我国农民阶层分化的特点及其发展趋势

改革开放以后,我国农民阶层不断分化,农村社会结构发生深刻演变,农村社会问题日益复杂。研究表明,我国农民阶层分化具有多元性、不彻底性和非均衡性的特点;发展的趋势主要是农民工阶层固化、进城农民市民化和农村居民结构异化。农民阶层分化是今后研究我国农村社会转型和发展的重要视角,尤其不可忽视农民阶层分化所附带的一些负面影响。     

中国土地财政的社会福利效应*——基于森（Sen）的可行能力理论

本文基于森（Sen）的可行能力理论,运用模糊数学与因子分析法测度中国2004-2013年31个省份社会福利指数,并分析社会福利与土地财政关系。通过理论与实证检验研究发现：第一,沿海城市社会福利指数相对较高,且透明性担保、社会机会、经济条件、防护性保障和政治自由对社会福利指数贡献率呈递增的趋势。第二,东部沿海地区土地财政收入绝对值与相对值远超西部地区,且各地区社会福利与土地财政二者呈脱钩现象。第三,各地区社会福利指数之间存在正的空间相关性,且各省社会福利指数存在空间集聚与扩散现象。最后,利用空间动态面板模型实证检验发现,地方政府土地财政收入占比与社会福利之间呈倒U型曲线。     

身份政治：回归社区后的北京市下岗失业职工的生计策略

本文基于北京市城区下岗职工的日常生活策略访谈和田野调查而来,关注北京国企下岗职工回归社区后,如何通过身份斗争来谋取资源,维持生计。回归社区后的下岗失业职工的集体身份,由多重因素建构,并且服从于实践利益的需要。本文并没有刻意导向阶级分析的思路,而是沿着文化身份的意义进行分析。     

Optimal policy and the role of social contacts in a search model with heterogeneous workers

This paper develops a search model with heterogeneous workers and social networks. High‐ability workers are more productive and have a larger number of professional contacts. Firms can choose between a vacancy in the regular market and a job opening in the referral market. The model predicts that a larger number of social contacts is associated with a larger wage gap between high‐ and low‐ability workers and a larger difference in the unemployment rates. The net welfare gain of referrals is estimated at 1.2%. There are three reasons for the inefficiency of the decentralized equilibrium. First is the traditional search externality described by Hosios. Second, firms share their profits with workers, whereas the social optimum implies that full surplus should be given to firms in the referral market. This inefficiency can be internalized by means of referral subsidies. Third, there is the “pooling inefficiency” in the regular market. If high‐ability workers are sufficiently more productive they impose a positive externality on low‐ability workers and should be rewarded by positive transfers. On the contrary, if productivity differences are small, high‐ability workers achieve unreasonably high wages by referring each other and reduce employment chances of low‐ability workers. In this latter case, high‐ability workers should be penalized. If optimal policy is implemented the net welfare gain of referrals rises up to 1.8%.     

城市流迁就业新格局下的农民工收入问题思考——基于主观感知视角的实证研究

随着代际更替的完成,农民工城市流迁模式出现新的变化。新生代农民工行业选择性增强,劳动力回流返城再就业比重上升,安居乐业正在成为"家庭迁徙型"农民工城市生活的写照。尽管还有部分农民工仍往返于城乡与地区之间,但这种"候鸟型"流迁模式已在明显弱化。因此,以北京5区县为样本取集聚地,针对不同流迁模式下的农民工收入状况及幸福感知进行计量分析。研究结果表明:收入边际效用影响力在下降,农民工积极感知呈上升趋势,表明作为"城市边缘人"的农民工社会待遇不公、幸福感低下境遇正在改善,这与社会关注度提高、新生代农民工成为群体主导有关。在收入水平短期内难以获得大幅提升的现阶段,政府应致力于教育、职业发展以及社会保障权利等国民待遇平等环境创造,尽可能激发农民工群体正向心理潜能,以其积极品质提升主观幸福感。     

资本主义,危机,复兴:对一些概念的挖掘

对新自由主义时代特征和相关文献作简单的分析,并不能对当前状态是萧条、复苏还是其他下个定论。无论如何,认为大萧条是持久性的或无法复苏都是不合适的。如果要理解这次为抵御危机给工人们带来掠夺性影响所进行的抗争的变革性含义,寻求解决就业和社会保障等核心问题的基本途径,将对这次危机及危机前状态的分析放在马克思坚实的分析平台上是十分必要的。     

CANADA: RICH BY NATURE, POOR BY POLICY

This paper examines the political economy of Canada, particularly the question of why Canada's economic performance has so persistently lagged behind that of the United States. It argues that this shortfall cannot be traced to values and choices arising out of a unique Canadian "political culture," as is conventionally assumed, but instead is the consequence of poorly designed institutions. These institutions directly benefit powerful interest groups in Canada and are thus explicable in Public Choice terms. Nevertheless, they are under strain as the underlying social reality of Canada cannot be suppressed indefinitely. One symptom of this is the bilateral free trade agreement recently negotiated between Ottawa and Washington, D.C.     

