Resource saving and productivity enhancing impacts of crop management innovation packages in Ethiopia

Crop management innovations are often not discrete fixed stand‐alone options—and their adoption may imply various combinations and adaptations. This potentially confounds their impact assessment. This article assesses the resource saving and productivity enhancing impacts of a crop management package revolving around minimum tillage in maize‐based farming systems in northwest Ethiopia. An endogenous switching regression model was applied to plot‐ and household‐level survey data collected from 290 rural households operating 590 maize plots during the 2012 production year. Controlling for variations in plot and household characteristics, the average effect of minimum tillage package (minimum tillage package) on maize productivity is 0.44 t/ha. Compared to conventional practice (CP), adoption of the MTP decreased the average male and female labor use in maize production by 14.4 and 8.2 person‐days per ha, respectively. Similarly, MTP adoption decreased draft power use for land preparation by 13.2 pair of oxen‐days per ha. Compared to CP, in general, there is a considerable short‐run maize productivity gain and reduction in labor and draft power use under MTP.     

Neighborhood quality and labor market outcomes: Evidence from quasi-random neighborhood assignment of immigrants

Settlement in a socially deprived neighborhood may hamper individual labor market outcomes because of lack of employed or highly skilled contacts. I investigate this hypothesis by exploiting a unique natural experiment that occurred between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to municipalities quasi-randomly, which successfully addresses the methodological problem of endogenous neighborhood selection. I show that individuals sort into neighborhoods. Taking account of location sorting, living in a socially deprived neighborhood does not affect labor market outcomes of refugee men. Their labor market outcomes are also not affected by the overall employment rate and the overall average skill level in the neighborhood. However, an increase in the average skill level of non-Western immigrant men living in the neighborhood raises their employment probability, while an increase in the employment rate of co-national men living in the neighborhood raises their real annual earnings. This provides quasi-experimental evidence that residence-based job information networks are ethnically stratified.     

The role of inventories and capacity utilization as shock absorbers

We examine the role of inventories and capacity utilization (of both capital and labor) for the propagation of business cycle fluctuations. We document a new set of facts regarding the U.S. cyclical regularities of inventories and capacity utilization. First, we find that capital utilization and the flows of services from both capital and labor are procyclical, and comove with the holdings of inventories. Second, we find that labor utilization is procyclical as well, but is weakly negatively correlated with inventories. We build a model that accounts for these facts, and also accounts for the stylized inventory facts, i.e., inventory holdings are procyclical, while the inventory-to-sales ratio is countercyclical. The analysis is centered on the effects of two possible shocks: preference (demand) shocks and technology shocks. Our model shows that inventories and the rate of capital utilization are mostly complements, while inventories and the rate of labor utilization are mostly substitutes. It further shows that temporary demand shocks emphasize the role of inventories as being a “shock absorber,” whereas high-persistence demand shocks, as well as technology shocks of any persistence, emphasize the role of inventories as being a complement to consumption.     

Production complementarities and flexibility in a model of entrepreneurship

The focus of this paper is the flexibility in working hours as a motive for entrepreneurship. The model exhibits inflexibilities for workers and entrepreneurs, which arise due to complementarities in production. In addition, it allows for volatile value of leisure to make flexibility in hours desirable. Differences in occupation-specific flexibility, disciplined with the observed patterns in hours (level, persistence, dispersion) and income (persistence, dispersion), can explain relatively low income levels of entrepreneurs in the US and the occupation-specific distributions of working hours and income. Policy relevance of the model features is discussed using experiments of workweek restrictions and income taxation.     

城镇就业市场上劳动力工资扭曲程度测度

本文利用CHIPS2007数据库，基于随机前沿模型对我国城镇就业市场上劳动力的工资扭曲程度进行测度。研究结果表明：（1）在城镇就业市场上，由于工资扭曲现象的存在，劳动力实际获得的工资要比他们的边际生产率低45％～60％；（2）已婚、子女个数较少、本地、拥有失业保险、男性、大中型企业的劳动力工资扭曲程度要低于未婚、子女个数较多、外来、没有失业保险、女性、小型企业的劳动力；（3）中低工资水平的劳动力工资扭曲程度要比高工资水平的劳动力严重，且中低工资水平劳动力工资扭曲程度的方差更大。由此，本文提出推进就业市场的市场化改革，完善就业市场信息网络，从而减轻劳动力工资扭曲程度。     

Impact of the Sloping Land Conversion Program on rural household income: An integrated estimation

The objective of this study is to identify the pathways of the potential impacts of the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) on household income and quantify these impacts along the identified pathways. We fulfill this objective by developing an integrated analytic framework and using data collected from Wuqi county of Shaanxi for the period 2004–2010. This integrated analytic framework enables us to formulate a structural equation model for testing hypotheses regarding the direct and indirect impacts of the SLCP. It is found that the direct effect of the SLCP on household income is positive but very small and insignificant, suggesting that retiring cropland has, at least, not reduced income from farming. Moreover, the SLCP has had a much higher and even increasing indirect impact on household income through promoting labor transfer and relaxing liquidity constraints. Overall, the SLCP's total impact on household income ranged from 3% in 2004 to 9% in 2010 excluding the insignificant direct impact. The research and policy implications of our work are discussed.     

Land prices and unemployment

We integrate the housing market and the labor market in a dynamic general equilibrium model with credit and search frictions. We argue that the labor channel, combined with the standard credit channel, provides a strong transmission mechanism that can deliver a potential solution to the Shimer (2005) puzzle. The model is confronted with U.S. macroeconomic time series. The estimation results account for two prominent facts observed in the data. First, land prices and unemployment move in opposite directions over the business cycle. Second, a shock that moves land prices also generates the observed large volatility of unemployment.     

Is a Policy of Free Movement of Workers Sustainable?

In this paper, we study the costs and benefits of the adoption of a policy of free movement of workers. For countries to agree on uncontrolled movements of workers, short‐run costs must be outweighed by the long‐term benefits of better labor‐market flexibility and income smoothing. We show that such a policy is less likely to be adopted when workers are more impatient and less risk‐averse, when production technologies display stronger decreasing returns, and when countries trade a significant share of their products.     

Labor market institutions and inflation volatility in the euro area

Despite having had the same currency for many years, EMU countries still have quite different inflation dynamics. In this paper we explore one possible reason: country specific labor market institutions, giving rise to different inflation volatilities. When unemployment insurance schemes differ, as they do in EMU, reservation wages react differently in each country to area-wide shocks. This implies that real marginal costs and inflation also react differently. We report evidence for EMU countries supporting the existence of a cross-country link over the cycle between labor market structures on the one side and real wages and inflation on the other. We then build a DSGE model that replicates the data evidence. The inflation volatility differentials produced by asymmetric labor markets generate welfare losses at the currency area level of approximately 0.3% of steady state consumption.     

中国劳动力错配对TFP的影响分析

文章利用一个资源错配对TFP影响的核算框架和中国改革开放30年的宏观经济、产业相关数据,估算了当前中国农业部门就业比重过大对全要素生产率产生的影响。结果显示,改革以来,劳动力错配对TFP有着明显的负效应,以不同的指标计算,在-2%到-18%之间,并呈逐渐扩大趋势。这种负的效应随着发展和改革的历程有明显的波动趋势;把总效应分解为工资差异效应和部门份额效应以后,显示中国当前的劳动力错配对TFP产生的负效应主要是由于部门间的工资差异所致。