产业外移与研发集聚--工资成本上升及其“对冲”效应分析

“中心－外围”说是经济地理与区域经济学的“要核”，经济活动的集聚会推高本地工资水平而出现产业外移的“离心力”。本文研究发现知识外溢和市场潜力可强化本地的产业“向心力”，惠及并吸纳相对倚重知识、信息和市场氛围的研发活动（产业）。这两种力的“对冲”效应及其消长得到了国内相关区域数据的证实，较好地解释了国内外普遍发生的产业外移和研发集聚现象，对我国优化区域产业布局、推动经济转型升级具有重要的战略意义和政策启示。     

The role of social capital in the labour market in China1

Social capital is considered to play an economic role in labour markets. It may be particularly pertinent in one that is in transition from an administered to a market‐oriented system. One factor that may determine success in the underdeveloped Chinese labour market is thus guanxi, the Chinese variant of social capital. With individual‐level measures of social capital, we test for the role of guanxi using a dataset designed for this purpose, covering 7,500 urban workers and conducted in early 2000. The evidence is consistent with the basic hypothesis. Both measures of social capital – size of social network and Communist Party membership – have significant and substantial coefficients in the income functions. Social capital can have influence either in an administered system or in one subject to market forces. It appears to do so in both parts of the labour market.     

Getting the Unemployed Back to Work: The Role of Targeted Wage Subsidies

This paper examines alternative approaches to wage subsidy programmes. It does this in the context of a recent active labour market reform for the young unemployed in Britain. This New Deal reform and the characteristics of the target group are examined in detail. We discuss theoretical considerations, the existing empirical evidence and propose two strategies for evaluation. The first suggests an ex-post trend adjusted difference in difference estimator. The second, relates to a model based ex-ante evaluation. We present the conditions for each to provide a reliable evaluation and fit some of the crucial parameters using data from the British Labour Force Survey. We stress that the success of this type of labour market programmes hinge on dynamic aspects of the youth labour market, in particular the pay-off to experience and training.     

Evaluating the Gains to Cooperation in the G-3

A model of the G-3 is introduced which has a transparent structure including a simple but analytically tractable supply side. New optimising techniques are used to conduct extensive policy experiments on this multicountry model (including full Nash solutions and a fully cooperative solution). In the case of a fiscal shock originating in theUS, we find evidence of significant spillovers to other countries, which can only be ameliorated in the fully cooperative regime.     

Policy consequences of limited cognitive ability

This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. We deal with that by assuming that people compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. We first discuss an example of an auction that will attract the least efficient buyers, because these are those who have made the largest mistake. We then study the case for government intervention when the government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well as that of errors. By imposing constraints on transaction prices, the government eliminates some that are on average inefficient - because the price signals that one of the parties has typically grossly overestimated its benefit from participation. This policy may increase aggregate welfare even though some of the transactions being blocked are actually efficient.JEL Classification: D81, J38, K31Gilles Saint-Paul: This paper is based on my Spanish Economic Review lecture at the Spanish Economic Association meeting, Salamanca, December 2002. I am grateful to the organizers for inviting me, and to participants and especially Juan Dolado for their useful comments.     

Creative Destruction and the Rise of Inequality

Common wisdom interprets the rise in inequality of the last two decades as the result of a skill-biased labor demand shift. This explanation does not account for two important observations: (i) within-group inequality has also markedly risen, and (ii) the rise of inequality has been accompanied by a rise of the volatility of earnings. This paper argues that a dual labor market structure, where some workers are paid efficiency-wages can account for the empirical regularities, in the absence of skilled biased technological change. The analysis demonstrates that an unbiased innovation, as well as North–South trade, can contribute to the efficiency wage premium, and thus to wage inequality, by increasing labor turnover.     

Optimal fiscal and monetary policy with sticky wages and sticky prices

We determine the optimal degree of price inflation volatility when nominal wages are sticky and the government uses state-contingent inflation to finance government spending. We address this question in a well-understood Ramsey model of fiscal and monetary policy, in which the benevolent planner has access to labor income taxes, nominally risk-free debt, and money creation. Our main result is that sticky wages alone make price stability optimal in the face of shocks to the government budget, to a degree quantitatively similar as sticky prices alone. Key for our results is an equilibrium restriction between nominal price inflation and nominal wage inflation that holds trivially in a Ramsey model featuring only sticky prices. Our results thus show that when nominal wages are sticky, setting real wages as close as possible to their efficient path is a more important goal of optimal monetary policy than is financing innovations in the government budget via state-contingent inflation. A second important result is that the nominal interest rate can be used to indirectly tax the rents of monopolistic labor suppliers. Taken together, our results uncover features of Ramsey fiscal and monetary policy in the presence of a type of labor market imperfection that is widely-believed to be important.     

Is the Efficiency Wage Efficient when Workers Decide on the Working Time?

There is a body of literature that argues that workers' productivity is significantly influenced by their hours of work. This paper attempts to set up a shirking model of efficiency wages with endogenous working time to investigate how the endogenous working time decision critically influences work effort and undermines the efficacy of efficiency wages. We believe such a model might conceivably support the empirical finding that there exists a possibly perverse relationship between worker's effort and wages. Received July 10, 2001; revised version received March 21, 2002 Published online: November 11, 2002     

对马克思劳动价值论的再认识

深化对马克思劳动价值理论的认识应结合发生了重大变化的时代条件,全面认识价值创造主体、创造价 值的活劳动的范围以及劳动价值论中的工资组成等问题,并相应调整我国现阶段的工资政策。