WAGE POLICY IN AN OPEN‐ECONOMY KALECKI–KALDOR MODEL: A SIMULATION STUDY

This paper discusses a Post‐Keynesian model of income, production and trade. The one‐country, one‐sector model features Kaleckian investment demand, Kaldorian productivity and a labor market module based on a wage–price spiral. The model is first presented for a closed economy with exogenous real wages; second, for a closed economy with endogenous real wages; third, for an economy open to trade with endogenous real wages. Simulations with different calibrations show key characteristics of the model. Monte Carlo simulations over reasonable parameter ranges shed some light on the effectiveness of wage policies in open economies.     

我国劳动力市场买方垄断条件下最低工资就业效应分析

文章探讨了劳动力市场买方垄断条件下最低工资对就业的影响。研究表明:无歧视买方垄断下,实行最低工资能促进就业;完全歧视买方垄断下,实行最低工资对就业没有影响。此外,关于上海市最低工资与农民工就业的实证分析结果表明,提高最低工资对农民工就业有正作用。由此导出了一个重要的政策含义,即提高最低工资标准,促进农民工就业。     

通货膨胀、劳动力市场与工资率走势

当前的通货膨胀,属内外结合的复合型通胀。本文提出劳动年龄人口供给变动的三个阶段：第一阶段是2010年以前的总体过剩阶段,表现为劳动力买方市场,工资率被人为压低;第二阶段是劳动年龄人口占比越过峰值,但尚未达到绝对数量峰值,劳动力市场由供大于求向供求平衡转变,工资率处于劳资博弈状态;第三阶段是2017年以后,即占比和绝对数量总体短缺阶段,工资率将呈持续上涨趋势。当前处于第二阶段,由于劳动年龄人口供大于求的逐步结束和工资欠账较多,工资率理应有一个较大幅度的提升;不过要适度,因为总体上还处于劳动力由供大于求向供求平衡转变;更要着眼于实际工资的提升,因为仅仅名义工资的提升是有害的,对通胀治理不利。     

IS LABOUR MARKET FLEXIBILITY DESIRABLE OR HARMFUL? A FURTHER DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

A common belief of mainstream economics as well as underpinning government policy is that the more flexible real wage is, the lower is unemployment. In this paper we study the dynamics of a standard neoclassical labour market under the simplest Walrasian adjustment rule. We show that when consumption and leisure are sufficiently low substitutes, an increase in real wage flexibility may destabilize the unique Walrasian equilibrium of the economy, triggering fluctuations in wages and employment. Minimal departures from strict (Walrasian) neoclassical equilibrium modelling are required to obtain instability results for wage flexibility.     

Foreign direct investment and wage differentials in Taiwan

Abstract

The ease of restrictions on foreign direct investment in China since 1990 has attracted a continuous and dramatic flow of outward investment from Taiwan to the mainland. At the same time, the relative wages for skilled workers in Taiwan have risen mildly despite a rapid increase in the share of educated workers in its labor market. The aim of this paper is to explore the linkage between capital outflows to China and the wage share of skilled workers in Taiwan over the period 1991 – 2001. We find that the pattern of changes in relative wages is consistent with shifts in the relative demand for skilled labor. For the most part, the increases in the relative demand for skilled workers could be attributable to within-industry factors. Findings also indicate that outward direct investment to China has a significantly positive impact on the skilled labor wage share.     

Impact of international trade on unemployment under oligopoly

By studying a two-sector general equilibrium model in which firms engage in oligopolistic competition and unemployment is a result of the existence of efficiency wages, we derive the following results analytically. A country's comparative advantage in producing manufactured goods increases with the level of efficiencies in the labor market. The opening of international trade leads to the equalization of wage rates even though countries differ in their factor endowments and labor market efficiencies. If countries have the same level of labor market efficiencies but differ in their endowments of labor and land, the opening to international trade leads to an increase in the wage rate in both countries.     

Productivity, indexation and macroeconomic outcomes: The implications of goods market competition and wage bargaining structure

One strand of the macroeconomics literature explores the extent to which the indexation of nominal wages to a variable in addition to the price level can improve macroeconomic performance. The present paper contributes to this literature by developing a model in which the nominal wage is indexed not only to the price level but also to productivity. Two key features of the framework are a monopolistically competitive goods market and a unionized labor market in which wages are determined by a finite number of unions. A significant finding is that the multiparameter indexation scheme generally outperforms full-information wage setting.     

Reservation wage levels in UK and German financial services sectors

Although expenditure on wages represents a major element of costs in financial services firms, there is a dearth of studies analysing wage levels in the sector. This paper examines reservation wage levels in the sector by utilising maximum likelihood selection and stochastic frontier methodologies in two leading European economies: UK and Germany. Our results show that wage achievement is higher in the UK than Germany. At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive, given that actual wage costs and the overall cost–income ratio is higher in Germany than the UK.     

