搜寻理论、失业救济金与中国城镇人口失业持续时间

通过对享受失业救济金者和不享受者失业救济金者的再就业概率的分析,我们可以发现,与享受失业救济金者相比,人力资本特征、家庭特征和宏观经济环境对不享受失业救济金者的再就业概率有显著正向影响,转换模型也得出了失业救济金会降低再就业概率、延长失业持续时间的结论。     

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE AND EXPERIENCE RATING: INSURANCE VERSUS EFFICIENCY*

Unemployment insurance (UI) distorts firms' layoff decisions by reducing the cost of laying off workers. To dampen this increase, it has been suggested that UI should be financed with an experience‐rated tax. Despite the fact that increasing the level of experience rating can reduce unemployment, it can reduce the insurance coverage workers receive. With high experience rating, firms may reduce their severance payments by more than the UI benefit. We build a model where competitive firms offer contracts with severance payments to risk‐averse workers. Frictions in the labor market lead to incomplete insurance. This article shows that less than full‐experience rating enables the government to increase the insurance coverage workers receive. Welfare implications are also investigated.     

BANK RUNS: DEPOSIT INSURANCE AND CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS*

Diamond and Dybvig provide a model of intermediation in which deposit insurance can avoid socially undesirable bank runs. We extend the Diamond–Dybvig model to evaluate the costs and benefits of deposit insurance in the presence of moral hazard by banks and monitoring by depositors. We find that complete deposit insurance alone will not support the first‐best outcome: depositors will not have adequate incentives for monitoring and banks will invest in excessively risky projects. However, an additional capital requirement for banks can restore the first‐best allocation.     

ASSET‐BASED UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE*

This article studies a model of consumption, savings, and job search in which a borrowing constraint limits self‐insurance. The government administers the unemployment insurance program that may condition on an individual’s asset position, but not on her efforts of finding a job. To compensate for the impediments to self‐insurance, benefit payments should optimally be set higher at lower wealth levels and peak for borrowing‐constrained individuals with zero liquid funds. A quantitative exercise reveals that the U.S. unemployment insurance program is surprisingly close to optimal for the asset poor, but far too generous for wealthier individuals.     

失业保险金与再就业行为

现有的失业理论及实证研究都认为失业保险金的提高会增加失业者的失业持续时间。在本文中,我们试图从失业者面临工作机会的工资分布结构出发,对失业保险金与失业者再就业工资分布的关系进行描述。通过对传统工作搜寻理论模型的扩展,我们证明失业保险金对失业持续时间的影响存在三种不同的传导路径,同时我们得到两个推论:失业保险金的增加一方面将提高失业者接受"高"工资工作机会的概率;但另一方面对失业者从事"低"工资工作机会的影响是不确定的。如果将正式工作视为"高"工资的工作机会,而将非正式工作视为"低"工资的工作机会;则基于微观层面的数据所进行的实证研究结果验证了我们的推论。     

STOCKS AND DEPRECIATION OF HUMAN CAPITAL: NEW EVIDENCE FROM A PRESENT-VALUE PERSPECTIVE

Responding to a perceived growing interest in human wealth estimates, this paper offers a framework for measuring the aggregate stock of human capital and then implements the procedure for the United States male population age 14 to 75. Unlike previous estimates of human wealth that are based upon historical or resource costs, these estimates measure the capital stock as the discounted resent-value of expected lifetime returns. In the estimation, returns are equated with earnings data from the 1970 U.S. Census 15 percent Public Use Sample for out-of-school males, adjusted for employment and survival probabilities, adjusted for an assumed exogenous growth in future earnings, and discounted at 7.5 percent.
We provide cross-sectional estimates of individual stocks of human capital by age and educational attainment, as well as expected lifetime wealth profiles for individuals by level of education. These individual profiles can be used to obtain direct estimates of age-specific depreciation which suggest human capital is subject to significant and prolonged appreciation before nearly straight-line depreciation begins around middle age. This finding is all the more significant since resource-cost estimates of human capital which must assume a depreciation pattern to obtain stocks have always imposed a much faster rate much sooner.
Finally, an aggregate estimate of the stock of human capital for all males is supplied and its sensitivity to the choice of the discount rate, tax laws, and expected exogenous growth is analyzed. This seemingly-conservative stock estimate is then compared to a much lower resource-cost estimate offered recently by John Kendrick. A discount rate over 20 percent would be needed to equate the two measures. In trying to reconcile the two figures, we raise some new questions about the validity of both approaches for human capital accounting.     

HUMAN CAPITAL ACCUMULATION,HOME PRODUCTION AND EQUILIBRIUM DYNAMICS*

In this paper, we construct a three‐sector endogenous growth model in which long‐run growth is propelled by human capital accumulation. We show that although the addition of a home sector to the standard two‐sector endogenous growth model preserves the well‐behaved balanced growth equilibrium properties, it generates new transitional dynamics around the balanced growth path. It is shown that, when there is a positive shock to physical capital, our model is more likely to exhibit paradoxical growth than are standard multisector endogenous growth models that exclude home production. Our analysis adds new results to those from the related literature on leisure.     

HUMAN CAPITAL ACCUMULATION AND LABOR MARKET EQUILIBRIUM*

We analyze an equilibrium labor market with on‐the‐job search and experience effects (as workers learn by doing). The analysis yields a Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. Equilibrium sorting—where over time more experienced workers also tend to move to better paid employment—has a significant impact on wage inequality.     

