讨论式教学法在劳动与社会保障法教学中的应用

讨论式教学有别于传统的讲授式教学。为了达到良好的教学效果，讨论的主题应当紧扣劳动与社会保障法课程内容，能够激发学生的讨论热情，难易适中。在讨论过程中，教师应居于主导地位，有效地控制讨论进程，把握讨论方向，避免偏离讨论主题。讨论结束后，教师要及时总结、评价和补充，对涉及的理论或制度问题进行系统的整理和陈述，以达到讨论式教学的目标。     

美国劳工组织对中美贸易关系的影响——以PNTR案和货币操控案说起

中美贸易关系历来受多种因素影响,美国国内劳工组织在中美贸易摩擦的两个典型个案中起到了一定的影响。其行动的一般规则及目的需要进一步研究及分析,从而利用这些规则来为中美贸易关系润滑,减少不利因素最终提高贸易关系成功的可能性。     

Downward wage rigidity and business cycle asymmetries

The growth rates of wages, unemployment and output of a number of OECD countries have a strongly skewed distribution. In this paper we analyze to what extent downward wage rigidities can explain these empirical business cycle asymmetries. To this aim, we introduce asymmetric wage adjustment costs in a New-Keynesian DSGE model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Increasing wages is less costly than cutting them. It follows that wages increase relatively fast and thus limit vacancy posting and employment creation, but they decline more slowly, leading to a strong reduction in vacancies and employment. The presence of downward wage rigidities strongly improves the fit of the model to the observed skewness of labor market variables and the relative length of expansions and contractions in the output and the employment cycles. The asymmetry also explains the differing transmission of positive and negative monetary policy shocks from wages to inflation.     

经济全球化视角下的“夹层效应”——从结构性矛盾看欧洲主权债务危机

本文从经济全球化视角,对欧盟内部和亚洲发展中国家的劳动生产率、劳动工资和单位劳动成本进行了研究。研究表明,当前不对称国际经济体系中特有的夹层效应是欧洲债务危机爆发的深层原因,即希腊等夹层国面临着劳动力全球化下底层国家即亚洲新兴经济体的低成本竞争和上层发达国家劳动生产率的强烈冲击,导致单位劳动成本上升和产品竞争力丧失,这种结构性矛盾与不平衡最终引发了本次危机。根据研究结果,本文认为结构性改革是化解危机的根本途径。     

The Future European Labor Supply: The Critical Role of the Family

The European employment strategy initiated in 1997 is critically dependent upon the further integration of women into the labor market. The European Union has set a specific target employment rate for women of 60 percent by 2010 and is also committed to providing more and better child care facilities. This gender focus is reinforced by the requirement for gender mainstreaming in all aspects of European employment policy. There is an implied Europe-wide, universal policy of encouraging female labor-market participation and reducing the care work performed by domestic labor. However, the European Commission continues to have limited competence in areas of family, social, and welfare policy. As a result, these common employment objectives for women are thus being pursued against a background of quite different systems of social, family, welfare, and indeed labor-market organization. These systems have different economic and employment implications, such that the outcomes of the common European employment strategy will also be highly variable.     

Changing Women's Lives: Child Care Policy in Ireland

Child care as a policy issue has been forced to the center of the national planning agenda in Ireland with the report of an expert working group on child care. As Ireland has broken into the ranks of wealthy Western economies, Irish women have joined the formal workforce in ever greater numbers, dramatically breaking the traditional ideology of women as childbearers and homemakers. However, women are now carrying the double burden of work that accompanies the lack of any state policy on child care. This article traces this recent history of the feminizing of the Irish workforce, amidst a fast-changing social context for family life, and the multiple problems confronting the expert working group of securing an adequate range of policies for the provision of child care in a country which has one of the lowest rates of formal state provision in the entire European Union.     

Demystify the labor statistics in China

In contrast to the great changes from a planning economy to market economic system, the transition in statistics system is left behind. The problem is quite serious in labor statistics. The paper reviews how the current labor statistical system collects the data and its reliability. By analyzing relevant indicators, the paper points out that policy-making based on the current labor statistics may mislead the outcomes in the Chinese labor market. To improve the labor statistics, a deep and comprehensive reform in the statistical system is required.     

Firms’ demand for work hours: Evidence from matched firm-worker data in Japan

Using information on Japanese males’ work hours and the matched firms’ characteristics, this paper investigates whether the number of hours worked is determined by demand-side factors and tries to offer a possible explanation of why Japanese males tend to work longer on average, than their counterparts in other countries. Based on an empirical framework in which each firm sets a minimum boundary of work hours and where workers hired by the firm are required to put in at least the minimum hours, we found that the minimum requirement depends on each firm’s fixed costs of labor. Specifically, firms that tend to hoard labor during recessions, presumably because of higher fixed costs, require incumbent workers to work longer hours during normal times. Since Japanese firms have long been considered as incurring high fixed costs to train workers, we interpret the long work hour requirement as a rational strategy for Japanese firms in protecting high-skill-accumulated workers from dismissal. In other words, the long work hours of Japanese males reflect firms’ long-term employment practices, a typical feature of the Japanese labor market.     

Re-examination of wage, employment, and hours adjustments: what is crucial for differences in the adjustments?

Manufacturing wage, employment, and hours adjustments are significantly different among developed countries, typically between Japan and the US. The problem of explaining the differences is closely related to that of what effect the extent of wage flexibility has on labor market adjustments. However, prevailing theories are invalid or incomplete for explaining the differences. The differences in the adjustments cannot be unrelated with institutional features of the labor market. Indeed, the extent of wage flexibility depends on the differences in the institutional features. Using a new model with such an idea, this paper theoretically re-examines the cause of the differences in the adjustments. The crucial causes are the characteristics of wage flexibility as well as the differences of the institutional features. The characteristics are that wage adjustment is discontinuous, infrequent, and has a lower limit in comparison with changes in demand.     

Tax Reform,Sector‐specific Labor Supply and Welfare Effects*

This paper focuses in particular on the 1992 tax reform in Norway. In this reform the top marginal tax rates were cut considerably. We find that the impact on overall labor supply is rather modest, but these modest changes shadow for stronger sectoral changes. The tax reform stimulated the women to shift their labor from the public to the private sector and to work longer hours. A calculation of mean compensated variation, calculated within the framework of a random utility model, shows that the richest households benefited far more from the 1992 tax reform than did the poorest households.