Tax Liability and Tax Evasion in a Competitive Labor Market

In a competitive labor market, a change in the legal incidence of a tax on labor will not alter employment if tax obligations are fulfilled. However, this irrelevance result may no longer apply if taxes can be evaded. In particular, a shift from payroll to income taxes will lower employment. This will be the case if workers exhibit constant absolute risk aversion, have a utility function, which is strongly separable in income and the disutility from working, and the penalty for evasion is not proportional to the amount of taxes evaded. Accordingly, tax evasion opportunities can make the legal incidence of a tax on labor an important determinant of its economic incidence.     

Globalization,labor standards,and women's rights: dilemmas of collective (in)action in an interdependent world

This paper challenges the idea that a “social clause” to enforce global labor standards through international trade agreements serves the interests of women export workers in poor countries. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh and empirical studies, the author argues that exploitative as these jobs appear to Western reformers, for many women workers in the South they represent genuine opportunities. Clearly, these women would wish to better their working conditions; yet having no social safety net, and knowing that jobs in the informal economy, their only alternative, offer far worse prospects, women cannot fight for better conditions. Moreover, global efforts to enforce labor standards through trade sanctions may lead to declining employment or to the transfer of jobs to the informal economy. Lacking measures that also address the conditions of workers in this informal economy, demands for “the social clause” will reinforce, and may exacerbate, social inequalities in the labor market.     

Technology,Growth and Employment

The relationship between technology, productivity and employment is a complex one. Increased productivity can lead not just to increased market share, but through falling relative prices can help expand markets, and through product innovation can develop new markets. On the other hand, if demand and hence output does not expand in line with productivity, then an inverse relation between productivity and employment will result. The European Union seeks to improve living standards in Europe by boosting productivity, competitiveness and employment together. How, though, is this to be achieved? This paper looks at the effects on productivity of different forms of investment--in physical capital, in Research & Development, and in human capital. The paper also distinguishes between the high-tech and low-tech sectors. There does appear to be scope for boosting both productivity and employment, particularly in the high tech sectors. But to do so will require increased investment across all three categories--in machinery, in innovation and in people.     

外来劳动力挤占了本地居民的就业机会吗??

城市就业包容性的提升是实现城镇化发展的重要内容,而异质外来移民对原有居民的就业机会将产生不同影响.文章运用动态监测数据,按劳动力的技能水平、所属行业和流入时期分析城市劳动力市场的就业包容性,衡量人力资本等因素在异质外来劳动力就业过程中的作用机制.研究发现：(1)总体而言,人力资本的差异性取代传统的行业壁垒已成为获取就业机会的主要因素.(2)进一步使用工具变量,对劳动力组群的就业决定模型进行估计发现,外来劳动力占比每上升10％,城市原有劳动力的就业率将下降0．04－1．99个百分点,表现为外来劳动力对城市原有低技能劳动力就业率的影响并不明显,但对高技能劳动力的就业率产生显著冲击,且此现象在部分高进入门槛行业尤为明显.(3)城市劳动力市场对不同时期流入的高技能组劳动力的包容性显著低于低技能组,高技能组劳动力之间存在更高的替代性.(4)与本地劳动力的就业率相比,新进入的外来劳动力对前期进入的外来劳动力的就业率的影响会更大,且这种影响同样会随着受教育程度的提高而递增.因此,在完善就业市场的同时,应在就业的前置和后置环节制定更有针对性的人才培养机制和引入措施.     

Cash Transfers to the Poor and the Labor Market: An Equilibrium Analysis

This paper studies the effects of cash transfers to the poor on the labor market. This is investigated in a matching model with endogenous labor market participation and job destruction. Depending on their productivity, workers might want to stay in the job, become unemployed, or leave the labor market; in addition, workers out of the labor force might decide to search for a job. Cash transfers are introduced to all agents with income below a given level. Two qualitative results are found: (i) The size of cash transfers has a negative effect on the employment rate, but an ambiguous effect on the unemployment rate; and (ii) the coverage of this welfare program has a positive effect on the employment rate, and an ambiguous effect on the unemployment rate. The numerical simulations also show that: (i) if the government target is to reduce inequality and poverty, the more efficient policy is to increase the level of benefits instead of increasing the eligibility of the program; (ii) compared with a welfare program that condition eligibility to labor market participation, the “unconditional” cash transfer program has a stronger impact on inequality and poverty, but with a reduction in labor market participation and output.     

