Male–female wage discrimination in Chinese industryInvestigation using firm‐level data1

We use firm‐level data to analyze male–female wage discrimination in China's industry. We find that there is a significant negative association between wages and the share of female workers in a firm's labour force. However, we also find that the marginal productivity of female workers is significantly lower than that of male workers. Comparing wage gaps and productivity gaps between men and women, we notice an intriguing contrast between state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms. The wage gap is smaller than the productivity gap in SOEs, while the converse is true for private firms. These results suggest that women in the state sector receive wage premiums, whereas women in the private sector face wage discrimination.     

Wage and price differences,technology gap and labor flow dynamics

The relationship between wage difference and relative employment is a very important issue in the field of economic structural change. An M-sector economic growth model is constructed in this paper to investigate the relationship between wage difference, price difference, technology gap, relative employment and sectoral dynamic change from the perspective of technologies. Labor flow is regarded as a decision-making behavior to maximize the benefits of economic agents. The benefits of labor flow mainly come from sectoral wage difference, and the costs of labor flow mainly come from the social resource expenditure during labor flow process. Our model illustrates that: (i) the relative employment is positively correlated with the real wage difference and technology gap; (ii) the sectoral dynamic changes coexist with the aggregate economic growth; (iii) increases in technology gap, and price and wage differences will stimulate labor migration, exacerbate the unbalanced growth of sectoral economies, and lead to faster and more effective aggregate economic growth.     

中国劳动市场一体化测度与利益评估

笔者通过比较劳动生产率和劳动边际产出的地区差异与产业差异,对我国劳动市场一体化程度及其变化趋势进行测度。研究发现改革以来,劳动市场地区分割已明显减弱,但产业分割仍然严重;工业部门存在较高技术门槛和体制门槛,传统服务业是农业劳动力转移的主要渠道。政策模拟显示,劳动市场一体化具有巨大的经济社会利益。     

Holdup and wage dispersion

This paper provides a search-theoretic model of the labor market, in which large firms hire workers sequentially and wages are bargained with full commitment. The firm's optimal vacancy-posting strategy trades off the fact that a larger size decreases marginal benefits from subsequent jobs, but avoids higher future recruiting costs attributable to the holdup effect. The holdup effect is dominant if the production function is not sufficiently concave, resulting in firm-size wage premium. The equilibrium features wage dispersion both within and between firms. When calibrated to the U.S. data, the extended model accounts for 67%–84% of the observed wage dispersion, among which 13%–27% is attributed to the holdup effect.     

发展中国家劳工标准的演进路径——对“社会倾销”指责的一种经济学解析

中国等发展中国家经常因低劳工标准而被指责为“社会倾销” ,而发展中国家则反对将劳工标准问题与贸易挂钩。本文提供了一种解释发展中国家劳工标准演进的框架。本文认为发展中国家的劳工标准必然经历一个逐步提升的过程 ,在此过程中市场机制对于劳工标准的改变有重要作用。发展中国家的劳动力由于劳动边际生产率低而向国外流动 ,同时外国资本也进入发展中国家 ,在此过程中劳工标准得到提高 ,而并不需要国际组织的外力干预。这个分析具有重要的政策含义。     

Reciprocity and matching frictions

The ability of search and matching models to replicate stylized facts—such as volatilities and correlations—has been a center of attraction over the last couple of years. This paper introduces the Akerlof (Q J Econ 97:543–569, 1982) fair wage approach into an endogenous separation search and matching model. Within a RBC general equilibrium context, we show that the efficiency wage model outperforms its benchmark Nash bargaining pendant. In particular, the model generates the empirically observed volatilities in response to a productivity shock and replicates a strong Beveridge curve. Furthermore, we derive the Solow condition in a search environment and discuss the interactions of search and efficiency wage frictions. We show that search frictions create a wedge between the optimal wage/effort solution in the search and the competitive equilibrium. The efficiency wage consideration adds an additional margin to the firm's decision problem. As effort varies over the cycle, it changes the firm's optimal response to exogenous disturbances and amplifies the response to shocks.     

