《劳动合同法》对我国企业解雇成本与雇用行为的影响——来自企业态度的问卷调查

《劳动合同法》从制定、修改、颁布到实施,引起了社会各界的广泛关注。解雇成本是争议的焦点之一。本文以企业态度调查为依据,探讨了《劳动合同法》对我国企业解雇成本及雇用行为的影响。研究表明,《劳动合同法》对不同所有制、不同规模企业的影响存在差异性,《劳动合同法》增加企业解雇成本的同时,促进了企业调整手段的多元化。     

The shadow of death model revisited with an application to French firms

This article provides an empirical model of the shadow of death in which the exit probability of a firm depends on the firm’s productive performance and the firm’s level of sunk costs, which are viewed as barriers to exit. The shadow of death effect is treated by assuming a relationship between the propensity to exit and both the contemporaneous and lagged values of efficiency and sunk costs. To estimate the unobserved productive efficiency, we use the Ackerberg et al. (2006) estimator extended by the addition of a correction for selection bias. We use an unbalanced sample of approximately 100 000 French firms over the period 1997 to 2002. Our results indicate that the probability of exit is negatively affected by unobserved individual efficiency and the level of sunk costs. The shadow of death effect applies mainly in manufacturing, where both productive efficiency and sunk costs decrease during several years before exit. In service sectors, the exit process seems to occur more suddenly.     

INCENTIVES AND THE COST OF FIRING IN AN EQUILIBRIUM LABOR MARKET MODEL WITH ENDOGENOUS LAYOFFS*

I study the effects of firing costs in an equilibrium model of the labor market with moral hazard. Layoff is an incentive device, modeled as termination of the optimal long‐term contract. When the economy’s stock of firms is fixed, firing costs could reduce layoffs and increase worker welfare. In the long run when firms are free to enter and exit the market, firing costs generate not only lower employment, longer unemployment durations, and lower aggregate output, but also lower welfare for both employed workers and new labor market entrants.     

Entry, exit and business cycles in a general equilibrium model

This paper studies the role of entry and exit in the short run behavior of a general equilibrium model with industry dynamics. For tractability, and to preserve potential asymmetries in the impulse responses, I focus on the transition dynamics of the economy after shocks. Entry and exit are found to be insensitive to productivity shocks of reasonable magnitude. Moreover, the dynamics of GDP are insensitive to fluctuations in entry and exit rates, and any asymmetries are negligible. As an application of the model, the paper also asks whether firing costs may interact with entry and exit to affect transition dynamics after shocks, finding that they do not.     

The interaction of firing costs and firm training

By allowing firms to invest in their workers’ human capital, this paper extends the traditional analysis of firing costs with respect to two points, both of them positive in terms of welfare. On the one hand, firing restrictions reduce turnover, thereby enhancing incentives to provide training. On the other hand, training gives firms the opportunity to lower the costs of firing restrictions since well-trained workers are less likely to be fired. In this way the negative effects of firing costs on firm profitability and workers’ job-finding rates are reduced.

Contingent worksharing

In a setting that focuses on efficient dynamic hours-workers substitution we show that contingent worksharing contributes to worker retention during bad business spells and to sustained hiring during good spells. As a consequence, average employment increases on both accounts. We also show that worksharing interacts with firing costs in affecting workforce decisions and determines the sign of the employment impact from an increase in firing restrictions.     

Opportunity Costs,Competition, and Firm Selection

Abstract

The paper questions the standard economic assumptions that competing economic agents have identical reservation utility levels, and that when differences in opportunity costs exist, they can be conveniently represented by fixed costs. Asymmetries in opportunity costs are considered in relation to current efficiency. The effect of this interchangeability of skills is studied in the context of the effect of entry on firm selection in a Cournot setting. It is found that inefficient firms are more likely to crowd out efficient ones when the relationship between current efficiency and opportunity costs is strong, and when the fixed costs of changing markets are high. Moreover, in the long-run, firms with intermediate cost levels are likely to induce the exit of low and high cost firms. The model sheds light on the benefits of diversification by multiproduct and multinational firms, and their relationship to skill transferability.     

Institutions and training inequality

We analyze how firm-provided training is affected by the interaction among important institutional variables in the labor market: firing costs, minimum wages and unemployment benefits. We find that the degree of complementarity and substitutability among these variables depends on employees' abilities. Thereby the institutional interactions influence skill inequality. We derive how the influence of one of the institutional variables above is affected by other institutional variables with respect to inequality in skills arising from firm-provided training. We derive several striking results, such as: (a) the minimum wage and unemployment benefits generate increasing skill inequality whereas firing costs generate skill equalization; (b) unemployment benefits and firing costs are complements in their effects on skill inequality, (c) firing costs and the minimum wage are substitutes in their effects on skill equalization, and (d) unemployment benefits and the minimum wage are substitutes in their effects on skill inequality.     