Employment and Productivity Growth in Europe and North America: The Impact of Labor Market Institutions

In this paper, we examine long-run employment and productivity growth in the major economies of North America and Europe from 1960 to the early 1990s. We develop a model in which output growth is determined by the growth of aggregate demand, and the relative contributions of employment and productivity growth to the growth of output depend on country specific labor market institutions. We find that institutions that promote collective bargaining, employment security and social protection have roughly equal and opposite effects on employment growth (negative) and productivity growth (positive), giving rise to an inverse relationship between these variables. The welfare implications of this finding are that labor market deregulation could result in more work and greater inequality and insecurity for workers, without significantly increasing the rate of economic growth.     

Informal employment relationships and the labor market: Is there segmentation in Ukraine?

One of the most important factors that determine individuals’ quality of life and wellbeing is their position in the labor market and the type of jobs that they hold. When workers are rationed out of the formal segment of the labor market against their will, i.e., the labor market is segmented, their quality of life is limited, and their wellbeing is reduced. When they can freely choose between a formal or informal employment relationship, i.e., the labor market is integrated, their wellbeing can reach high levels even in the presence of informal employment. We, therefore, test whether the Ukrainian labor market is segmented along the formal-informal divide, slicing the data by gender and age. The analysis that we perform consist in the analysis of short-term and medium-term transitions between five employment states, unemployment and inactivity. We also analyze wage gaps of mean hourly earnings and across the entire hourly earnings distribution, controlling for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. According to our results segmentation is present for dependent employees: for a large part of informal employees informal employment is used as a waiting stage to enter formal salaried employment and is not voluntarily chosen. As far as self-employment is concerned the evidence is mixed regarding segmentation in the Ukrainian labor market. This heterogeneity in outcomes implies that not all informal work is associated with a low quality of life and reduced wellbeing in post-transition economies.     

正视农村剩余劳动力转移的挑战

中国在10年左右的周期内农村剩余劳动力转出的总规模需要达到1．5亿到两亿人。城乡劳动力对就业岗位的竞争正在趋于激化。大中型城市将是新增就业岗位的主要来源。就业岗位正在成为国际竞争中最稀缺的资源。就业优先应当成为最重要的战略取向。劳动力市场发育要优先于其他要素的市场发育,就业岗位增加要优先于社会收入水平提高。就业政策的重点是要防止供求不平衡导致交易价格被压低到供给成本之下,同时保证有限的就业机会优先分配给最优秀、最有效率的群体。     

The dynamic impact of immigration on natives' labor market outcomes: Evidence from Israel

This paper studies the short and medium run impact of highly skilled immigrants from the Former Soviet Union to Israel on natives' wages and employment. If immigrants are relatively good substitutes for native workers, the impact of immigration will be largest immediately upon the immigrants' arrival, and may become smaller as the labor market adjusts to the supply shock. Conversely, if immigrants upon arrival are poor substitutes for natives, the initial effect of immigration is small, and increases over time as immigrants acquire local labor market skills and compete with native workers. We empirically examine these alternative hypotheses using data from Israel between 1989 and 1999.We find that wages of both men and women are negatively correlated with the fraction of immigrants with little local experience in a labor market segment. A 10 percent increase in the share of immigrants lowers natives' wages in the short run by 1–3 percent, but this effect dissolves after 4–7 years. This result is robust to a variety of different segmentations of the labor market, to the inclusion of cohort effects, and to different dynamic structures in the residual term of the wage equation. On the other hand, we do not find any effect of immigration on employment, neither in the short nor in the medium run.     

