Modern slavery,corruption, and hysteresis

We develop a model where firms profit from coercing workers into employment under conditions violating national law and international conventions and where corrupt public servants prosecuting violations of the rules are willing to turn cases down if bribed. Firms and public servants are heterogeneous. Firms benefit differently from the use of coerced labour whereas public servants have differing intrinsic motivations to behave honestly. Moreover, there is a socially determined warm-glow effect: honest public servants feel better if their colleagues are honest too. The determination of bribes is modelled via Nash bargaining between the firm and the corrupt civil servant. It is shown that multiple equilibria and hysteresis are possible. Depending on history, an economy may be trapped in a locally stable high-corruption, high-slavery equilibrium and major changes in government policies may be necessary to move the economy out of this equilibrium. Moreover, we show that trade bans that are effective in reducing slavery in the export industry tend to raise slavery in the remainder of the economy. It is possible that this leakage effect dominates the reduction of slavery in the export sector.     

论环境民事公益诉讼制度

近年来随着我国经济的腾飞,工业化进程的加快,生态环境遭到严重破坏。依据民事诉讼法和民事实体法的规定,受害者可以提起环境污染侵权民事诉讼。由于单个受害者的经济实力以及诉讼能力远不及污染企业,为了弥补受害者个体诉讼能力的不足,我国可以参照西方国家的环境公益民事诉讼制度,赋予环境公益组织有限的诉权,给予他们适格原告的身份,提起环境民事公益诉讼,充分保护广大民众的环境公共利益。     

Political aspects of household finance: debt,wage bargaining,and macroeconomic (in)stability

The recent literature has shown that income inequality is one of the main causes of borrowing and debt accumulation by working households. This article explores the possibility that household indebtedness is an important cause of rising income inequality. If workers experience rising debt burdens, their cost of job loss may rise if they need labor-market income to continue borrowing and servicing existing debt. This, in turn, will reduce their bargaining power and increase income inequality, inducing workers to borrow more to maintain consumption standards, and so creating a vicious circle of rising inequality, job insecurity, and indebtedness. We believe that these dynamics may have contributed to observed simultaneous increases in income inequality and household debt prior to the recent financial crisis. To explore the two-way interaction between inequality and debt, we develop an employment rent framework that explicitly considers the impact of workers’ indebtedness on their perceived cost of job loss. This is embedded in a neo-Kaleckian macro model in which inequality spurs debt accumulation that contributes to household consumption spending and hence demand formation. Our analysis suggests that (a) workers’ borrowing behavior plays a crucial role in understanding the character of demand and growth regimes; (b) debt and workers’ borrowing behavior play an important role in the labor market by influencing workers’ bargaining power; and (c) through such channels, workers’ borrowing behavior can be a decisive factor in the determination of macroeconomic (in)stability.     

国有企业外部人控制：—个寻租视角

国有企业的公共物品性导致国有企业蜕变为一个多重寻租网络。政府作为国有企业的外部控制人,借助政企不分、个人权力的无约束和责任体系弱化、多层委托与多重代理等体制性弊病的掩饰,与国有企业代理人合谋寻租,国有企业的"内部人控制"应运而生。可以说,国有企业若不存在"外部人控制","内部人控制"几乎不可能产生;国有企业若存在"外部人控制","内部人控制"便几乎一定会产生。"外部人控制"产生的必要前提是国有企业泛化为公共物品,而国有企业泛化为公共物品,必须具备以下条件:包括存在可供寻租的租金、存在制度性的寻租通道、存在租金和信息的传递系统。国有企业外部人控制具有极大的危害,主要表现为降低企业家的生产性努力水平和使得企业家行为寻租化。解决问题的关键在于进行产权改革,使产权得到清晰界定并得到有效保护,同时不会出现事后寻租的现象。     

Chasing the carrot – actual working hours of fixed-term employees

Fixed-term contracts can serve as a screening device to reveal the true ability of workers. To achieve promotion to a permanent position, fixed-term employees have an incentive to prove themselves by providing higher effort than competing co-workers by means of longer working hours. Applying fixed effects estimation to the German register data, we find that employees work longer hours on fixed-term contracts. This effect is stronger for labour market entrants and employees that are newly hired. We further show that actual hours of work are particularly large when there is competition among co-workers to receive promotion to a permanent position.     