Financial intermediation,consumption dynamics,and business cycles

The recent financial crisis highlighted the need to deepen our understanding of the impact of the financial intermediation sector on the real economy. We examine the quantitative implications of financial intermediation and firm's financing frictions in explaining the observed cyclical properties of both real and financial variables. We find that a modified version of the financial intermediation framework of Gertler and Karadi (2011) augmented with financing frictions in production does a good job in matching the unconditional moments of financial fluctuations without compromising key real co-movements. Our results are relevant for macro-prudential policy analysis as they underscore the importance of carefully identifying the sources of aggregate fluctuations in models in which financial intermediaries and financial frictions play a non-trivial role.     

Hours risk and wage risk: repercussions over the life cycle*

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain 31 percent of total risk, permanent hours shocks 21 percent. Progressive taxation attenuates cross-sectional earnings risk, but its life-cycle insurance impact is much smaller. At the mean, a one-standard-deviation hours shock raises lifetime income by 11 percent, a wage shock by 13 percent.     

Sex Differentials in Earnings in the South Korean Labor Market

We examine gender differences in earnings among South Korean workers in 1988 – the year the South Korean National Assembly enacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Using the "88 Occupational Wage Bargaining Survey on the Actual Condition," we calculate women's mean earnings as a percentage of men's mean earnings by major industrial category and educational attainment. We find a larger wage gap among clerical and sales workers than production workers or professionals. Generally, the more education a woman has, the smaller the gap between her earnings and those of her male counterparts. Women with a middle-school education have a mean income 53.5 percent that of comparable men, while the female-to-male wage ratio among college graduates is 76.1 percent. We analyze wage differences separately for women and men. Following Ronald Oaxaca's (1973) work, we decompose male–female wage differentials. We also calculate a discrimination coefficient. Our work shows that, all else equal, men earn from 33.6 percent to 46.9 percent more than women with comparable skills. We attribute the difference to gender discrimination.     

NON-WAGE LABOUR COSTS, POLICY UNCERTAINTY AND LABOUR DEMAND – A THEORETICAL ASSESSMENT

Labour costs in various European countries have reached a record high in recent years. The topic of non‐wage labour costs is therefore increasingly being discussed among and between the political parties because non‐wage labour costs are likely to have major negative effects on employment. We follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the value to a firm of waiting to adjust labour when the firm's wage and non‐wage costs are stochastic and adjustment costs are sunk. Simulation exercises show that the interaction between hiring and firing costs, non‐wage labour costs and uncertainty can have important ramifications for employment dynamics.     

Sex, Wages, and Productivity: An Empirical Analysis of Israeli Firm-Level Data

Sex discrimination in labor markets may generate a wage gap between men and women that exceeds any gap in marginal productivity. We test for this type of discrimination using unique firm-level data on manufacturing firms in Israel. There is a statistically significant negative association between wages and the proportion of a firm's workforce that is female. However, there is also a statistically significant negative association between marginal productivity and the proportion of females. The difference beween the wage and productivity gaps is small relative to wage-regression estimates of wage discrimination, and is not statistically significant, which is most consistent with no discrimination.     

Optimal monetary policy for a small open economy

This paper focuses on the design of monetary policy rules for a small open economy. The model features optimizing behavior, general equilibrium and price stickiness. The real exchange rate is shown to affect the firm's real marginal cost, aggregate supply and aggregate demand. The welfare objective depends on the openness of the economy, and the optimal policy rule differs from that which obtains in a closed economy. The inflation versus output gap stabilization trade-off is caused by the real exchange rate. The implied optimal monetary policy regime is domestic inflation target coupled with controlled floating of the real exchange rate.     

Why is the public sector more labor-intensive? A distortionary tax argument

Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may reflect a wage tax advantage, stemming from the fact that government entities (partly) pay their taxes to themselves. A tax-induced cost advantage of public production precludes production efficiency and reduces welfare when labor supply is inelastic. With an elastic labor supply, a wage tax advantage of the public sector may improve welfare if it allows for a higher net wage.      

Joint outputs and real wage rates

The magnification effect in standard international trade theory asserts that if the relative price of the labor-intensive commodity increases, the real wage will also increase, as will the wage/rental ratio. This result depends upon the assumption that both activities are nonjoint—each combining labor and capital to produce a single output, so that if activities are joint instead, the results are in jeopardy. It is shown that if the difference between the share of commodity one produced in the first activity and in the second activity exceeds the difference between the labor distributive shares in the first activity and the second, an increase in commodity 1's relative price raises the wage/rental ratio. The real wage unambiguously rises in this case if and only if the ratio of the commodity output shares in the two activities exceeds the ratio of labor shares.     