Household Characteristics and the Distribution of Income In Italy: An Application of Social Distance Measures

The Lorenz criterion of preferable distributions fails to distinguish adequately between convergence to the global mean and clustering around local means. This concern has motivated independent work by Wolfson, and Esteban and Ray on the notion of polarization. In this paper I build on this recent work by providing a new method that characterizes changes in the entire distribution, rather than focussing only on dispersion. In particular, the approach proposed offers a new decomposition method of within- and between-group components that differs from the classical method of additively decomposable inequality indices. The new method can monitor which factors modified the entire distribution, where precisely on the distribution these factors had an effect, and what determined the variation in the level of social distance between groups or geographic areas. Summary statistics of the observed movements and of distance between and divergence among the estimated and the counterfactual distributions are provided as well as a new index of social distance. The new method is then applied to Italian data on income distribution between 1987 and 1995.     

Information, bilateral negotiations, and worker recruitment

This paper studies experimentally how firms choose between using a centralized market and bilateral negotiations to recruit new personnel. In the market firms interact with several workers but do not have information about workers’ behavior in the past. In the bilateral negotiations firms negotiate bilaterally with prospective workers and learn about workers’ performance in previous jobs. We show that the interaction between social preferences, the incompleteness of contracts and the existence of information about a worker’s past performance provides an explanation for firms forgoing market opportunities and bilaterally negotiating with a worker. We observe that approximately 30% of all job contracts were bilaterally negotiated when these contracts are incomplete as opposed to only 10% when contracts were complete. The surplus from trade is higher when incomplete contracts can be bilaterally negotiated, which can be attributed to the presence of information.     

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.     

Innovation or imitation? The effect of spillovers and competitive pressure on firms’ R&D strategy choice

In this paper a firm’s R&D strategy is assumed to be endogenous and allowed to depend on both internal firm characteristics and external factors. Firms choose between two strategies, either they engage in R&D or abstain from own R&D and imitate the outcomes of innovators. This yields three types of equilibria, in which either all firms innovate, some firms innovate and others imitate, or no firm innovates. Firms’ equilibrium strategies crucially depend on external factors. We find that the efficiency of intellectual property rights protection positively affects firms’ incentives to engage in R&D, while excessive competitive pressure has a negative effect. In addition, smaller firms are found to be more likely to become imitators when the product is homogeneous and the level of spillovers is high. Regarding social welfare our results indicate that strengthening intellectual property protection can have an ambiguous effect. In markets characterized by a high rate of innovation a reduction of intellectual property rights protection can discourage innovative performance substantially. However, a reduction of patent protection can also increase social welfare because it may induce imitation. This indicates that policy issues such as the optimal length and breadth of patent protection cannot be resolved without taking into account specific market and firm characteristics.     

Occupational attainment and stratification in China: The interactive effects of social networks and the hukou system

This paper examines the effects of social networks and hukou status on worker’s occupational attainment in China. To identify the potential ranking of different occupations, we consider the use of the stereotype ordered regression model to estimate individual occupational choice. Our results show that social networks play different roles in shaping occupational outcomes for urban and rural workers. In particular, friendship ties significantly improve urban workers’ opportunities in obtaining higher‐ranked occupations; in contrast, kinship ties appear to be more influential for rural migrants, but the effects are limited to the attainment of lower‐ranked occupations. While social contacts from government organizations or state‐owned sectors facilitate urban workers’ attainment of higher‐ranked occupations, similar patterns are not observed among rural workers. We further find that the beneficial effects of social networks or urban hukou identity are stronger for workers who are from less‐developed regions, who work in state‐owned enterprises, or who have a college degree. Decomposition of the wage gap between urban and rural workers suggests that differences in social networks and occupation types, together with hukou discrimination, account for the majority of the current wage inequality.     

