KINKED DEMAND CURVE THEORY AND THE MICRO FOUNDATIONS OF KEYNESIAN INVOLUNTARY UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper presents a macroeconomic model in which firms have kinked demand schedules owing to asymmetries in the dissemination of price information amongst consumers. It is then shown that nominal wage reductions may be unable to increase employment, let along secure full employment. The necessary condition is that the lower branch of the kinked marginal revenue schedule be negative. In this case, prices are unresponsive to nominal wage declines, and there is no Pigou effect from lower nominal wages.     

IMPLICIT CONTRACTS, TRADE UNIONS AND INVOLUNTARY UNEMPLOYMENT

Implicit contract theory is used to predict the nature of optimal wage-employment contracts between a firm and a union with a utilitarian maximand, under an uncertain revenue product of labour. By allowing recruitment of outsiders in good states, and allowing unemployment of union members in bad states, a rich set of possible trajectories in wages and employment is achieved. Monotonicity of employment in prices is preserved, whereas monotonicity of wages is not.     

WELFARE MEASUREMENT,INVOLUNTARY UNEMPLOYMENT,AND HETEROGENEITY

This paper concerns welfare measurement in an economy with union wage setting, where the equilibrium is characterized by unemployment. Contrary to results derived in the first best, the current value Hamiltonian is not an exact welfare measure in an economy with unemployment. Instead, the welfare measure also depends on “employment effect,” which are caused by the discrepancy between supply and demand in the labor market. In addition, since unemployment gives rise to heterogeneity, distributional effects will also characterize the welfare measure.     

STICKY WAGE, EFFICIENCY WAGE AND KEYNESIAN UNEMPLOYMENT

Abstract.  This paper provides a model of involuntary unemployment by combining the insights of the sticky wage theory and the efficiency wage theory. It implies that employed workers tend to supply more effort in response to economic downturns. Thus, a negative shock to an economy has intriguing impacts on the unemployment. The model also shows that a negative demand shock may have a relatively small effect on output since changes in work effort serve to partially mitigate the effects of the shock. Moreover, it yields some implications that complement the existing 'work sharing' literature.     

"过密化"理论的经济学评析:宏观证据与微观行为

由于资料、数据的关系,学界对中国在20世纪初期的经济绩效进行了较多的探讨。以黄宗智的"过密化"理论和罗斯基的"增长论"为其两端,展开了激烈的争论。本文在总结国内外相关文献的基础上,首先通过较详实的历史统计资料,对我国1914—1936年的经济发展情况给出了一个简明的支持黄宗智的判断。然后,在微观层次上,进一步讨论了黄宗智总结的过密化现象背后的行为逻辑。本文不同意黄宗智的人口压力和生存压力的解释,认为过密化现象产生的原因中最重要的两点:一是棉花和粮食的相对价格的外生变化,它是小农由种粮向种棉转变的主要原因;二是种棉过程中内生的劳动力的增加,它是家庭农场和经营农场分化的主要原因。     

ESTIMATION AND INFERENCE BY THE METHOD OF PROJECTION MINIMUM DISTANCE: AN APPLICATION TO THE NEW KEYNESIAN HYBRID PHILLIPS CURVE*

The stability of the solution path in a macroeconomic model implies that it admits a Wold representation. This Wold representation can be estimated semi‐parametrically by local projections and used to estimate the model's parameters by minimum distance techniques even when the stochastic process for the solution path is unknown or unconventional. We name this two‐step estimation procedure “projection minimum distance” and investigate its statistical properties for the broad class of models where the mapping between Wold coefficients and parameters is linear. This includes many situations with likelihood score functions nonlinear in the parameters that would otherwise require numerical optimization routines.