Contracts,the Spot Market Wage and Unemployment Benefits

This paper presents a model of the labour market with a contract and a spot market sector. Contracts are binding and enforceable, but unemployed contract workers are free to work in the spot market. The contracting wage is shown to be constant across states. A non‐trivial result shows that the spot market wage is increasing with product price. An increase in product price has an ambiguous effect on contract employment. An increase in unemployment benefits increases the contracting sector wage whilst stabilizing the spot market wage, and may have ambiguous effects on unemployment.     

ASSET PRICES,OUTPUT AND MONETARY POLICY IN A SMALL OPEN ECONOMY

We formulate a macro‐model of a small open economy in order to investigate the relative performance of rules that respond to asset prices and those that do not. Our model consists of three asset prices: the stock price, the long‐term interest rate and the exchange rate. These asset prices interact with nominal wage and price Phillips curves, a law of motion for the labour share, a dynamic IS curve that describes output adjustment and a Taylor‐type interest rate policy rule. Estimations of the model show that policy rules that respond to asset price movements dominate rules that do not.     

Macroeconomic stability in a flexible labor market

This paper examines the relationship between labor market flexibility and macroeconomic stability from a post‐Keynesian perspective. Considering two aspects of labor market flexibility, employment flexibility and real wage flexibility, I adopt the flex–output model to discuss employment flexibility and extend it by incorporating real wage dynamics induced from a wage–price Phillips curve to discuss real wage flexibility. Simulation of the model suggests that employment flexibility possibly increases instability of an economy whereas real wage flexibility reduces it.     

Norm Bounds and A Homographic Approximation for the Wage–Profit Curve

This paper provides lower and upper norm bounds for the wage–profit curve in linear single‐product systems. Thus, it also constructs an algebraically simple (i.e. homographic) and empirically powerful approximation to that curve. The results finally suggest that actual economies tend to behave as ‘corn‐tractor’ systems with respect to the shape of the wage–profit curve and, at the same time, behave as three‐industry systems with respect to the shape of the production price–profit rate curves.     

论如何同时降低通货膨胀率和失业率——菲利普斯曲线的微观经济基础及其移动

菲利普斯曲线有其微观经济基础。菲利普斯曲线描述的货币工资变化率与失业率之间的关系取决于失业工人随机寻找工作的经济决策、在岗工人与公司之间的博弈行为、工会势力与公司讨价还价力量的均衡、公司调整产品价格和工人工资的决定、劳动供给曲线的斜率等。以此为理论基础,通过对工作报价、最低工资预期水平、搜寻工作的效率、工会势力和公司势力、辞职率与临时解雇率、生产技术效率、劳动周转率、劳动市场分隔及其不平衡等因素进行政策性调节,可以使菲利普斯曲线整体性向左下方移动,从而同时降低通货膨胀率与失业率。     

HIRING STANDARDS AND LABOUR MARKET CLEARING

Consider a labour market with heterogeneous workers. When recruiting workers, firms set a hiring standard and make a wage offer. A more demanding hiring standard necessitates a better wage offer in order to attract enough qualified applicants. As a result, an efficiency wage effect is obtained. An equilibrium emerges which does not clear the labour market. The wage level depends on structural characteristics of labour supply, such as heterogeneity and mobility of the workers, but—in contrast to other efficiency‐wage models—not on the level of unemployment and is, thus, compatible with increasing unemployment as observed, e.g. in Germany.     

A Structuralist Inflation Curve

This paper presents a structuralist model of inflation and applies it to the US economy. The model uses a mark‐up rule to specify inflation as a function of income distribution and capacity utilization, as usual in structuralist macroeconomics, but it also includes inflation expectations, the government's inflation target and cost pressures from non‐labor inputs as explaining variables. The model shows how inflation and income distribution, measured by the wage share of income, are connected through an inflation curve in the long run.     

Long‐term Futures Curves and Seasonal Structures of Wheat in the European Union and the United States

A two‐factor affine theoretical model is used to estimate the long‐term futures curves for wheat in the European Union and the United States, as represented by the Euronext and CME markets, respectively. The CME futures curve exhibits a long‐term equilibrium; in contrast, the Euronext futures curve does not show a tendency for futures to revert to a long‐term equilibrium value. The estimated seasonality is relatively similar for both markets. However, the seasonal minimum and maximum points in the futures curve occur one to two months later for Euronext compared to the CME. More importantly, the futures curve for Euronext has a much more marked seasonality than the CME futures curve. Credible intervals of the futures curves are also estimated. The width clearly increases for longer maturities, but it does so much faster for Euronext than for the CME. For long‐maturity futures, variability in the parameter estimates (as opposed to the residual errors) accounts for most of the width of the credible intervals, especially for Euronext. The proposed model can be used to price long‐term futures options, long‐term price insurance, and long‐term swaps, among other applications. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 33:1118–1142, 2013     