Working capital requirement and the unemployment volatility puzzle

Shimer (2005) argues that a search and matching model of the labor market in which wage is determined by Nash bargaining cannot generate the observed volatility in unemployment and vacancy in response to reasonable labor productivity shocks. This paper examines how incorporating monopolistically competitive firms with a working capital requirement (in which firms borrow funds to pay their wage bills) improves the ability of the search models to match the empirical fluctuations in unemployment and vacancy without resorting to an alternative wage setting mechanism. The monetary authority follows an interest rate rule in the model. A positive labor productivity shock lowers the real marginal cost of production and lowers inflation. In response to the fall in price level, the monetary authority reduces the nominal interest rate. A lower interest rate reduces the cost of financing and partially offsets the increase in labor cost from a higher productivity. A reduced labor cost implies the firms retain a greater portion of the gain from a productivity shock, which gives them a greater incentive to create vacancies. Simulations show that a working capital requirement does indeed improve the ability of the search models to generate fluctuations in key labor market variables to better match the U.S. data.     

结构变迁、工资差异与经济增长——基于75个国家和地区1978—2007年面板数据的实证研究

文章基于1978-2007年包括中国等发展中国家在内的跨国数据探讨结构变化的增长效应,通过扩展MRW(1992)模型得出结构变化与部门间工资比的关系,并着重考察结构变化和工资差异对经济增长的影响。研究发现:(1)当部门间劳动边际产出存在差异时,劳动的重新配置有助于经济增长。(2)结构变化率和工资差异与经济增长正相关。(3)在发展中国家或地区,结构变化的增长效应最大,物质资本的影响次之;在发达国家,人力资本的增长效应最大,结构变化的影响不显著。     

Who Gains from Boycotts? A Welfare Analysis of Consumer Activism

This paper explores the welfare consequences of product boycotts by linking product and labor markets. Consumers' threat of boycott can affect the firm's decision such as production location, size of operation and wage rate. Such conscientious action, however, can actually result in a welfare loss of the workers of concern as well as consumers themselves. The analysis suggests that consumers set their goals by studying the labor market and coordinating with local groups rather than demanding what may seem righteous.     

The Effects of Gender Differences in Career Interruptions on the Gender Wage Gap in Spain

The aim of this paper is to measure the influence of past employment interruptions on current wages and to analyze how these interruptions contribute to the gender wage gap. The discontinuity in labor trajectories of Spanish employees from 2005 to 2010 is examined by measuring the duration of unemployment periods from employees’ first Social Security affiliation to the last job at which they were employed. Through the use of the database “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales” (MCVL), the estimated gender wage gap is found to be 13.1 percent. Introducing an index of interruptions as an explanatory variable, the results show that interruptions have a negative impact on both men's and women's wages. These interruptions explain 7.4 percent of the daily gender wage gap in Spain, primarily because women experience more interruptions in employment than men.     

中国劳资关系的城乡户籍差异

本文利用最近的企业和农民工调查数据探讨了劳资关系城乡户籍差异问题。城乡工人在劳资关系各方面的巨大差异源于两个方面 :一是人力资本水平差异和就业企业的差异 ;二是农民工受到的户籍歧视。研究结果发现 ,前者解释了两类工人劳资关系差异的 70 %— 80 % ,说明人力资本和企业状况是决定工人待遇的主要因素 ;后者解释了两类工人劳资关系差异的 2 0 %— 3 0 % ,户籍歧视所造成的差距同样是不容忽视的。除劳动合同方面外 ,农民工在工资、养老保险、医疗保险、失业保险以及工会参与等方面均遭到户籍歧视。研究结果暗示仅仅关注工资收入的城乡歧视是不够的 ,同时也为更全面的劳动力市场校正政策提供了经验支持     

Wage,productivity and unemployment: microeconomics theory and macroeconomics data

We confront microeconomics theory with macroeconomics data. Unemployment results from two main micro-level decisions of workers and firms. Most of the efficiency wage and bargaining theories predict that over the business cycle, unemployment falls below its natural rate when the worker’s real wage exceeds the reservation wage. However, these theories have weak empirical support. Firm’s decision predicts that when the worker’s real wage exceeds the marginal product of labour (MPL), unemployment increases above its natural rate. Accounting for this microeconomic decision helps explain almost all the fluctuations of US unemployment.