逆向外包与技能偏向性技术进步

经济新常态和新工业革命背景下,中国经济迫切需要通过技术创新,尤其是技能偏向性技术进步的创新来实现经济增长方式的转变和产业结构的升级。文章根据后金融危机时期中国企业加快海外并购等典型事实,基于李嘉图框架构建了包含逆向外包的一般均衡模型,从理论上论证了逆向外包作为一种后发国家集聚全球创新资源的新方式,能够弥补后发国家高技能劳动力的不足,诱导企业采用更加偏向技能劳动力的生产技术,进而对后发国家的技能偏向性技术进步产生促进作用。利用制造业16个细分行业2003－2011年样本数据的实证检验表明,本土制造业企业主导的逆向外包显著促进了制造业的技能偏向性技术进步,FD I和人力资本供给的增加加速了技能偏向性技术进步的形成和发展。文章的研究不仅丰富了现有的关于技能偏向性技术进步和逆向外包的全球化理论,对中国制造创新方式的转变和经济结构的调整也具有重要的启示。     

Occupational Upgrading and Changes In Capital Usage In U.S. Manufacturing Industries, 1989–98

Proposed explanations of the role of microprocessor technology in the shifts toward relatively highly skilled workers that have occurred within industries since the mid 1970s have implications for the types of occupations that should be most affected by computerization. In this study, I measure the effects of changes in capital usage, and of the level of high-tech capital usage in particular, on skill change caused by employment shifts among detailed occupations within industries over the 1989–98 period. The study utilizes data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey, which produces data on employment and wages for over 700 occupations in non-farm establishments, by industry. These data provide an unprecedented opportunity to determine the types of occupations and skills that are most affected by changes in capital and technology usage, by making it possible to measure skill change within relatively narrowly defined occupational groups.     

Patterns of Skill Premia

This paper develops a model to analyse how skill premia differ over time and across countries, and uses this model to study the impact of international trade on wage inequality. Skill premia are determined by technology, the relative supply of skills, and trade. Technology is itself endogenous, and responds to profit incentives. An increase in the relative supply of skills, holding technology constant, reduces the skill premium. But an increase in the supply of skills over time also induces a change in technology, increasing the demand for skills. The most important result of the paper is that increased international trade induces skill-biased technical change. As a result, trade opening can cause a rise in inequality both in the U.S. and the less developed countries, and thanks to the induced skill-biased technical change, this can happen without a rise in the relative prices of skill-intensive goods in the U.S., which is the usual intervening mechanism in the standard trade models.     

Forecasting the impact of new technologies on the future job market

This paper examines recent occupational projections in order to determine how new technologies will affect future job growth in the United States. The first part of the paper reviews the methodologies used to derive occupational projections, focusing on how adjustments for technological change are incorporated into the forecasts. The second part of the paper reviews the most recent projections produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and compares them with projections produced by other organizations. The results reveal that neither high-technology industries nor high-technology occupations will supply many new jobs over the next decade. Instead, future job growth will favor service and clerical jobs that require little or no postsecondary schooling and that pay below-average wages.     

The macroeconomics of the quiet revolution: Understanding the implications of the rise in women’s participation for economic growth and inequality

We study the impact of the rise in female labor supply on the economic performance of the United States over the period 1967–2002 through the lens of a calibrated structural model. The model features all the key forces behind the increase in female participation (the “Quiet Revolution”): (1) the decline in marriage rates, (2) the narrowing gender wage gap, (3) the preference (or cultural) shift towards market work, and (4) the change in women’s bargaining power within the household. We find that preference shifts and the rise in relative wages of women were the most important driving forces behind rising women’s participation, while changes in marriage patterns have also had a sizeable effect. We conclude that half of the growth in US earnings per capita over this period can be traced to growth in female labor supply. We also find that the rise in female labor supply has had offsetting effects on income inequality and, therefore, its overall role has been negligible relative to skill-biased demand shifts and rising residual wage volatility.     

Trade,skill-biased technical change and wages in Mexican manufacturing

This article looks at the relative importance of competing stories, particularly trade liberalization and skill-biased technical change, to explain changes in the skill premium and the real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in Mexican manufacturing using plant-level data. The channel through which technical change is observed is changes in the domestic price of machinery and equipment due to the availability of new and cheaper machines. The analysis also looks at trade-induced skill-biased technical change by taking into account changes in the price of machinery and equipment caused by changes in the tariff rate specific to machinery and equipment. Instrumental variables, including the price of machinery and equipment in the United States, are used to determine causality between the above effects and wages. Thus, the article provides evidence for some recent findings in the literature that link trade liberalization, skill-biased technical change occurring through technology embodied in machines and increases in the skill premium.     

