Information Disclosure to Employees and Rational Expectations: a Game-Theoretical Perspective: a Comment

In this comment we identify the key features of the Frantz and Walker (1997) game theoretic model that drive the non-disclosure equilibrium result in their paper. We argue that, although technically correct, their model fails to capture certain aspects of real-world wage bargaining that will be important in determining optimal disclosure strategies in practice. However, Frantz and Walker's paper illustrates the potential of analytical techniques to contribute to the employee disclosure debate.     

金融发展与城乡居民收入差距关系探讨--以中国西部12省区为例

文章基于2002-2011年中国西部12个省份金融市场（金融中介和保险市场）发展状况面板数据,建立回归模型,利用pooled LS回归和基于贝叶斯线性回归理论的MCMC算法,对西部地区金融发展与城乡居民收入差距之间的关系进行实证分析。研究结果表明：金融中介发展拉大了西部地区城乡居民收入差距,而保险市场发展则对西部地区城乡居民收入差距的扩大有抑制作用。并在文章的最后对出现这些情况的原因以及政策建议进行了阐述。     

工资性收入不平等：基于户籍歧视的分析

文章利用2012年中国城镇居民与流动人口收入调查数据,采用不同的工资分解方法,从地区分割、职业分割和收入阶层的角度测算并分析了户籍工资差异及户籍歧视情况。实证结果表明,户籍歧视在不同经济发展区域都存在;户籍歧视的加剧体现在工资歧视和就业歧视两方面;对于极低工资、低工资和较高工资的劳动者而言,户籍歧视带来的收入不平等问题相当严重。     

The Great Compression of the 1940s: The Public versus the Private Sector

Between 1940 and 1950 wage differentials narrowed substantially, a phenomenon that economic historians have called the “Great Compression.” This paper dis-aggregates the Great Compression into changes within and between the public and private sectors. We show that wage differentials declined in the public sector as well as in the private sector; had the public sector decline not taken place, the Great Compression would have been substantially smaller. In this regard, the experience of the 1940s stands in stark contrast with that of the past two decades, during which a relatively rigid public sector wage structure has dampened overall increases in wage inequality.     

Is There a Glass Ceiling over Germany?

This paper analyzes the gender wage gap across the wage distribution using 2010 data from the German Statistical Agency. I investigate East and West Germany and the public sector separately to account for potential heterogeneities in wage gaps. I apply unconditional and conditional quantile regression methods to investigate the differences between highly paid men and women in distributions conditional and unconditional on covariates. The results indicate increasing gender wage gaps in all estimations, suggesting that there is indeed a glass ceiling over Germany even after controlling for a large set of observable characteristics (including occupation and industry). This finding is even more pronounced when also taking bonus payments into account.     

Is Downward Wage Flexibility the Primary Factor of Japan's Prolonged Deflation?

By using both macro‐ and micro‐level data, this paper investigates how wages and prices evolved during Japan's lost two decades. We find that downward nominal wage rigidity was present in Japan until the late 1990s, but disappeared after 1998 as annual wages became downwardly flexible. Moreover, nominal wage flexibility may have contributed to Japan's relatively low unemployment rates. Although macro‐level movements in nominal wages and prices seemed to be synchronized, such synchronicity is not observed at the industry level. Therefore, wage deflation does not seem to be a primary factor of Japan's prolonged deflation.     

生态与经济发展的鸿沟

文章主要从词语来源与含义、研究对象的组织层次等方面系统地对比和阐述了生态学和经济学的接近或相似。生态学和经济学的学科性质和环境问题的日益严重决定了二者之间交叉学科的出现;经济学借鉴生态学,二者逐步走向融合。但由于＂生态＂是保守的,而＂经济＂是积极主动的,所以在经济与生态发展之间仍存在＂鸿沟＂。怎样处理和解决二者之间的矛盾,跨越＂鸿沟＂是摆在国内外学者们面前的一个重大课题。笔者认为,解决的途径仍应该是学科间的交融,这为科学研究提供了新的探索空间。     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

How does FDI affect domestic firms’ wages? theory and evidence from Vietnam

This paper explores the role of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) as a determinant of domestic firms’ wages, namely wage spillovers. We first construct a theoretical model to demonstrate that the presence of FDI firms affects domestic firms’ expected average wages via productivity spillovers and a cut-off capability. We then estimate FDI-induced wage spillovers by employing IV-GMM estimator with a five-year panel dataset of a growing service industry in Vietnam. Despite FDI firms on average pay 2.25 times that of domestic firms, they put a downward pressure on domestic firms’ wages. A one percent increase in FDI presence causes domestic firms to cut average wages by 2.03 percent. The estimations also find that firm-specific features are attributable to significant differences in their wages as well as FDI-linked wage spillovers.