Gender differences in early-career wage growth

In Finnish manufacturing, the gender wage gap more than doubles during the first ten years in the labour market. This paper studies the factors contributing to the gender gap in early-career wage growth. The analysis shows that the size of the gender gap in average wage growth varies with mobility status, the gap being higher with employer changes compared to wage growth within firms. Several explanations for the gender gap in wage growth based on human capital theory and theory of compensating wage differentials are considered. However, much of the gap in wage growth remains unexplained. The distributional analysis of the wage growth shows that the female wage penalty increases significantly as we move along the conditional wage growth distribution, the increase being stronger with employer changes compared to within-firm wage growth.     

The effect of match quality and specific experience on career decisions and wage growth

This paper constructs and estimates a career decision model where individuals search for both careers and firms that are a good match for their idiosyncratic skills using the NLSY79. It departs from previous papers in that career mobility decisions and participation decisions are explicitly modeled. I find substantial returns to career-specific experience. However, college graduates' wage grows little through career-match upgrading, which results in a lower incidence of career changes than high school graduates. The finding suggests that college graduates learn about their suitable careers before they enter a labor market.     

Forecast revisions of Mexican inflation and GDP growth

We analyze the forecasts of inflation and GDP growth contained in the Banco de México’s Survey of Professional Forecasters for the period 1995–2009. The forecasts are for the current and the following year, and comprise an unbalanced three-dimensional panel with multiple individual forecasters, target years, and forecast horizons. The fixed-event nature of the forecasts enables us to examine their efficiency by looking at the revision process. The panel structure allows us to control for aggregate shocks and to construct a measure of the news that impacted expectations in the period under study. We find that respondents anchor to their initial forecasts, updating their revisions smoothly as they receive more information. In addition, they do not seem to use publicly-known information in an efficient manner. These inefficiencies suggest clear areas of opportunity for improving the accuracy of the forecasts, for instance by taking into account the positive autocorrelation found in forecast revisions.     

Firm-specific wage growth and changes in the labor market for managers

This paper analyzes recent changes in the employment relationships between managers and firms. In both Becker's and Lazear's models of firm-specific wage growth, compensation is deferred from early in an employee's tenure with a firm until later in the contract. The deferred compensation bonds the worker to the firm. Based on cross-sectional data from Current Population Surveys, rates of firm-specific wage growth are estimated for the managerial labor market. The findings show that the rate of wage growth that is firm-specific for managers in manufacturing industries declined significantly during the early 1980s. It is estimated, for example, that a manager with 12 years of tenure in a manufacturing firm enjoyed, on average, a 25% wage premium in 1979 over an otherwise similar manager who was a new hire in a firm. By 1983 the firm-specific wage premium for a manager with 12 years of tenure was only 5%. These changes represent a significant reduction in the strength of the employment bond between firms and managers, and a reduction in the incentive effects previously enjoyed by firms from the use of deferred-compensation schemes. This change is consistent with the significant increases in the displacement rates of managers that occurred during the 1980s.     

The consequences of minimum wage legislation

A policy which could raise wages in the low-wage labour market without job losses would be remarkable. Employers will respond to a wage floor not only by changing the employment level but by altering the other components of job packages. The'new economics'of the minimum wage largely ignores such effects.     

欲望升腾中的困惑——中国家电连锁企业如何做强

这几年,中国家电连锁业的发展速度令人惊愕,以至于业内人士用欧洲历史上的“圈地运动”一词来形容,但问题恰恰出在这里。据商务部商业改革发展司统计,2005年国内家电连锁企业国美、苏宁、永乐和五星的门店数量飞速增长,其中最高的增长了88.1%,最低的增长了60.8%。进入2006年,经过企业间的购并,虽然各自的门店数量都有变化,但总体扩张的势头未见衰减。然而,与大气派的排兵布阵相比,中国家电连锁企业的整体效益却在下滑,主要原因是成本的增速超过了销售收入的增速。如果说这是家电连锁业的“内忧”,那么它的“外患”则更甚。一面是消费者对家…     

The commuting time paradox

We examine the conditions for the ‘commuting time paradox’ which states that the average commuting time does not vary between different periods. We develop therefore an equilibrium job search model with endogenously chosen commuting costs. Presuming wage bargaining between workers and firms, the optimally chosen maximum commuting costs jointly maximise the worker's and firm's payoffs. We demonstrate that when productivity levels increase over time, average commuting costs and average wages both increase, which affects the optimally chosen commuting time. We establish the conditions under which the paradox holds.     