China wage inequality: the role of trade and technology

This article empirically investigates the impact of international trade and technical change on skill premia for a panel of 28 manufacturing sectors in China over the period 2002–2011. The results find that the effect of changes of the share of SOEs is twofold. First, the contraction of SOEs promoted productivity growth, and the promoting effect was skill-biased, which tended to increase the skill premia in China. Second, the drop of product prices resulting from falling SOEs share was more magnificent in skill-intensive industries, which helped to mitigate wage inequality through product prices. The accounted-for portion of price changes by productivity growth was skill-biased, significantly raising skill premia through product prices. However, the portion of price changes accounted for by foreign price was unskill-biased, and world price competition diminished the growing income disparity in China.     

Human capital,employment protection and growth in Europe

Using data for a large sample of manufacturing and service sectors in 14 EU countries, this paper shows that the value added and TFP growth rate differential between high and low human capital intensive industries is greater in countries with low than countries with high levels of employment protection legislation. We also find that such negative effect of EPL is slightly stronger for countries near the technology frontier, in the manufacturing sector and after the 1990s. We interpret these results suggesting that technology adoption depends on the skill level of the workforce and on the capacity of firms to adjust employment as technology changes: therefore, firing costs have a stronger impact in sectors where technical change is more skill-biased and technology adoption more important.     

The Impacts of Technology, Trade and Outsourcing on Employment and Labor Composition

Empirical studies of skill-biased technological change are typically based on a simple production or cost function framework and limited information on technology and labor composition. In contrast, we simultaneously assess the impacts of trade, technology, and outsourcing on shifts in labor demand using a dynamic cost function framework and comprehensive measures of workforce composition and investment in technology. Our findings indicate that technological change has had the largest impact on changes in labor composition. However, the indirect impact of trade on shifts in employment augments its direct impact because trade stimulates computerization, which further exacerbates skill-biased technological change.     

Economic growth, skill-biased technical change and wage inequality: A model and estimations for the US and Europe

In recent literature skill-biased technical change has been viewed as a major cause for wage inequality. Some modelling and presentation of stylized facts have been undertaken for US time series data. A preliminary study of wage inequality in a model with knowledge as input in an aggregate production function has been presented by Riddell and Romer [General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth, 1998, MIT Press]. Although some important forces determining wage inequality are widely accepted we know little about the quantitative impact of each source and differences across countries. We present a growth model of the Romer type with innovation-based technical change and two skill groups where the growth of knowledge, the relative supply of the two skill groups, externalities and substitution effects among the two groups are the driving forces for wage inequality. We undertake estimates for US time series data and contrast those estimates with results from some European countries. In particular, we compare parameter estimations for US and German time series data. The paper concludes that there is less wage inequality across skills in Europe in contrast to the US on the macroeconomic level. But, considering disaggregated data we observe some increases in inequality for Germany, too. Although our model reveals important variables for the explanation of wage inequality there may, however, also be other factors, such as trade unions, which have impacted the wage spread.     

Manufacturing Wage Differentials and Employment in Some Scandinavian Countries, the U.S. and the U.K.: An Analysis of Variance Approach

This paper presents some empirical evidence on the factors determining changes in wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers and in their employment. An ``analysis of variance' (ANOVA) model is estimated using UN data for five OECD countries in order to assess the relative importance of industry-specific, country-specific and international shocks (as well as interactions between industry and country effects). It is found that both international shocks and national policies affect wage differentials over the whole sample, whilst skill-biased technical change (SBTC) was a significant factor in the seventies. Employment responds mainly to international shocks, although national policies and SBTC were important determinants in the seventies and eighties respectively. Some of the results are found to be sensitive to the technology level of the industries considered.     

Long-run technical change and multifactor productivity growth in US manufacturing

This study utilizes a translog cost function to produce econometric estimates of the separate influences of technical change versus scale efficiency in contributing to multifactor productivity growth within the US manufacturing sector. The analysis generates (two-digit) industry-specific parameters that capture the effects of output versus time-related shifts in the cost function over the 1949–1991 period. Thus initial evidence concerning the relative importance of technical progress (versus ‘scale’) cannot be provided as a source of productivity gains within two-digit industries. The parametric estimates of total factor productivity growth are compared with existing Divisia measures to explore the shortcomings of the growth accounting technique. These long-run patterns hold implications for the productivity convergence hypothesis traced to knowledge spillovers between industries.     

