Final answer:
The subject question covers the difficulty labor economists face when integrating subjective factors like effort and natural ability into studies of labor markets, which impact wage determinations alongside measurable considerations like minimum wage laws and safety regulations.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question revolves around identifying factors that are difficult to quantify but play a significant role in determining wages within labor markets. These include attributes such as effort, natural ability, years of experience, and job characteristics. Although they inevitably influence wages, their subjective or qualitative nature makes them challenging to incorporate into economic models and analyses.
While minimum wage laws, safety regulations, technological advancements, and labor union activities are more measurable influences on wages, factors like effort and natural ability are less tangible. Economists often observe that wage adjustments to productivity levels are slow and infrequent, chiefly because individual productivity can be elusive to assess accurately, especially in complex jobs. Changes in productivity can also unexpectedly influence wages and employment, contributing to the natural rate of unemployment over time.
In essence, while some factors influencing wages are clear and regulatory-based, others are characterized by their complexity and the difficulty in measuring them precisely, which complicates the tasks of labor economists in their study of labor markets and wages.