基于收入分布的收入差距扩大成因的分解

本文采用核平滑化的半参方法估计了1987年、1996年、2004年我国城市居民收入分布曲线,并且基于收入分布又进一步分解了导致城市居民收入差距扩大的主要原因。收入差距扩大的成因可以分为两类:一是劳动者的劳动力特点的普遍变化,如劳动者教育水平的提高,行业、职业分布的变化;二是对劳动力特点回报率的变化,如教育回报率的提高,各行业、职业回报率差异的扩大等。本文发现后者是导致收入差距扩大的主要原因。     

Employment and wage practices of Japanese firms in the Philippines: convergence with Filipino-Chinese and Western-owned firms

In foreign-owned Philippine firms, human resource approaches and practices tend to converge. Japanese-owned firms localize their human resource practices by emphasizing local standards and practices in compensation, hiring, recruitment, job assignments and the like. On the other hand, Western-owned firms tend to adopt well-known Japanese style practices. Filipino-Chinese-owned firms tend to be traditional, emphasizing both informal and hierarchical control mechanisms which put a premium upon loyalty and trust, through familistic, informal but hierarchical control mechanisms. As the owners of these firms pass on control to the next generation, they tend to hire professional managers. These managers include younger generation Filipino-Chinese educated abroad. They are torn between the rational, and traditional norms and practices insisted upon by their Confucian-oriented elders, and the demands of a competitive and ever-changing technology and economy.

It is quite meaningless to attach adjectives like ‘Japanese’, ‘Filipino-Chinese’ or ‘Western’ to universal concepts like industrial relations and human resource approaches - the search for the best approach in work relations is beyond the issue of convergence or divergence.     

劳工标准的决定：中国的实证分析

在全球贸易摩擦中,社会倾销论的流行,对发展中国家在全球贸易利益中的分配必将产生不利的影响。而劳工标准的决定机制,是贸易摩擦中争论的核心问题之一。本文对中国的有关数据进行实证分析,认为发展中国家劳工标准的高低,是同其生产力发展水平相一致的。因此,发达国家不能要求发展中国家在现有的生产力水平的基础上提高劳工标准。     

Did immigration contribute to wage stagnation of unskilled workers?

In this paper we first show that the timing and skill distribution of Immigrants to the U.S. between 1970 and 2014 imply they did not contribute to the decline in the wages of native, non-college educated workers – including high school dropouts – at the national level. We then review other evidence at the local level, which implies immigration is not associated with lower non-college wages. Rather, higher immigration seems associated with higher average (and college-level) wages. Local externalities, complementarities, efficient specialization and appropriate technological choice suggest at least part of the positive association is causal.     

Foreign direct investment, intellectual property rights, and wage inequality in China

This article incorporates foreign direct investment (FDI) and product differentiation in a general equilibrium trade model. The analysis shows that freer trade and FDI will upgrade China's technology, improve its skills of labor, and increase the competitiveness of local firms in the international market. At the same time, the relative wage of skilled labor to unskilled labor will rise. The size of this rise will be affected by the degree of protection for intellectual property rights. These theoretical results are consistent with empirical evidence. The analysis provides insights in coordinating policies on FDI, labor market reform, and intellectual property rights protection.     

Labor supply in urban China

Using labor supply responses from 10,560 urban Chinese workers, two-stage least squares estimations identify positive compensated wage effects and negative income effects that are, for the most part, statistically significant. The gross wage effects are mostly positive but they indicate relatively low uncompensated labor supply elasticities. The compensated wage effects are much larger; these may be important in assessing the labor market consequences of reform policies that monetize non-pecuniary benefits. The significance of labor supply responses depends on individual responsibilities within the family; the effects are largest for women and non-household heads. Journal of Comparative Economics 31 (4) (2003) 795–817.     

Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the presence of a pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection of six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, and Madagascar. We build on a simple agricultural household production model and we propose an extension to include adjustments in labor income. Our approach, which can be implemented without repeated cross-sections of household level data, suits well the data constraints in SSA. It also allows us to capture the heterogeneity in trade protection at the tariff line level. The pro-poor bias indicators suggest that SSA's trade policies tend to be biased in favor of poor households, as these policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is because protection increases the agricultural prices of goods that are sold by African households and this effect dominates both the impacts of higher consumption prices and the strong Stolper–Samuelson effects that benefit skilled over unskilled workers.