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE,HUMAN CAPITAL STRUCTURE,AND MULTIPLE GROWTH PATHS*

This paper presents a theoretical model to analyze the effects of technology change on growth rates of income and human capital in the uncertain environments of technology. The uncertainty comes from two sources: the possibility of a technology advance and the characteristics of new technologies. We set up an overlapping generations model in which young agents invest in both width and depth of human capital in order to adopt new technologies. The model develops explicitly the micro‐mechanism of the role of human capital in adopting new technologies as well as that of the process of human capital production in the uncertain environments. In our model, a higher level of width of human capital relative to the level of depth leads one country to a higher growth path. We also show that an economy can have different growth paths depending on the initial structure of human capital and the uncertainty about the nature of new technologies. In particular, new technologies with more uncertain characteristics may adversely affect human capital accumulation and income growth, leading the economy to a low growth trap.     

EDUCATION,WORK, AND CRIME: A HUMAN CAPITAL APPROACH*

This article develops a model of crime in which human capital increases the opportunity cost of crime from foregone work and expected costs associated with incarceration. Older, more intelligent, and more educated adults should commit fewer street (unskilled) crimes. White collar crimes decline less (or increase) with age and education. Predictions for age–crime and education–crime relationships receive broad empirical support in self‐report data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and arrest data from the Uniform Crime Reports. The effects of education, training, and wage subsidies, as well as enforcement policies on criminal behavior are discussed.     

CREDIT,DEFAULT, AND OPTIMAL HEALTH INSURANCE

I study how credit and default affect optimal health insurance, constructing a life-cycle model of health investment with a strategic default option on emergency room bills and financial debts. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy and used to compare the optimal policy for Medicaid by the availability of the default option and credit. I find that strategic default induces the optimal policy to be more redistributive. With (Without) the option, the optimal income threshold for Medicaid eligibility is 44% (25%) of the average income. In these findings, the interaction between strategic default and preventative medical spending is important.     

外包与不确定环境的最优资本投资

本文以需求不确定性为切入点,为外包生产行为提出一个解释。当需求存在不确定性时,我们分别考虑存在与不存在外包可能性的两种情况下的最优资本投资模型。我们发现,当存在不确定性时,外包行为具有帕累托改进的性质,而且,在存在外包可能性的情况下,生产品牌产品的垄断厂商可以借此降低固定资产投资。此外,我们还发现外包的成本对于垄断厂商的资本投资具有显著的影响。     

OCCUPATIONAL SPECIFICITY OF HUMAN CAPITAL*

We find that returns to occupational tenure are substantial. Everything else being constant, 5 years of occupational tenure are associated with an increase in wages of 12%–20%. Moreover, when occupational experience is taken into account, tenure with an industry or employer has relatively little importance in accounting for the wage one receives. This finding is consistent with human capital being occupation specific.     

DEPRECIATION, OBSOLESCENCE AND THE ROLE OF CAPITAL IN GROWTH ACCOUNTING

Maurice Scott has argued that the neoclassical production function and growth accounting are fundamentally flawed as tools for understanding the growth process. If the role of capital were correctly evaluated, then (he argues) the famous 'residual' of growth accounting would disappear. Contrary to these claims, this paper seeks to show that growth accounting gives correct answers to interesting questions, even when all technical progress is embodied in new capital goods and even when depreciation is entirely due to obsolescence.     

HUMAN CAPITAL DISTRIBUTION,GROWTH AND TRADE

Distribution differences in human capital matter for a country's growth and trade. While the existing literature considers only the diversity difference in talent distribution, we argue that the kurtosis difference is also an important factor. In a two‐sector equilibrium growth model, where the production function is supermodular for the consumption‐good sector and submodular for the R&D sector, we prove that the diversity effect and kurtosis effect are opposite to each other. A country endowed with more diverse but leptokurtic talent distribution may have lower growth rate and import submodular goods, opposite to the conventional result from considering only the diversity difference.     

OPTIMAL CAPITAL TAXES FOR PUBLIC GOOD PROVISION*

This paper constructs a general equilibrium trade model of a small open economy that produces many traded private goods and one non-traded public consumption good. Trade in goods is free, but the country taxes the internationally mobile capital to finance the provision of the public good. Within this framework, the paper identifies the conditions under which the optimal policy on the internationally mobile capital calls for a tax. Under the assumptions that (i) the welfare function is concave with respect to the tax rate, and (ii) the net revenue-maximizing capital tax rate is positive, it is shown that the marginal cost of the public good always understates its social marginal cost.     

资本积累与最优银行规模

本文回顾了近半个多世纪以来有关收入和财富分配持续性不平等的原因及其动态演化方面的理论,包括收入和财富分布的随机过程模型、新古典框架下不平等的动态演化理论、人力资本投资对持续性不平等的影响、不完全资本市场下持续性不平等的动态演化、经济增长中持续性不平等的动态演化以及其他各种机制对不平等动态演化的影响等。论文还对有关持续性不平等理论的发展脉络和内在演化逻辑进行了梳理,并在此基础上对现有文献进行了总体评述,并对今后研究的发展方向作了简单讨论。