Pareto-improving firing costs?

We examine self-enforcing contracts between risk-averse workers and risk-neutral firms (the ‘invisible handshake’) in a labor market with search frictions. Employers promise as much wage-smoothing as they can, consistent with incentive conditions that ensure they will not renege during low-profitability times. Equilibrium is inefficient if these incentive constraints bind, with risky wages for workers and a risk premium that employers must pay. Mandatory firing costs can help, by making it easier for employers to promise credibly not to cut wages in low-profitability periods. We show that firing costs are more likely to be Pareto-improving if they are not severance payments.     

Modelling economic hysteresis losses caused by sunk adjustment costs

Transition from one economic equilibrium to another as a consequence of shocks is often associated with sunk adjustment costs. Firm-specific sunk market entry investments (or sunk market exit costs) in case of a reaction to price shocks are an example. These adjustment costs lead to a dynamic supply pattern similar to hysteresis. In analogy to “hysteresis losses” in ferromagnetism, the authors explicitly model dynamic adjustment losses in the course of market entry and exit cycles. They start from the micro level of a single firm and use explicit aggregation tools from hysteresis theory in mathematics and physics to calculate dynamic losses. The authors show that strong market fluctuations generate disproportionately large hysteresis losses for producers. This could give a reason for the implementation of stabilizing measures and policies to prevent strong (price) variations or, alternatively, to reduce the sunk entry and exit costs.     

自发性会计变更、监管契约与契约成本

笔者对我国上市公司自发性会计变更的行为从契约理论的角度进行了分析。对证券市场监管规定和强制性会计政策——两种不同的监管契约对自发性会计变更的不同影响从单向强制性契约成本构成及契约成本最小化方面进行了解释,对证券市场监管契约成本和强制性会计政策契约成本进行了比较研究。     

Does computer-based training impact maintenance costs and actions? An empirical analysis of the US Navy’s AN/SQQ-89(v) sonar system

The United States Navy decided in the early 2000s to replace traditional, instructor-led schoolhouse training with computer-based training (CBT). While employing CBT may produce gains in knowledge acquisition and lower costs for repetitive, low-skill work, there is a lack of empirical evidence whether these benefits exist for more highly skilled Navy operations. Anecdotal evidence suggests that CBT failed to sufficiently prepare new sailors for sophisticated systems’ maintenance and operation. To determine the validity of this evidence, we examine how CBT has affected the AN/SQQ-89(v) sonar. We empirically analyse whether the Navy’s introduction of CBT significantly altered fleet maintenance costs, actions and training requirements, by assembling a unique data set of ships, locations, personnel, maintenance costs and maintenance actions. Controlling for the Navy’s plan to man the system, the number of authorized billets and the number of personnel on board, we find that CBT adversely impacts costs, actions and maintenance hours for the sonar system.     

Electricity wheeling and incentive regulation

This paper relates social contract regulation strategies to a particularly important comtemporary issue in energy regulation—electricity wheeling; we find that substantial gains in economic efficiency may be possible. First, social contracts give potential wheelers more monetary incentive than traditional regulatory procedures to provide wheeling services to interested third parties. Second, social contract regulation gives potential wheelers better incentives to measure marginal costs accurately. Third, under social contract regulation, wheelers have proper incentives to install efficient amounts of transmission capacity, thereby avoiding Averch-Johnson and other regulatory distortions that emerge in traditional regulation.     

A two-stage translog marginal cost pricing approach for Floridian hospital outputs

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, issues still remain regarding the mandated purchase of insurance to ensure more universal coverage. One such issue is the pricing of these insurance packages and whether or not the reimbursements will cover necessary services. Therefore, policy concerns exist that increasing the number of insured individuals may not curtail costs. Conversely, providers may not wish to treat patients covered by excessively frugal plans such as Medicaid; hence the trade-offs between access and cost control. In this article, we present findings from a cost function and a productivity approach to determine the marginal cost of providing inpatient hospital care for hospitals operating in Florida during 2005. Using these methodological approaches, we are able to use the marginal rate of transformation to determine the relative marginal costs while controlling for hospital technical and allocative inefficiency. Our work differs from earlier articles as we avoid the Greene problem for cross-sectional models through a two-step approach. By including both reimbursement rates under conditions of hospital efficiency, we can ascertain payment schemes that should, at least in theory, cover necessary costs for patient care without leading to excessive input usage.     

