Globalization,welfare, and the attitudes toward higher education

In this paper we study how the attitudes toward higher education may affect labor market outcomes in the context of globalization. In particular, we show that different educational attitudes are responsible for differences in the wage differential among countries. Using a matching model with two types of workers and firms, we find that there is a trade-off between the wage differential and the workers’ welfare, namely, that an economy that is less willing to educate itself will display a lower wage differential but will lose in terms of welfare. Moreover, from a policy perspective, we show that the negative effects on welfare due to this disinclination to study can be offset by increased labor market flexibility. All things considered, policy makers ought to keep in mind that both a positive attitude toward higher education and labor market flexibility, can lead to improved overall performance in this increasingly globalized world.     

Labour market implications of EU product market integration

European labour markets are in a state of flux due to the changing market situation induced by international integration. This process affects wage formation through more fierce product market competition and increased mobility of jobs. This development is by some observers taken to enforce labour market flexibility, while for others it signals an erosion of social standards and in turn possibly the welfare society. Since labour is not very mobile in Europe, the effects of international integration on labour markets are mostly indirect via product market integration. We review the channels through which product market integration affects labour markets and perform an empirical analysis of the convergence and interdependencies in wage formation among EU countries. We find that integration is changing labour market structures and inducing wage convergences as well as stronger wage interdependencies, but it is a gradual process. Moreover, the present study does not support the view that international integration will lead to a 'race to the bottom' and rapidly erode domestic labour markets standards, nor that it will relieve politicians of the need to consider labour market reforms to improve labour market performance.     

不完全劳动市场、政府干预与失业率

本文针对我国不完全的劳动市场,建立了一个短视一搜寻模型,目的是要说明,第一,虽然政府直接干预下的就业率高于无政府干预的劳动市场的均衡就业率,但是后者的社会总福利水平高于前者,而且,无政府干预情形下失业者的福利水平不会低于政府干预时在低工资岗位上的就业者的福利水平.这说明政府直接干预劳动市场虽然有可能降低失业率,但可能导致整个社会福利损失,也不利于提高低收入人群的福利水平.第二,我国现行的社会保障制度、户籍制度以及地方保护政策妨碍城乡劳动力自由流动,造成城市居民一般占据了工资较高的岗位,农村居民一般只能找到工资较低的岗位.这种匹配过程达到的劳动市场均衡,虽然有可能最大限度降低城镇失业率,但不是使得全国总失业率最低的均衡.     

A theory of employment guarantees: Contestability,credibility and distributional concerns

Both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guarantee scheme (EGS) in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage it promises, and the ease with which any worker can gain access. An EGS is thus at once a wage guarantee and a rationing device. We chart the positive and normative limits of such an EGS as an efficiency improving and poverty alleviating policy reform in a canonical labor market setting. At its core, an EGS provides an aggregate, not just EGS, employment target. Given the target, the EGS wage and access can be fine-tuned to deliver outcomes ranging from a contestable labor market to a simple universal unemployment benefit. The credibility of any such target, however, is shown to be triggered endogenously by a host of factors: the distributional concerns of the planner, private sector productivity, the prevalence of market power and the need for public works. Paradoxically, the outcome with a planner who cares only about efficiency can be less efficient than the outcome with a planner whose social welfare function also gives weight to poverty!     

Restrictive or expansive selection: the uneven role of tariff structure in improving market access

We estimate the effect of tariff reforms on market access from the Doha Round until the Great Recession. Gravity estimates yield significant effects of the variation in tariff structure. The change in the Mercantilist Trade Restrictiveness Index reveals that the change in tariff dispersion reflects a restrictive selection counteracting the effect of average tariff reductions. Restrictiveness is concentrated in East Asia and Pacific while, in Latin America and Caribbean, selection is expansive. We illustrate reforms in China, finding strong restrictive selection. Simulations highlight reforms with unchanged dispersion for their larger improvement in market access and a simultaneous improvement in welfare.     

Wage discrimination and antidiscrimination policy in unionized industries

We consider industries where the equally skilled workers/members of firm-specific monopoly unions can be grouped according to different reservation wages. We show that, in absence of active antidiscrimination policy, discriminatory wage contracts across groups of employees may emerge, in equilibrium, under either oligopoly or a perfectly competitive product market. We subsequently propose that to combat wage discrimination a benevolent policy maker should under either market structure subsidize the employment of the low reservation wage group. The reason is that taxing wage discrimination, as an alternative antidiscrimination policy, always entails a welfare loss relative to the no policy/wage discrimination status quo.     