The effect of corruption on capital accumulation

This paper examines the effect of corruption in infrastructure development as well as in capital and labor markets, on capital accumulation and output in an overlapping generations model. Corruption affects income redistribution, government expenditures on infrastructure, firms’ incentive to invest, and workers’ incentive to supply labor. An increase in corruption in infrastructure development decreases capital accumulation and output if the decrease in the savings of ordinary workers is sufficiently large. An increase in corruption in the capital market decreases capital accumulation and output. An increase in corruption in labor market decreases capital accumulation and output when labor supply is completely inelastic. Simulation results based on plausible parameter values indicate that an increase in corruption in the labor market will also reduce labor supply, capital accumulation and output.      

劳动力转移与工资差距同时扩大的“悖论”研究——基于市场分割的视角

从市场分割的角度出发,对劳动力流动与工资差距同时扩大的"悖论"和中国市场化过程中的"迁移谜题"进行了深入分析,认为劳动力市场的地区分割和城乡分割导致了劳动者之间必然存在工资收入差距,而且即使存在劳动力转移,也不能使工资差距收敛。这种制度性偏好导致的劳动力市场分割,对劳动者工资收入差距的扩大起了推波助澜的作用,因此构建全国统一、自由竞争的劳动力市场是非常必要的,并提出有关的政策建议。     

Multinational Firms and Labor Market Pooling

In the presence of increasing specialization of workers it becomes more and more difficult for firms to find the most suitable workers. In such an environment a multinational enterprise (MNE) has an advantage because it can exchange workers between plants in different countries. Recruiting from the home and foreign plant leads to a larger labor market pool for an MNE, reducing the mismatch of its workforce. This paper analyzes the consequences of this advantage for production, employment, prices and wages. In line with recent empirical results, we find that the additional ability to recruit workers from the home and foreign labor market leads to lower mismatch, higher average productivity of workers, lower prices, higher output, and higher employment of a plant of an MNE as compared with a national firm, while the wage‐effects depend on firm productivity.     

Making Labor Flexible: The Recomposition of Tijuana's Maquiladora Female Labor Force

This article revisits the debate over the benefits of export-oriented manufacturing employment for women by taking up Linda Lim's (1990) critique that such research is often biased in its methods and conclusions. Using a sample of 198 women workers from the 1993 Labor Trajectories Survey, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis to test whether the social and demographic characteristics of the female maquiladora labor force influence their position in the labor market. I find that maquiladoras in Tijuana, Mexico, employ married women, women with children, and women with low levels of education who constitute a low-wage sector of the labor force with few other employment alternatives. In the drive to keep production costs low, multinational manufacturers have tapped into this low-wage labor force, thereby taking advantage of women's labor market disadvantages and making a labor force willing to accept more "flexible" terms of employment.     

Employment and wages with sector-specific shocks and worker moral hazard

We study a model of worker moral hazard with identical workers and where sectoral prices are subject to stochastic shocks. When firms are short-run maximizers, employment is shown to be distorted downward relative to the case of certain prices, and more so the higher is the current price. This implies that employment is relatively insensitive to sectoral output-price changes, and that average employment and output are reduced when price volatility increases. When firms can commit to future employment levels, employment is greater in low-demand states (implying labor hoarding), and thus even less sensitive to shocks, while average employment is less distorted downward by uncertainty. The model gives a new explanation of how increased sector-specific volatility can lead to output losses, and of the possibility of negative comovements of unemployment and turnover.     

Flexible Labor Regulations and Informality in Egypt

Do more flexible labor market regulations reduce informal employment in formal firms? This paper examines the effects of changes in labor regulations on the incidence of formal employment. Using the case of Egypt, we study the effects of the introduction of more flexible labor regulations in 2003 on the probability that non‐contractual workers will be granted a formal employment contract. To identify the effect of the law and control for potential confounding factors, we use a difference‐in‐difference estimator that measures the difference in the pre‐ and post‐law probability of obtaining a formal contract across a treatment group of non‐contractual workers initially employed in formal firms and a comparison group of non‐contractual workers initially employed in informal firms. The latter serve as a useful comparison group since informal firms are unlikely to formalize as a result of the law, so that the only way their workers can become formal is to move to another firm. Our findings show that the passage of the new labor law did in fact increase the probability of transitioning to formal employment for non‐contractual workers employed in formal firms by about 3–3.5 percentage points, or the equivalent of at least a fifth of informal workers in formal firms.     