THE DIAMOND OF MACROECONOMIC EQUILIBRIA AND NON‐INFLATIONARY EXPANSION

This paper combines the microeconomic foundations of earlier models of a range of equilibrium rates of employment to generate a model with a diamond of equilibria. Analysis of the diamond model shows that for a depressed economy an expansionary aggregate demand policy can, without violating rational expectations of inflation, generate a central proposition of Keynesian economics—a non‐inflationary expansion (NIE), that is a permanent increase in employment without increasing inflation. The microeconomic foundations of the model draw on ideas of customer markets, reference dependence and loss aversion. It is also shown that the possibility of achieving an NIE is enhanced if a macro price policy, such as incomes policy or inflation targeting, accompanies the expansion in aggregate demand.     

Structural Reforms and Labour‐market Outcomes: International Panel‐data Evidence

This paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro‐level labour‐market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, the average wage index, and overall and female employment levels and labour force participation rates. Together, these outcome variables capture the overall health of the labour market and the aggregate welfare of workers. Yet, to our knowledge, there seems to be no other comprehensive empirical investigation in the existing literature of the impact of structural reforms at the cross‐country macro‐level on labour‐market outcomes other than the unemployment rate. After documenting the average trends across countries in the labour‐market outcomes up to 10 years on either side of each country's structural reform year, we run fixed‐effects ordinary least squares and instrumental variables regressions to account for the likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labour‐market outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labour. Redistributive effects in favour of workers, along the lines of the Stolper‐Samuelson effect, may be at work.     

THE LABOUR MARKET AND TECHNICAL CHANGE IN ENDOGENOUS CYCLES

The paper examines how a macro model, where there is an endogenous technical progress and strong interdependence between real and monetary aspects in both the labour and capital markets, can generate endogenous business cycles. This approach helps to understand the ambiguity of the NAIRU, the nature of the Phillips curve and the impact of labour productivity changes on the curve itself. Finally, the presence of expectation functions based upon a Markov‐switching time series process fosters endogenous dynamics and contributes to make asymmetries an important feature of the cycles.     

A Simple Post-Crisis EMU Phillips Curve — Implications for Monetary Policy

The persistently low wage and price growth in the EMU after the Great Recession of 2009 led some economic observers to conclude that the Phillips Curve has broken down and that the ECB should therefore reconsider its infl ation target. This study makes use of the considerable cross-country and cross-time heterogeneity in terms of infl ation and capacity utilisation of EMU member states after the Great Recession to investigate whether these claims are corroborated by empirical evidence. The results point to the conclusion that the Phillips Curve is alive and well in the EMU and centred at or only slightly below the ECB’s inflation target. Therefore, a readjustment of the infl ation target seems unjustified. Furthermore, as the ECB can expect inflation to return to its target, it possibly can accelerate tapering its unconventional monetary policy measures as the recovery continues.     

MARKETS FOR INFLATION‐INDEXED BONDS AS MECHANISMS FOR EFFICIENT MONETARY POLICY

We consider a continuous‐time framework featuring a central bank, private agents, and a financial market. The central bank's objective is to maximize a functional, which measures the classical trade‐off between output and inflation over time plus income from the sales of inflation‐indexed bonds minus payments for the liabilities that the inflation‐indexed bonds produce at maturity. Private agents are assumed to have adaptive expectations. The financial market is modeled in continuous‐time Black–Scholes–Merton style and financial agents are averse against inflation risk, attaching an inflation risk premium to nominal bonds. Following this route, we explain demand for inflation‐indexed securities on the financial market from a no‐arbitrage assumption and derive pricing formulas for inflation‐linked bonds and calls, which lead to a supply‐demand equilibrium. Furthermore, we study the consequences that the sales of inflation‐indexed securities have on the observed inflation rate and price level. Similar to the study of Walsh, we find that the inflationary bias is significantly reduced, and hence that markets for inflation‐indexed bonds provide a mechanism to reduce inflationary bias and increase central bank's credibility.     

GROWTH,COMMODITY PRICES,INFLATION AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME

A primary commodity price boom is underway. Given the role of internationally traded primary commodities as inputs into the productive process in the industrialized world, an important question arises: namely what effects will this price‐boom exert upon wage and price inflation in industrialized countries? In order to address this question, we specify and estimate a system of equations in which the key dependent variables are world commodity prices, the domestic inflation rate for finished goods and the rate of domestic industrial wage inflation. This model is estimated against data for each of three major industrialized countries: Japan, the UK and the USA and the implications of the results thus obtained are explored.     