Technological Change and Wages in China: Evidence from Matched Employer–Employee Data

The relationship between research and development (R&D) intensity and wages is examined using a unique matched employer–employee dataset. The ordinary least squares estimates suggest that a one standard deviation increase in R&D intensity is associated with an increase in the hourly wage rate between 3.4% and 6.9% for the full sample, depending on the exact specification. The instrumental variable estimates are that a one standard deviation increase in R&D intensity is associated with an increase in the hourly wage rate between 5.5% and 11.4%. The wage elasticity with respect to R&D intensity is found to be higher in larger firms as well as for better educated workers and workers with technical skills. Consistent with the rent‐sharing hypothesis it is also found that the wage elasticity with respect to R&D intensity is higher for workers who belong to the Communist Party or union.     

Social Preferences,Sorting, and Competition*

In this paper, I investigate how an increase in competition for workers influences the impact of social preferences on labor‐market outcomes. By sorting themselves into firms with homogeneous work forces, workers can ensure that they suffer less from social comparisons. Competition promotes choice and thus facilitates sorting. However, competition also boosts rent differences in the labor market, because firms cannot curb internal inequity among its employees without losing workers to competitors. To reduce their exposure to social comparisons, workers might engage in inefficient sorting into unemployment. Consequently, social preferences can have strong effects (i.e., unemployment) in a competitive labor market, whereas they only have a slight impact on labor‐market outcomes in a monopsony.     

Collective Choice and Control Rights in Firms

Recent writers have asserted that firms controlled by workers are rare because workers have diverse preferences over firm policies, while investors all support wealth maximization. However, the source of the asymmetry between capital and labor remains unclear. We resolve this puzzle by arguing that because financial capital is exceptionally mobile, capital markets induce unanimity. The lower mobility of human capital implies that labor markets are monopolistically competitive and hence that unanimity cannot be expected in labor‐managed firms. Moreover, such firms are vulnerable to takeover by investors, while capital‐managed firms are substantially less vulnerable to takeover by workers.     

中国情境下多层面体面劳动测量指标体系研究

体面劳动不仅是社会文明与进步的发展目标,也是企业的社会责任和劳动者的基本权益,构建合理的体面劳动测量指标体系具有重要的意义。体面劳动的实现是一项复杂的系统工程,需要国家、企业和劳动者的共同努力。因此,需要结合我国具体国情,在国家政府、企业、劳动者个人三个层面上分别从就业、权利、社会保护和社会对话四个维度构建更为科学的测量指标体系。     

我国社会保障水平对城乡收入差距的影响

从理论上说,社会保障制度负有调节收入差距的制度使命,西方福利国家的发展实践也证明了这点。但在我国,由于社会保障制度本身的不公平,一直被质疑对收入分配存在"逆向调节"效应。运用Pooled OLS模型,借助于2007-2011年的省级面板数据,重新检验了新时期我国社会保障水平对城乡收入差距的影响。财政社会保障水平的效应不显著,而社会保障水平的正效应已经开始显现。说明随着我国城镇社会保障制度的扩面(农民工是主要受益者)以及农村社会保障制度建设的全面启动,我国社会保障制度正向调节城乡收入差距的"时间窗口"已经出现。     

Strong and weak ties in employment and crime

This paper analyzes the interplay between social structure and information exchange in two competing activities, crime and labor. We consider a dynamic model in which individuals belong to mutually exclusive two-person groups, referred to as dyads. There are multiple equilibria. If jobs are badly paid and/or crime is profitable, unemployment benefits have to be low enough to prevent workers for staying too long in the unemployment status because they are vulnerable to crime activities. If, instead, jobs are well paid and/or crime is not profitable, unemployment benefits have to be high enough to induce workers to stay unemployed rather to commit crime because they are less vulnerable to crime activities. Also, in segregated neighborhoods characterized by high interactions between peers, a policy only based on punishment and arrest will not be efficient in reducing crime. It has to be accompanied by other types of policies that take into account social interactions.     

新生代农民工信息获取障碍及影响因素研究——兼与老一代农民工的比较

以"需求层次理论"为依据,将农民工的信息需求从低到高分为物质信息、安全信息、尊重信息、自我实现信息四类,分别考察了四类信息的获取障碍。农民工的信息获取普遍存在较大障碍,层次越高的信息障碍越大;新生代农民工不同亚群体在信息获取障碍方面存在差异;信息环境、社会融合、信息费用是新生代农民工信息获取障碍的主要影响因素,两代农民工的影响因素同中有异。