Dismissal conflicts and unemployment

We analyse the institutional sources of dismissal conflicts when workers’ effort is not perfectly observable. We build an efficiency wage model with firing costs to capture their effect on employment through wages. In this context, whenever there is a dismissal, a double moral hazard problem can arise. Resolution of this problem by a third party will be imperfect due to asymmetric information. In turn, disciplinary dismissals will not be costless and firing costs will have a negative effect on aggregate employment. The solution to this problem does not necessarily imply the elimination of firing costs.     

Aggregate fluctuations, financial constraints and risk sharing

Summary. Private information and costly state verification often result in credit rationing in models with smooth investment, affecting both loan size and total investment. The optimal contract is derived in a dynamic stochastic growth model with capital for two types of models: one with symmetric information and the other with asymmetric information and costly state verification. When all information is observed costlessly, the equilibrium optimal contract provides complete insurance to risk-averse savers against aggregate fluctuations. When information is asymmetric and there is costly state verification, the equilibrium optimal contract provides only partial insurance against aggregate shocks. The extent of insurance is measured by the marginal rate of transformation of consumption between borrowers and lenders which is closely linked to the user cost of capital. The deadweight monitoring costs create a wedge between a borrower's cost of capital and a lender's stochastic discount factor, with two results: (i) fluctuations in the user cost of capital provides a mechanism by which aggregate shocks can be␣propagated; (ii) the distribution of capital's share of output among borrowers, lenders, and monitoring costs varies even if capital's share is constant. Capital market frictions not only amplify aggregate fluctuations but also generate cross-sectional fluctuations that may not be observable in aggregate data. Received: November 17, 1997; revised version: April 20, 1998     

Employment and Environmental Protection

One of the most pressing problems in an economy intransition is that of unemployment. Hitherto the`costs' of this unemployment have either focused onthe value of the lost production, or on the costs tothe government of supporting the unemployed. From asocial viewpoint this is inappropriate. In this paper,we discuss the costs of unemployment in terms of theirimpacts on human welfare, particularly the healtheffects. On the positive side, as inefficient industries areshut down and as production responds to marketpressures, wasteful government subsidies are reduced,as is the level of environmental pollution. Clearly,therefore, there is a trade-off between theenvironmental and economic benefits on the one handand the welfare costs of unemployment on the other.In this paper, a simple model is developed to analyzethis trade-off. A single firm has a short-runproduction function in which output is dependent onthe level of employment. The present position ischaracterized by `inefficiency' in that the firm ismaking a loss and overproduction is taking place.Environmental damage is a function of the level ofoutput. The efficient production point is known, asare the efficiency prices.The problem to be solved is to minimize the costs ofmoving to the efficient point. The papercharacterizes the efficient dynamic path and givessome illustrations of such a path for the coal sectorin Russia, for given values of the efficiency losses,the environmental costs of using coal and the costs ofunemployment.     

就业保护与劳动力市场绩效——基于跨国面板数据的实证分析

本文采用世界经济自由度指数和世界银行的世界发展指标,选取2002-2008年面板数据对就业保护的理论假说和经验分析进行了相应的验证。实证结果表明,就业保护提高了失业率,女性和青年受就业保护制度的影响程度更大;就业保护子指标对失业率的影响与理论估计一致,但显著性较低。其中,雇佣/解雇管制越低,失业率越低;法定解雇成本越高,失业率越低;服兵役时间越长,失业率越高;最低工资、集体协商、工时管制与失业率之间没有显著关系。就业保护问题的研究有助于改进我国的劳动立法,改善女性、青年的就业机会,提高就业率,发挥法律的增进市场效率的作用,为完善劳动力市场的运行机制提供理论支持。     

企业理论主要流派的整合:基于复杂系统的角度

本文通过比较企业理论流派之间在研究范式上的差异,在简单性世界观和复杂性世界观下划分企业理论流派.从简单性世界观来看,企业具有节约交易费用的长期契约性质;从复杂性世界观来看,企业具有经济新质突显的复杂系统特征.交易费用企业理论和其余流派的企业理论是从不同的角度对企业这两种性质的分析或描述.分析不同企业理论流派的世界观特征,可以打通"企业理论丛林"之间的边界,使得诸多企业理论流派在范式上整合起来.     

Exit, sunk costs and the selection of firms

Summary. This paper aims to identify the cost characteristics of exiting firms whenever firms are playing an infinite horizon supergame with time-invariant cost and demand functions. With more than two firms, the problem of which firms exit is quite similar to a coalition formation one. Solving this coalition formation problem, we obtain that the exiting firms are those with higher average cost functions whenever reentry is costless while, whenever reentry is unprofitable, the exiting firms are those with lower marginal (and possibly average) cost functions. Since reentry costs are typically sunk, our analysis points out that the presence of sunk costs affects not only the size (as it is well known) but also the composition of the industry. Received: April 5, 1995; revised version: January 28, 1998