WAGE FLEXIBILITY AND THE STABILITY ARGUMENTS OF THE NEOCLASSICAL SYNTHESIS

This note fills a lacuna in the neoclassical synthesis and completes its dynamic disequilibrium processes by including adjustments of the money wage rate in response to excess demand on the labour market. A Walrasian and a Keynesian variant are distinguished. While in the first case local asymptotic stability is always ensured, the equilibrium is unstable in the Keynesian case if money wages are too flexible relative to the adjustment speeds on the product and money markets.     

The contribution of a satellite market to price discovery: Evidence from the Singapore exchange

The Singapore Exchange (SGX), a small satellite market, successfully competes with a large home market, the Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE), in trading the Nikkei 225 futures index. In this paper, we investigate the contribution of the SGX to price discovery and shed light on the reasons for its continued success. Evidence is provided from information revelation and price discovery of three competing but informationally linked markets of the Nikkei 225 index—domestic spot (Tokyo Stock Exchange), domestic futures (OSE), and foreign futures (SGX), which represents the satellite market. Overall, the futures market contributes 77% to price discovery, with the satellite market contributing 42% of the futures and 33% of the total price discovery. These figures, surprisingly, far exceed the satellite market's share of trading volume. Support is provided for the extended trading hours on the SGX for three of the four non‐overlapping trading sub‐periods. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 24:981–1004, 2004     

Geographical Location of Foreign Direct Investment and Wage Inequality in China

This paper examines the relationships between distance and the transportation costs of international trade on the location‐specific effects of foreign direct invest‐ment and provincial per capita income in China. Applying the economic geography model proposed by Redding and Venables (2004), it traces the increasing wage inequality among the coastal and inland provinces by focusing on the distance of foreign‐owned firms from access to international markets and to suppliers of intermediate inputs. First, a gravity‐type equation is used to construct the ‘market access’ and ‘supplier access’ variables. Then, the effect of market and supplier access on provincial wage rates is estimated. The results indicate that distance does affect international trade and geography explains roughly one‐third of the wage differential. Greater market access increases the provincial wage gap, while larger supplier access increases the wage difference in trade destined for the foreign market but decreases the wage difference in trade targeted for the domestic market. Similar findings also result from applying the estimations to two local firm types: state‐owned enterprises and collective‐owned enterprises.     

Trade,Technical Change,and Labour Market Adjustment

This paper empirically examines three possible reasons for the high and rising unemployment of low‐skilled employees in Germany: (i) an upsurge in inter‐industry trade, (ii) a skill‐biased technical change, and (iii) a failure of labour market adjustment. The empirical analyses indicate that an exogenous wage‐setting process as well as a bundle of factors, including a skill‐biased technical and structural change, have contributed to the decline in relative demand for low‐skilled employees in Germany. Thus, economic policy in Germany should focus on improving the employability of workers in the lower segment of the labour market and on raising the adjustment flexibility, above all the flexibility of the wage structure, of the German labour market.     

PRICE‐ADMISSIBILITY CONDITIONS FOR ARBITRAGE‐FREE LINEAR PRICE FUNCTION MODELS FOR THE TERM STRUCTURE OF INTEREST RATES

To assure price admissibility—that all bond prices, yields, and forward rates remain positive—we show how to control the state variables within the class of arbitrage‐free linear price function models for the evolution of interest rate yield curves over time. Price admissibility is necessary to preclude cash‐and‐carry arbitrage, a market imperfection that can happen even with a risk‐neutral diffusion process and positive bond prices. We assure price admissibility by (i) defining the state variables to be scaled partial sums of weighted coefficients of the exponential terms in the bond pricing function, (ii) identifying a simplex within which these state variables remain price admissible, and (iii) choosing a general functional form for the diffusion that selectively diminishes near the simplex boundary. By assuring that prices, yields, and forward rates remain positive with tractable diffusions for the physical and risk‐neutral measures, an obstacle is removed from the wider acceptance of interest rate methods that are linear in prices.     

Trade liberalization and the allocation of labor between households and markets in a poor country

We consider the relationship between relative price changes and the allocation of labor between households and the formal wage labor market in the context of Vietnam's liberalization of its rice trade in the 1990s. Many individuals in poor economies work within their own household rather than in formal labor markets. We find that larger rice price increases in a community are associated with declines in hours adults devote to work within the household and increases in time spent in the wage labor market. We also observe increased specialization in household economic activities accompanying these shifts in hours towards wage work. Our results are consistent with the idea that a growth in the extent of the market shifts production and labor from households to markets during development, thereby inducing gains from specialization. Thus, the reallocation of labor between households and markets in response to a trade liberalization might be an important component in understanding the link between trade and growth in very poor economies, currently the focus of the Doha WTO negotiation round.