农产品价格与农民收入增长关系的动态分析

实证分析表明,在1978～2010年的样本区间内,农产品生产价格上涨对我国农民收入水平的提高没有显著作用。因此,在出台提高农产品价格的政策选择上,应持谨慎的态度。农业生产资料价格上涨对农民收入增长具有较微弱的负向影响。切实控制农业生产资料价格的非理性上涨,应是政府的长期政策取向。而加大政府对农业的支持力度,建立和完善符合国际惯例和中国国情的农业综合补贴支持体系,推进农业产业化以加快农村劳动力的转移,不失为解决农民增收困难问题的重要途径。     

An essay on the biological origin of producing surplus value by human labor

In this essay, we explore the origins of the ability to produce surplus value through human labor. The main hypothesis is that the safety factor for energy capacity in humans determines the surplus value of human labor in human societies. We estimate the safety factor for Homo sapiens to be around 2.78. This is based on the rise of the encephalization quotient from 2.5 in Australopithecus africanus to 5.8 in H. sapiens, and we assume this rise is matched by a rise in the safety factor from 1.2 to 2.78. Being a communal species compels human individuals to produce both their personal and their community’s energy need. The possible correlation between Dunbar’s number and the safety factor of energy production capacity provides a very essential feature of human labor, namely “surplus value”. The average labor activity of a modern human is sufficient to provide energy for two to three people’s energy burden in a community. Human labor not only produces the energy for survival of an individual but also produces a surplus due to the safety factor. Therefore, work activity of an individual enables them to supply more than they need for themselves as a value.     

Is the value of environmental goods sensitive to the public funding scheme? Evidence from a marine restoration programme in the Black Sea

In this paper, we conduct choice experiments in Turkey and Ukraine on the valuation of a marine restoration programme in the Black Sea, to examine whether the value of environmental goods is sensitive to the source of public financing. We contribute to the debate on the optimal composition of public expenditure, an issue that can be controversial in times of financial crises. We discriminate between two funding regimes through the reallocation of public spending. The first proposes financing the marine restoration programme by reducing public expenditure for investments in renewable energy, and the second by reducing public expenditure for civil servants’ training. The results reveal that the marginal value of public money depends on the funding source. Furthermore, attribute values are sensitive to the trade-off implied by the funding scheme. The magnitude of the results differs in the two countries considered, because of their heterogeneity in political and cultural dimensions.     

Analysing wage differentials when workers maximize the return to human capital investment

The analysis of the determinants of differences in wages across workers has traditionally relied on the estimation of average earnings functions. In this article, we propose a new theoretical model where it is the workers who decide the amount they wish to invest in human capital, taking into account the costs of acquiring those skills, for the purpose of maximizing earnings. In this model, both human capital and marginal productivity are likely to be influenced by the individual’s (unobserved) characteristics such as ability or motivation, potentially giving rise to endogeneity problems. In this context, the empirical implementation of our theoretical model allows us, under certain assumptions, to obtain consistent estimates even under the assumption of endogeneity. We present an empirical application to the education sector using data from the Spanish Structure of Earnings Survey 2010. Our results show that females and workers in the private education sector face more difficulties in achieving their maximum potential wage.     

Competition and the cost of health care

Previous studies of the underreporting of income for tax purposes have used private employees as the benchmark to which other groups’ compliance was measured. In this paper it is suggested that there are a number of circumstances when there will be an incentive for private employees and their employers to collude to understate employee wages and salaries for purposes of taxation. The existence of high marginal tax rates of income tax combined with high social security payroll taxes are the typical conditions that stimulate this behaviour. These conditions are present in North Cyprus. This paper examines a rich source of household consumption expenditure and income data for North Cyprus that allows one to separate out the consumption expenditures made by the self-employed, private employees and civil servants over specific periods of time. From the comparison of consumption expenditures on food by these three groups it is possible to estimate how much self-employed and the private employees understated their incomes as compared to the civil servants. It is found that in North Cyprus private employees understate their incomes by approximately the same proportion of their incomes as do the self-employed.     

公务员地区之间工资关系研究*

目前我国公务员工资地区差距较大。依据客观的数据和科学的办法,建立合理的地区之间工资关系,缩小地区之间的公务员工资收入差距,这是我国公务员工资制度改革的一项重要内容。本文讨论了地区差距的相关理论,研究了公务员工资地区差距的特点,考察了公务员地区工资关系的历史演变,分析了目前公务员地区工资关系存在的问题,提出了建立合理公务员地区工资关系的几点思考。     

Development and inefficient regulation under the threat of revolution

This paper considers a model of strategic interaction between a rent-seeking elite ruling class and a disenfranchised working class, whose ability to revolt constrains the elite’s choice of economic institutions. The disenfranchised are imperfectly informed about the economy’s productive capacity, an asymmetry which the elite may exploit to implement distortionary economic regulations to create rent in excess of that which can be generated in a relatively more efficient manner. Our main result is that, the manner in which the elite will extract rent depends on the economy’s level of development. We demonstrate that below a threshold development level the elite choose relatively inefficient regulation and above the threshold development level the elite choose relatively efficient taxation.     

