Malthusian regime, where technological progress is slow and population growth prevents any sustained rise in income per capita, into a Post-Malthusian regime, where technological progress rises…
Mortality decline, human capital investment, and economic growth
Retailing and supply chains in the information age
Assessing Osha Performance: New Evidence from the Construction Industry
The determinants of OSHA performance can be examined by breaking the regulatory process into three elements relating to enforcement, compliance behavior, and the adequacy of standards in addressing safety outcomes. This paper develops and applies this framework to the U.S. construction industry during the period 1987 to 1993. Enforcement activity among the firms in the sample was substantial, with firms facing a high probability of annual inspect…
Building More Effective Unions
The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies
Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies ar…
The contemporary industrial relations system in construction: Analysis, observations and speculations
The construction industry experienced deep transformations coinciding with its three-decade decline in unionization from the 1970s to the present. Several factors shaping its industrial relations system have changed so fundamentally that it would be extremely difficult to recreate the workplace rules and governance mechanisms (e.g. apprentice systems; hiring halls; multi-employer funds) long associated with the industry. This essay provides a pro…
Public Enforcement/Private Monitoring: Evaluating a New Approach to Regulating the Minimum Wage
This paper examines compliance with federal minimum wage laws in the U.S. apparel industry and analyzes the impact of new methods of intervention designed to improve regulatory performance. Drawing on data from a randomized survey of apparel contractors, the author evaluates the impact of agreements between manufacturers and the government used to monitor contractor behavior as a means of improving compliance outcomes. Several non-regulatory vari…
The Future of the Apparel and Textile Industries: Prospects and Choices for Public and Private Actors
The expectation that Chinese apparel and textile exports will swamp the US and EU retail markets now that international quotas on those products have been eliminated has fueled much of the discussion of the future of these industries. Although imports from China have surged since the elimination of quotas on 1 January 2005, this conventional wisdom masks important choices that remain for public and private policies over time. In particular, two f…
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Governments employ public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, these policies are freque…
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, …
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Post-1500 Population Flows and The Long-Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality
We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators to predict current GDP. The variance of early development history of a…
A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth
The quantity of human-generated light visible from outer space reflects variation in both population density and income per capita. In this paper we explore the usefulness of the change in visible light as a measure of GDP growth. We discuss the data, and then present a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, assuming that measurement errors in the two series are uncorrelated. For some countries w…
On the dynamics of the age structure, dependency, and consumption
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventionally measured growth and growth predicted from lights. Our estimates differ from official data by up to three percentage points annually. Using lights, empirical analyses of growth need no longer u…
Economics (27 works) · Business (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Labour economics (9 works) · Population (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Demographic economics (7 works) · Demography (7 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (7 works) · Economic growth (6 works)