THE DOUBLE ROLE OF SKILLED LABOR,NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND WAGE INEQUALITY

We examine the relationship between the supply of skilled labor, technological change and relative wages. In accounting for the role of skilled labor in both production activities and productivity‐ enhancing ‘support’ activities we derive the following results. First, an increase in the supply of skilled labor raises the employment share of non‐production labor within firms, without lowering relative wages. Second, new technologies raise wage inequality only in so far as they give incentives to firms to reallocate skilled labor towards non‐production activities. In contrast, skill‐biased technological change of the sort usually considered in the literature does not affect wage inequality.     

Macroeconomic stability in a flexible labor market

This paper examines the relationship between labor market flexibility and macroeconomic stability from a post‐Keynesian perspective. Considering two aspects of labor market flexibility, employment flexibility and real wage flexibility, I adopt the flex–output model to discuss employment flexibility and extend it by incorporating real wage dynamics induced from a wage–price Phillips curve to discuss real wage flexibility. Simulation of the model suggests that employment flexibility possibly increases instability of an economy whereas real wage flexibility reduces it.     

Trade, wages, and the political economy of trade protection: evidence from the Colombian trade reforms

Worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models. Yet, most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy-wide returns to a specific worker characteristic (i.e., skill or education) rather than through worker industry affiliation. This paper exploits drastic trade liberalizations in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s to investigate the relationship between protection and industry wage premiums. We relate wage premiums to trade policy in an empirical framework that accounts for the political economy of trade protection. Accounting for time-invariant political economy factors is critical. When we do not control for unobserved time-invariant industry characteristics, we find that workers in protected sectors earn less than workers with similar observable characteristics in unprotected sectors. Allowing for industry fixed effects reverses the result: trade protection increases relative wages. This positive relationship persists when we instrument for tariff changes. Our results are in line with short- and medium-run models of trade where labor is immobile across sectors or, alternatively, with the existence of industry rents that are reduced by trade liberalization. In the context of the current debate on the rising income inequality in developing countries, our findings point to a source of disparity beyond the well-documented rise in the economy-wide skill premium: because tariff reductions were proportionately larger in sectors employing a high fraction of less-skilled workers, the decrease in the wage premiums in these sectors affected such workers disproportionately.     

Dynamic analysis of a disequilibrium macroeconomic model with dual labor markets

We extend the general disequilibrium model of Malinvaud (1980) by using dual labor market theory. By considering two tiers of workers, we find that while the duality of the labor market expands an equilibrium regime in the short term, it does not always keep an equilibrium in the medium term. In the medium term, the business cycle converges toward a disequilibrium regime unless the goods market is potentially in equilibrium. Employment and wages at the steady state are affected by the size of the government expenditure, and the stability of wage bargaining is only a sufficient condition of the local stability of our dynamic system. Therefore, involuntary unemployment can be remedied only when goods demand is sufficiently large.     

劳动力市场分割加剧了工资扭曲吗?--来自中国省际工业部门的经验证据

本文基于超越对数生产函数的随机前沿分析( SFA)方法测算中国省际工业部门的工资扭曲指数,通过可有效控制内生性问题的系统广义矩估计方法考察劳动力市场分割等因素对工资扭曲程度的影响,发现中国省际工业部门的工资扭曲程度要比现有研究结论严重得多,工资扭曲程度呈加重态势;西北偏远地区的劳动力市场分割程度较重,东部沿海省份的劳动力市场分割程度较轻;在控制相关因素后,劳动力市场分割将加剧工资扭曲程度。因此,逐步消除各省市之间的劳动力市场分割现象,可有效缓解中国工业部门的工资扭曲程度。     

How wages and employment adjust to trade liberalization: Quasi-experimental evidence from Austria

We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine differential pre- and post-1990 wage and employment growth rates between regions bordering the formerly communist economies and interior regions. If the ‘border regions’ are defined narrowly, within a band of less than 50 km, we can identify statistically significant liberalization effects on both employment and wages. While wages responded earlier than employment, the employment effect over the entire adjustment period is estimated to be around three times as large as the wage effect. The implied slope of the regional labor supply curve can be replicated in an economic geography model that features obstacles to labor migration due to immobile housing and to heterogeneous locational preferences.     