军民融合视角下中国军队院校非现役文职人员的配置优化研究

文职人员制度历史悠久。从世界主要国家来看,军队院校是聘用文职人员的主要机构之一。随着中国军队编制体制改革不断加深,非现役文职人员应运而生,并在院校中受到极大重视。中国在"十二五"规划中明确提出要逐步建立中国特色军民融合式发展体系。统筹军地院校人力资源,促进军队院校非现役文职人员科学合理配置,对于建立中国特色军民融合式发展体系具有重要意义。以非现役文职人员配置优化为切入点,总结借鉴世界主要国家文职人员队伍建设经验特点,针对中国军队院校非现役文职人员配置存在的主要问题,就如何实现中国军队院校非现役文职人员的配置优化,提高中国军队院校非现役文职人员使用效率提出相应对策建议,以推进中国特色军事力量体系建设。     

Marriages are Made in Kitchens: The European Marriage Pattern and Life-Cycle Servanthood in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam

Due to methodological difficulties of historical research on women’s labor, little is known of women’s contribution to household incomes in preindustrial economies. This article is the first to use domestic servants’ wages, as documented in account books from the period 1752–1805, to estimate the capital that women could accumulate during their years of service before marriage. As such, it offers a new perspective on women’s contribution to household resources. Results show that servants working for the most well-off households in eighteenth-century Amsterdam could save a marriage budget that was between one-third and half of the capital that an unskilled man could save in the same amount of time. Furthermore, servants’ wages would in theory have been sufficient to support a family of four at the subsistence level, illustrating that women’s wages and potential savings cannot be ignored.     

略论我国公务员流动管理信息系统的构建

公务员流动的种种不良特征对现行的公务员流动管理模式提出了挑战。在反思现行公务员流动管理现状的基础上,把管理信息系统引入到公务员流动管理当中,并结合公务员流动过程、管理本质、信息交流、系统自有特性等方面对公务员流动管理信息系统进行功能设计和结构分析;同时简要介绍构建系统必需的技术条件。     

Should civil servants be restricted in wage bargaining? A mixed-duopoly approach

Should civil servants (employees in the public sector) be allowed to bargain collectively? To answer this question, we construct a model of unionized mixed duopoly and examine the regulatory framework of public institutions, especially focusing on a wage regulation imposed on the public firm. The wage regulation turns out to yield critical welfare implications as it gives rise to two opposing strategic effects: the wage regulation intensifies downstream-market competition while it loosens upstream-market competition. The overall welfare effect is ambiguous, depending crucially on the degree of product differentiation between the firms. We also show that, in contrast to the popular belief, granting the right to bargain collectively to civil servants would not necessarily help them because they tend to demand excessively high wages when they are allowed to bargain collectively. Finally, we briefly discuss a new perspective on the role of profit motives in public institutions when the wages are determined endogenously.     

Inequality,public good provision and the composition of trade

This paper investigates the effect of trade liberalization on the provision of public goods and shows that inequality also plays a vital role here. Public goods help enhance the productivity of firms, lower prices and raise profitability. The provision of public goods has different effects in closed and open economies. In an open economy, the impact of productive spending on increasing profit is stronger. Consequently, the opening up of the economy shifts the benefits of productive public goods from consumers to firms. As the median voters’, share of the firm’s profit rises, public goods become more appealing and flourish. Consequently, the manufacturing export is boosted by a rise in productivity.     

Redistribution in the age of austerity: evidence from Europe 2006–2013

We examine the relationship between changes in a country’s public sector fiscal position on inequality at the top and bottom of the income distribution during the age of austerity from 2006 to 2013. We use a parametric Lorenz curve model and Gini-like indices of inequality as our measures to assess distributional changes. Based on Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and IMF data for 12 European countries, we find that more severe adjustments to the cyclically adjusted primary balance (i.e., more austerity) are associated with a more unequal distribution of income driven by rising inequality at the top. The data also weakly suggests a decrease in inequality at the bottom. The distributional impact of austerity measures reflects the reliance on regressive policies and likely produces increased incentives for rent-seeking while reducing incentives for workers to increase productivity.     

Welfare effects of automatic-IRAs

Several states require employers who do not offer retirement benefits to automatically enroll their employees in individual retirement accounts (IRAs). We quantify the welfare effects of this program for individuals who follow a rule-of-thumb to make savings decisions. We find workers who save more than 3% would be willing to give up 0%–1.4% of lifetime consumption to avoid an IRA. We also consider a fully rational model with credit frictions, stochastic income and pre-retirement withdrawals, and costly IRA opt-outs. We find that being enrolled in an IRA is most likely to benefit workers who do not borrow during the life-cycle.     

Dictators and oligarchs: A dynamic theory of contested property rights

In an economy with weak economic and political institutions, the major institutional choices are made strategically by oligarchs and dictators. The conventional wisdom presumes that as rent-seeking is harmful for oligarchs themselves, institutions such as property rights will emerge spontaneously. We explicitly model a dynamic game between the oligarchs and a dictator who can contain rent-seeking. The oligarchs choose either a weak dictator (who can be overthrown by an individual oligarch) or a strong dictator (who can only be replaced via a consensus of oligarchs). In equilibrium, no dictator can commit to both: (i) protecting the oligarchs' property rights from the other oligarchs and (ii) not expropriating oligarchs himself. We show that a weak dictator does not limit rent-seeking. A strong dictator does reduce rent-seeking but also expropriates individual oligarchs. We show that even though eliminating rent-seeking is Pareto optimal, weak dictators do get appointed in equilibrium and rent-seeking continues. This outcome is especially likely when economic environment is highly volatile.