Outsiders in economic integrationThe case of a transition economy

We use a spatial model of endogenous growth to investigate the likely impact of discriminatory integration between two advanced insider countries on their own welfare as well as on the welfare of an outsider transition economy. A first point is that, since convergence in per capita income levels depends on relative market access and local market size, piece-wise integration causes insider-outsider divergence. Nonetheless, outsiders can gain in absolute terms if integration fosters the global growth rate. We also show that exclusion from a regional agreement and on-going transition have unpredictable joint effects on the structural adjustment, which might even exhibit a swinging behaviour. Such swings may imply large adjustment costs, which can be reduced by careful integration design. With this respect, the asymmetric phasing-out of trade barriers built into the Europe Agreements seems to work in the right direction. Finally, we point out that the predictions of the model in terms of direct investment and terms-of-trade dynamics are broadly consistent with some actual developments in transition economies.     

Efficient taxation, wage bargaining and policy coordination

This paper is related to the literature on optimal nonlinear taxation under right-to-manage wage formation, and we assume that the fall-back profit facing firms during wage bargaining depends on the profit they can obtain if moving production abroad. The purpose is to study how policy coordination among countries can be used to increase the welfare level in comparison with an uncoordinated equilibrium. We consider coordinated policy reforms with respect to the marginal taxation of labor income, the unemployment benefit and the provision of a public good. The results show that policy coordination that leads to fewer hours of work per employee and/or a reduction of the unemployment benefit will increase welfare compared to the uncoordinated equilibrium.     

Spatial inequality, globalization, and footloose capital

This paper shows the equivalence of spatial inequalities in industrial location and in income by revisiting the home market effect (HME) without any homogeneous good based on a reconstructed footloose capital model. In this simple framework, spatial inequalities in industrial location and in income are the HMEs in terms of firm share and wage, respectively. We show that the larger country has a more-than-proportionate share of firms and a higher wage. Furthermore, both the wage differential and the industrial location in the larger country evolve in an inverted U-pattern when transport costs decline. Finally, we analytically examine the effects of trade liberalization on the welfare and show that both countries may gain from globalization.     

Imperfect credibility,sticky wages,and welfare

This paper studies optimal monetary policy under imperfect credibility in a New Keynesian model with staggered price and wage setting. In our imperfect credibility framework, the central bank commits to a policy plan but occasionally reneges on past promises with a given common knowledge probability. We find that the welfare gains from increasing credibility are approximately linear on the initial credibility level. We also find that the output-inflation stabilisation trade-off is nonmonotonic as higher credibility does not always reduce output volatility. The variance decomposition shows that wage markup shocks are the main driver of economic fluctuations and that these shocks are better contained, even in relative terms, when credibility is high. We then show that the degree of credibility impacts the effect of wage flexibility on welfare. When credibility is low, monetary policy is less potent and the economy can experience a feedback loop between wage volatility and price volatility. We show, though, that once wage markup shocks are taken into account, wage flexibility is usually welfare improving.     

Exploring different measures of wage flexibility in a developing economy context: the case for Turkey

In this paper we use Turkish household labor force data to address a number of conceptual issues pertaining to the wage curve, an empirically derived negative relationship between the real wage level and the local unemployment rate. First, we show that in developing economies where labor markets are prone to high degree of segmentation by skill level, local unemployment rates disaggregated by education provide more accurate measures of the degree of group-specific wage competition and hence yield more robust results of the wage curve analyses. Second, we estimate the wage curve using various definitions of the unemployment rate, including discouraged and marginally attached workers, and the long-term unemployment rate to explore the most relevant measure of local labor market tension in the wage setting process. We find that broader definitions of unemployment serve as a more effective reference point in measuring wage flexibility for women, whose attachment to the labor market is substantially weak in the Turkish context; while for men the official and long-term unemployment rates perform well. Finally, using quantile regression we show that wage responsiveness to unemployment cannot be assumed to be constant along the wage distribution. In the Turkish case, we find a higher unemployment elasticity of wages around the median segment of wage distribution. This effect is more pronounced for women.     

Tax reform in a two-class growth model

This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of tax reforms in a two-class model with exogenous labour supply. It extends the empirically calibrated, standard life-cycle model to include both pure life-cycle savers and households with an altruistic bequest motive. The tax reform simulations cover the move from an income to a wage and a consumption tax, respectively. The role of borrowing constraints is studied and a dynamic analysis of tax reforms using a static expectation approach is performed. The simulation results indicate that the two tax reforms have different impacts on the welfare of the two classes: while the pure life-cycle savers are better off with the consumption tax, the altruistically motivated households gain more under a wage tax. The results further show that while the introduction of a consumption tax is distributionally neutral, the move to a wage tax substantially increases income and wealth inequality.     

Migration and imperfect labor markets: Theory and cross-country evidence from Denmark,Germany and the UK

We investigate the labor market effects of immigration in Denmark, Germany and the UK, three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states. Institutions such as collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection and unemployment benefits affect the way in which wages respond to labor supply shocks, and, hence, the labor market effects of immigration. We employ a wage-setting approach which assumes that wages decline with the unemployment rate, albeit imperfectly. We find that the wage and employment effects of immigration depend on wage flexibility and the composition of the labor supply shock. In Germany immigration involves only moderate wage, but large unemployment effects, since immigrants are concentrated in labor market segments with low wage flexibility. The reverse is true for the UK and Denmark.     