The discourse of inflation accounting

The value of a share is given by the dividend discount model as a simple function of future dividends; but the actual determination of the share price is rarely based upon the direct estimation of these future dividends. A ranking of the valuation models used by analysts and fund managers shows a preference for ‘unsophisticated’ valuation using, for example, the dividend yield rather than the dividend discount model. This finding is shown to depend upon the practical difficulty of using currently-available information to forecast future cash flows. This difficulty limits the quantitative basis of valuations to short forecast horizons, while the subjective, qualitative estimation of terminal value assumes great importance. Crucially, both analysts and fund managers use their own assessment of management quality to underpin the estimation of terminal value, on the basis that superior quality causes outperformance and that, whereas management quality can be assessed now, future performance itself is unobservable. Linked with this and with information asymmetry, valuation is a dynamic, company-specific process, focused on personal communication with management and embodying ongoing signalling and implicit contracting, using both dividends and other variables. This method of valuation causes formal valuation models such as the dividend yield to play only a limited role. They offer a benchmark of relative price differences, which serves as a basis from which to conduct subjective, company-specific analysis and to make investment decisions; but valuation models are not used exclusively, in themselves, to value shares.     

The importance of firms in wage determination

Firms are central to many theories of the labor market. However, the actual degree to which firms shape the structure of wages is still not well understood. This paper investigates (i) the importance of firms in explaining wage differences across individuals and industries, and (ii) how the nature of interfirm mobility – job-to-job vs. job-unemployment-job – affects the relative importance of firms and workers in wage determination. Results indicate that (i) firms are much more important in explaining the variance of average wages across industries rather than across individuals, and (ii) using job-to-job transitions to identify the firm's contribution to the wage rate reduces the importance of firm wage policies in explaining wage differences by as much as 50%.     

The migration function and the Todaro paradox

"The purpose of this paper is to present a microeconomic foundation of the migration function and to discuss the impact of an increase in the job creation rate on migration and urban unemployment. Each rural worker must estimate his expected urban income on the basis of his own expected numbers of both newly created jobs and migrants during the coming period. Workers whose expected urban income is greater than the rural one decide to migrate, while those who estimate smaller urban income stay on." The geographical focus is on developing countries.     

The effect of the minimum wage on employment and hours

This study examines the effect of minimum wage increases on teen hours of work and employment using both state- and individual-level panel data in the US. The state-level results indicate that minimum wage increases may lower employment rates but do not adversely affect hours among either working teens or all teens. The individual-level results do not indicate that minimum wage increases have a significant negative effect on hours worked by low-wage teens who are likely to be affected by a minimum wage increase. The results suggest that low-wage teens are less likely to remain employed, relative to high-wage teens, when the minimum wage is raised. However, this adverse effect disappears when these low-wage teens are compared to other low-wage teens during periods when the minimum wage did not increase.     

The effect of money-growth and interest-rate variability upon inflation

This paper analyzes the effect of money-growth and interest-rate variability upon inflation. Unlike prior studies, the reduced-form inflation equation tested is derived from a closed-economy IS-LM model with an expectations-augmented Phillips Curve. The post-1979 period found money-growth variability to have a positive and marginally significant effect upon inflation.     

The entropy paradox and the distribution of urban population

This paper presents an empirical application of an information theoretic approach to spatial hypothesis testing. Following the lead of Batty [1] this study employs the concept of expected information to test hypotheses concerning the distribution of urban population and population density in San Antonio for the years 1960 and 1970. Cast for the first time in a longitudinal context, major concerns of this work are the relative advantages, both theoretical and methodological, of certain entropy measures. Specifically, comparisons are made between the Shannon and the Kullback formulations. In this context of comparison, problems closely linked to what has been called the “entropy paradox” are identified and explained, suggesting important qualitative differences between these two measures.     