Heterogeneous Wage Effects of Apprenticeship Training*

The relatively small average wage effects of employer and occupation changes after apprenticeship training mask large differences between occupation groups and apprentices with different schooling backgrounds. People who change employer and occupation within industrial occupations enjoy large wage advantages, whereas apprentices in commerce and trading occupations, as well as in construction and crafts occupations, face wage losses from an occupation change. The differences between the firms that provide the apprenticeship training are found to be small or insignificant. In this paper, we reconcile the differences between previous findings by comparing and replicating the empirical estimation strategies used. This demonstrates that selectivity in occupations and changes, unobserved heterogeneity between occupations, and sample selection do matter.     

Technical change and wage premiums amongst skilled labour: Evidence from the economic transition

I present reduced-form and structural evidence that the reorganization of the Russian economy in the post-transitional period increased the demand on law and business graduates. This demand shock provides a novel unified explanation of the Russian wage structure for 1985–2015. I then show that this shock is a common feature of all transitional economies, and it contributed to the transformational recession. The demand behaviour is identified with a new skill-biased technical change model of demand for skills with three production inputs (high school graduates and bachelor-level educations with two majors), showing that a technology shift that favours a particular skill might emerge within the skilled group rather than between skilled and unskilled. This is relevant because similar shifts (e.g., data scientists vs. liberal arts) emerge today in the frontier economies that adopt new general-purpose technologies (e.g., machine learning). Thus, this paper informs policymakers today on tools to counteract a potential drop in economic equality and performance that result from this adoption. Lastly, because of similarities between the mechanics of the transition and the 2022 sanctions to discourage Russia's war effort, my results highlight the importance of additional sanctions against the education system to prevent the regime's structural adaptation and preservation.     

Offshoring,tasks, and the skill-wage pattern

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the occupational task profile using rich individual-level panel data. Our main results suggest that, when only considering within-industry changes in offshoring, we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low-skilled workers, though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision. However, when allowing for cross-industry effects of offshoring, i.e. allowing for labor mobility across industries, negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers' occupations. A higher degree of interactivity and, in particular, non-routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring.     

Industry estimates of the elasticity of substitution and the rate of biased technological change between skilled and unskilled labour

We estimate the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour and the pace of skill-biased technological change at the industry level. The data is compiled from the March extract of the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1968 to 2006. Industry information provided by the survey is used to group workers into 13 industry categories and education levels are used to dichotomize workers as skilled or unskilled. We construct measures of the ratio of skilled to unskilled employment and the ratio of skilled to unskilled wages in each industry. Using a relationship implied by profit maximizing behaviour on the part of representative firms, this data generates estimates of structural parameters. We find considerable differences across industries in the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour. Furthermore, while most industries have experienced skill-biased technological change, the pace of this change has varied widely across industries.     

Theory-driven facts and the growth in earnings inequality

It is widely accepted that the rise in U.S. wage inequality can be explained by skill-biased technological change: workplace computerization produced demand shifts that worked with a simply supply and demand “vision” of the labor market than with direct statistical evidence, which is remarkably limited. Indeed, the dominance of this elementary textbook vision has led, I argue, to a conflation between statistical facts and “theory-driven” facts—those statements about reality that are selected, interpreted, or simply created to confirm a vision of the way things work. The paper concludes by outlining an alternative explanation of the growth in wage inequality based on a sharply different, Gordonian, vision of the labor market.     

中国技术进步贡献率的度量与分解

本文在分析索洛余值法缺陷的基础上,以新增长理论为理论背景,结合中国经济发展的现实,将产业结构变动、资本空间集聚、人力资本积累等因素引入技术进步贡献率的计量模型,使技术进步贡献率的度量更接近真实的技术进步情况;进而利用新的技术进步贡献率计量方法重新测算了1987—2003年间中国的技术进步状况,发现中国技术进步贡献率已开始出现稳步增长的趋势。     

技能型技术进步、南北贸易与工资不平衡

本文试图将技能型技术进步与产业内贸易置于一个框架中对工资不平衡现象进行理论解释。自由贸易通过促使发达国家产品质量阶梯提升型的技术进步而加剧了该国的工资不平衡程度;同时,自由贸易通过促使发展中国家产品种类数增加型的技术进步而加剧了该国的工资不平衡程度。南北贸易在拉大相对工资差距的同时促进了技能型技术进步。     

Luddites, the industrial revolution, and the demographic transition

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early industrial revolution, but is skill-biased today. This implies a rich set of non-monotonic macroeconomic dynamics which are not embedded in extant unified growth models. We present historical evidence and develop a model which can endogenously account for these facts, where factor bias reflects profit-maximizing decisions by innovators. In a setup with directed technological change, and fixed as well as variable costs of education, initial endowments dictate that the early industrial revolution be unskilled-labor-biased. Increasing basic knowledge then causes a growth takeoff, an income-led demand for fewer but more educated children, and a transition to skill-biased technological change in the long run.