Unemployment and product market competition in a Cournot model with efficiency wages

This paper analyzes the impact of product market competition on unemployment, wage and welfare in a model where unemployment is caused by the efficiency wage consideration and oligopolistic firms compete in quantity. It is shown that while more intense competition in the product market increases output and reduces price, it does not necessarily lead to a lower unemployment rate or a higher wage for workers. Depending on the technologies, the relationship between the intensity of competition and the level of employment (respectively, wage, welfare) is not always monotonic, and, in some instances, has an inverted U‐shape.     

Rigid Wage,Factor Immobility and Immiserizing Growth*

In the theory of trade and growth, Bhagwati made an interesting contribution by demonstrating the proposition that growth can be welfare reducing even at constant terms of trade, whenever distortions obtain in an economic system. Batra-Scully strengthened the Bhagwati thesis and derived the conditions for growth to be immiserizing at improved terms of trade in the presence of a wage differential. In the present analysis, we show that economic expansion in a country which is characterized by factor immobility and/or factor price rigidity may not reduce the country's real income at constant or improved terms of trade. Specifically, the Bhagwati theorem, and its stronger version proposed by Batra-Scully, hold for an economy with a rigidity in factor price whether or not accompanied by factor immobility. However, growth will not lower welfare at constant or improved terms of trade if factor immobility is the only imperfection existing in the factor market.     

Welfare dependence and recidivism in an era of welfare reform

This study examines the dynamics of welfare programme participation during the initial period (1993–1995) of programme reforms at the state-level in Iowa. The programme changes for the state were remarkably similar to the national reforms implemented in the USA in 1996. Analysis of the Family Investment Program (FIP) participation over the programme's first two years show that, on average, recipients stayed fewer months in the second year compared with the first, although a relatively large share of participants (36%) stayed on for the full two years. Fixed effect and semiparametric duration models are used to examine welfare dependence and recidivism, respectively. Results indicate that income from wages and child support are significant factors in reducing welfare participation. Child support and wage income are crucial in determining the chances of exiting and of staying off the programme, especially during the early months of the exit.     

Fiscal Policy,Economic Integration and Unemployment

In this paper fiscal policy is examined for an open economy characterized by unemployment due to efficiency wages. We allow for capital and firm mobility in a model where the government chooses the level of wage, source-based capital and profit taxation. The taxing choices of governments are analyzed in scenarios which differ with respect to the constraints imposed on the set of available taxes and on the mobility of firms. As a general result, the welfare loss from labor market imperfections increases when tax bases become internationally mobile, which suggests an increasing relevance of domestic labor-market reforms when tax bases become global.     

EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION AND THE NON‐LINEAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WAGE‐PRODUCTIVITY GAP AND UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper studies the relationship between the wage‐productivity gap and the unemployment rate in OECD countries between 1985 and 2007. In particular, we investigate whether differences in the employment protection across countries affect the link between these two variables. We show that the elasticity of unemployment with respect to the wage‐productivity gap is non‐linear and that it switches from a positive to a negative value with stricter employment legislation. From a theoretical point of view, we argue that this result is related to a set of labor market reforms introduced in many OECD countries, which affected the relative strictness of institutions.     

Can a raise in your wage make you worse off? A public goods perspective

We show that a seemingly paradoxical result is possible—an increase in one's wage can reduce one's welfare. Such outcome can occur in an economy populated by agents who value a private good bought using labor income and a public good produced by voluntary time contributions. A raise in the wage (in general, opportunity cost of time) makes each agent substitute away from contributing to the public good, failing to internalize the negative externality imposed on others. The result is a decrease in public good provision. Under quite general conditions, the implied cumulative negative effect on agents' welfare can more than offset the positive effect of the wage raise from increased private good consumption and lead to an equilibrium in which all agents are worse off. Our result is particularly relevant for developing economy settings as it holds for relatively low initial wage levels. We discuss the applicability of our findings to a number of important problems in development, such as market integration, cooperation in common pool resource conservation and social capital.     

Minimum Wage,International Migration And Their Effects On Welfare

This paper evaluates migration policies for an open economy in the presence of unemployment resulting from a minimum wage. Migration between countries is triggered by an expected wage differential which depends both on the market wage and the level of unemployment. Workers therefore can move in either direction. The paper shows that labor outflow raises employment and welfare. Distortion-ridden free trade with this out-migration is therefore better than distortion-ridden free trade with no migration. It might also be better than autarky. Under the scenario, free migration is an alternative to restricted trade often recommended to deal with this type of distortion. Labor inflow on the other hand generates unfavorable terms of trade, raises national and global unemployment, and reduces welfare. [F 2]