Business cycles and wage rigidity

In this paper, we analyze the impact of downward wage rigidity on the labor market dynamics. We shows that imposing downward wage rigidity in a matching model with cyclical fluctuations in productivity, endogenous match-destruction, and on-the-job search, quits are procyclical and layoffs countercyclical. Using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), we provide evidence that downward wage rigidity is empirically relevant in ten European countries. Finally, we show that layoffs are countercyclical and quits are procyclical, as predicted by the model.     

An efficiency wage approach to reconciling the wage curve and the Phillips curve

This study develops an efficiency wage model that generates a wage curve at the regional level and a Phillips curve at the national level, under the assumption that workers' efficiency depends on both regional and aggregate labor market conditions. An equation relating wages to unemployment and lagged wages is derived from the profit-maximizing behavior of firms, and it is demonstrated that the coefficient on lagged wages is less than 1 with regional data but equals 1 with aggregate data. In addition, there is an equilibrium relationship between unemployment and wages at the regional level, but not at the aggregate level.     

太阳照常升起

从辉煌到失落再到重新崛起,Sun经历了诸多的商业磨难。进入后创始人时代的Sun又能否保持其昔日的光芒呢?     

Evaluating predictive densities of US output growth and inflation in a large macroeconomic data set

We evaluate conditional predictive densities for US output growth and inflation using a number of commonly-used forecasting models that rely on large numbers of macroeconomic predictors. More specifically, we evaluate how well conditional predictive densities based on the commonly-used normality assumption fit actual realizations out-of-sample. Our focus on predictive densities acknowledges the possibility that, although some predictors can cause point forecasts to either improve or deteriorate, they might have the opposite effect on higher moments. We find that normality is rejected for most models in some dimension according to at least one of the tests we use. Interestingly, however, combinations of predictive densities appear to be approximated correctly by a normal density: the simple, equal average when predicting output growth, and the Bayesian model average when predicting inflation.     

Repressed inflation and pseudoinnovations

Innovation was and still is the catalyst of the market-oriented economy. More than seventy years ago, it was Joseph A. Schumpeter who made innovation the centerpiece of a developing economy. Schumpeter's innovations took six specific forms: producing new commodities, organizing technological change in the production of commodities already in existence, opening up of new markets, discovering new sources of raw materials, standardizing work and improving handling of materials, and setting up new management organization, i.e., breaking up an existing monopoly or setting up a new one. Schumpeter's innovators produced socially useful goods. By carrying out all of these innovations, singly or in combination, the innovator earns much more than the normal profits, although this high profit is not permanent.If, however, market forces become suspended and direct controls take over, conditions of repressed inflation prevail. In such conditions, people have money in the pockets but no coupons to buy real goods. In such spending-happy conditions, another type of innovator made his appearance in occupied West Germany between 1945 and 1948 and in Israel between 1949 and 1951, producing low-utility or marginally useful items. In occupied West Germany, for example, there was a veritable flood of such “new” commodities — ashtrays, fancy lamps, dolls, chandeliers, wall and ceiling decorations - which had not been produced before World War II because of the low utility of such items. The German and Israeli “pseudoinnovators” circumvented the existing price regulations and made a lot of money in the process. Schumpeter, for some reason, overlooked this pseudoinnovator operating in conditions of repressed inflation. He may have been a captive of the idea that repressed inflation in a capitalist economy would inevitably lead to the euthanasia of the entrepreneur.     

The estimation of union wage differentials and the impact of methodological choices

This paper demonstrates that methodological differences can matter a lot in the estimation of union/non-union wage differentials. Using individual-level data from the 1991 Wave of the British Household Panel Survey and a model evolved from replicating six existing British studies, we find that the model specification adopted has an important impact on the estimated differential and that the choice of which group means to use when evaluating the mean differential in multi-equation models is of considerable importance. There are also important differences between membership and coverage differentials and the earnings measure used and sample selected also make a difference. However, apart from firm size, the contents of the control vector used is not found to be of great importance.