Labor market reforms, job instability, and the flexibility of the employment relationship

We endogenize separation in a search model of the labor market and allow for bargaining over the continuation of employment relationships following productivity shocks to take place under asymmetric information. In such a setting separation may occur even if continuation of the employment relationship is privately efficient for workers and firms. We show that reductions in the cost of separation, owing for example to a reduction in firing taxes, lead to an increase in job instability and, when separation costs are initially high, may be welfare decreasing for workers and firms. We furthermore show that, in response to an exogenous reduction in firing taxes, workers and firms may switch from rigid to flexible employment contracts, which further amplifies the increase in job instability caused by policy reform.     

解雇成本、市场分割与《劳动合同法》——基于理论模型对《劳动合同法》争议的新解释

基于理论模型的研究发现,《劳动合同法》有助于知识员工和知识密集型企业达成"双赢",但是可能导致体力员工和劳动密集型企业"双输"。《劳动合同法》之所以备受争议,其对低端劳工市场的消极影响是主因,外界经济环境恶化带来的经营压力和就业压力是辅因,而且,主辅因的结合打乱了政府预期的经济转型之路。     

Competition and the capital-labor conflict

This paper analyzes the distributional effects of changes in the intensity of product market competition. The focus is on the interaction between imperfect competition in product markets and bargaining in the labor market. The main result is that, while a uniform intensification of product market competition increases employment, it may cause real wages to fall, in the short run as well as in the long run. This is especially likely if labor market regulations are favorable to workers. Therefore, product market and labor market regulations tend to reinforce each other politically, and compensatory fiscal transfers may be needed in order to enact employment-enhancing deregulation policies.     

环境规制对城镇二元劳动力就业的影响*——基于劳动力市场分割视角

城镇劳动力市场分割决定了环境规制对二元劳动力就业影响存在差异性。基于环境规制对城镇二元劳动力就业影响理论分析,本文首先利用1998—2014年30省份面板数据实证分析了环境规制对城镇二元劳动力就业影响的差异性,进一步采用面板门限模型,考察了环境规制对城镇农民工就业影响的劳动力市场分割门槛效应。研究发现：（1）环境规制对城镇农民工就业负面冲击大于对城镇本地劳动力就业冲击;（2）环境规制对农民工城镇就业存在显著的劳动力市场分割门槛效应,当劳动力市场分割程度高于2002时,环境规制对农民工城镇就业抑制效应为-0116;当劳动力市场分割介于1199到2002之间时,抑制效应较大程度下降,为-0042;而当劳动力市场分割程度小于1199时,抑制效应转变为正向促进效应,为0106。未来应继续深化户籍制度改革,打破劳动力市场分割,加强技能培训,提高人力资本积累,降低环境规制对农民工城镇就业抑制效应,进一步提高城镇化水平,有效发挥城镇化经济增长效应。     

Can Countries with Severe Labor Market Frictions Gain from Globalization?

The interaction between increased Southern trade integration (globalization) and labor market frictions is analyzed in a dynamic general-equilibrium North–South nonscale growth model with endogenous Northern innovation and endogenous Southern imitation. The qualitative employment, growth, and relative-wage effects of globalization are shown to depend crucially on the degree of Northern labor market frictions. I demonstrate that only Northern countries with particularly large labor market adjustment costs for both firms and workers benefit from globalization in terms of permanently lower unemployment, temporarily faster growth, and permanently higher wages. This is because of the resulting general-equilibrium feedback effects of Northern labor market frictions that deter Southern imitation incentives. The result does not imply the recommendation to increase Northern labor market rigidities, but it challenges the common belief that labor market flexibility helps Northern countries to better adjust to the "globalization threat" coming from the South.