Domestic Implications of a Global Labor Market

Conventional thinking about labor markets has been slow to adjust to the reality of labor in a context of a global rather than a closed, national economy. Liberalization of international trade and capital flows has made substitution of foreign for domestic labor increasingly feasible. This has put downward pressure on reservation wages of unemployed workers. Also, the relatively easy substitution of foreign and domestic manufactured products relative to services has led to a dual economy in which manufacturing employment has been severely impacted by foreign competition while service employment has not. This has been amplified by the U.S.’ comparative advantage in high education and skills, which tends to be more characteristic of services than of manufacturing. This implies that low-skilled workers will be increasingly left behind unless they upgrade their skills in an increasingly competitive global economy. JEL Classification J400,F410     

马克思劳动力价值价格界限理论初探

本文认为,马克思指出了实际生活中的工资运动不同于剩余价值生产分析中工资与劳动力价值相一致的理论假定;对现实中劳动力价值及工资运动的考察与正确把握,必须在劳动力价值价格界限的理论基础上来进行。这个理论揭示了工资由身体标准和社会标准确定,劳动力价值界限的决定要素是纯生理要素与社会历史要素;这个理论的实质,就是否定了工人所需生活资料是仅为劳动者生理需要部分提供生活资料的传统看法。如果工资没有达到劳动力两个界限所要求的内容,那么工资就低于劳动力价值,它成为工人在雇佣劳动制度下进行提高工资的斗争的理论依据。     

New firms and labor market entrants: Is there a wage penalty for employment in new firms?

In this paper, we explore the role of new firms as an entry point to the labor market. Because the vast majority of new firms are short-lived, it is a risky decision to accept employment in a new venture. It can be argued that individuals with little (or no) labor market experience are more willing to accept the high risks associated with employment in new firms. Hence, new firms may work as an entry point to the labor market. Nevertheless, some research concludes that one disadvantage of employment in a new firm is that new firms pay less (Shane in Small Bus Econ 33:141–149, 2009). However, this empirical conclusion is primarily based on literature on the wage penalty of small firms. In this paper, we study whether the wage penalty of employment in a new firm persists if we focus solely on labor market entrants. In the empirical analysis, we employ an employer-employee matched dataset that covers the Swedish population during the period from 1998 to 2008. We use the propensity score matching method to study the wage differences between labor market entrants employed in new and incumbent firms. We find an average wage penalty of 2.9 % for labor market entrants employed in new firms over the studied period.     

Does Final Market Demand Elasticity Influence the Location of Export Processing? Evidence from Multinational Decisions in China

Given the importance many developing countries attach to attracting foreign investors engaged in export‐processing activities, surprisingly little is known about the sensitivity of these investors to local wage differences and the role played by final product market conditions. Using data on 2,884 foreign‐invested manufacturing projects in China, we estimate the importance of host province wages to firm’s location choice and investigate how this sensitivity varies with demand conditions facing the industry in China’s largest export market, the United States. We use the profit function to show theoretically that firms’ ability to pass wage costs through to final markets matters for location choice and we test the implications of the theory using a control‐function technique for conditional logit developed by Petrin and Train . As predicted, we find that investors facing more elastic demand in the US market are more sensitive to wages across export‐processing locations. Taking both the factor intensity of the activity and final market demand elasticity into account, we find that investors producing homogenous goods, such as metals, chemicals, and food processing, are more likely to be attracted by relatively low wages than those producing differentiated goods. We also find that while OECD investors are more responsive to wage differences than are investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, they are less likely to choose a location that has received a large share of prior foreign investment.     

人才引进政策如何影响了劳动力市场？

人才引进政策被各地政府长期而广泛采用，但是此类干预政策对各地劳动力市场产生了怎样的影响，还鲜有研究。文章利用285个地级及以上城市政策文本的大数据分析，量化了人才引进政策的干预强度，从劳动力市场就业规模效应和人力资本积累效应两个方面，定量研究了人才引进政策对劳动力市场的影响。研究表明：第一，人才引进政策对城市劳动力市场规模有正向作用，政策干预强度增加1%，城市整体就业规模上涨0.352%，高技能就业规模上涨1.652%。第二，人才引进政策对城市人力资本积累也有正向影响，政策干预强度增加1%，城市人力资本水平上涨1.798%。第三，降低生活成本和提升工资待遇是人才引进政策的主要中介作用机制，房价的中介效应大小为0.094482，工资的中介效应大小为0.13129。     

A Model of Growth and Conflict Inflation for a Small Open Economy

Several models of conflict inflation have been developed within the structuralist tradition. This paper differs from such works by assuming full capacity utilization in a small open economy. We introduce the exchange rate as a participant in the theory of inflation and distribution, and analyze two closures: the trade deficit as a market clearing mechanism, and a foreign exchange constrained economy. It is found that wage rigidity and exchange rate flexibility can lead to instability. The main conclusions do not change when we allow for continuous substitution between capital and labor.