Legal Minimum Wages and Employment Duration

We estimate the effect of minimum wages on employment duration using event history data from the 1988-1994 rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Existing literature takes two alternative tracks: Some studies predict reduced turnover due to rents created by minimum wages, others focus on the expected increase in turnover due to reduced job amenities and imperfect information. We find that for men, the net effect of a minimum wage depends on its magnitude relative to the typical wage in the local labor market. We find some evidence that where the minimum wage is low, separation rates for men hired at the minimum wage are reduced. We also find that as the relative value of the minimum wage rises, separation hazards increase. We interpret these findings as evidence that rents may accrue to minimum wage workers, but that the job matching process is undermined when the minimum wage binds.     

Demographic change,human capital,and economic growth in Korea

We construct a measure of human capital using micro datasets on labor composition of age, gender, education, and wage rate and analyze its role in economic growth for the Korean economy. Over the past three decades, human capital has grown steadily at about 1% per year, contrasting to a continuously declining trend of total work-hours. This growth has been driven by the rise of better-educated baby-boom cohorts. A growth accounting exercise shows that human capital contributes significantly to economic growth; it accounted for 0.5% points of annual GDP growth over the period. Human capital is projected to remain a major growth factor over the next two decades as the increase in educational attainment continues. Increased employment rate of elderly or female workers reduces the aggregate human capital growth while increasing the available labor. Polices to improve human capital of female or elderly workers help to increase aggregate human capital growth.     

Increasing wage,mechanization, and agriculture production in China

As the population bonus disappeared, the wage rate has increased significantly since the early 2000s in China. Increasing wages have significantly affected export-oriented industries as well as agriculture. Mechanization is another factor affecting China's agriculture. This study shows the increasing wage and the mechanization have a negative impact on land area devoted to labor-intensive crops but a positive impact on land area devoted to labor-extensive crops. Based on nationally representative data, the empirical results conform well to the theoretical predictions.     

The Origins and Early Impact of the Minimum Wage in Agriculture

This article examines the effects on wages and employment of the minimum wage in agriculture during the interwar period. It finds that the impact of regulation was to raise the wage for agricultural labourers by 13 per cent when it was (re)introduced in 1924, by 15 per cent in the late 1920s, and by more than 20 per cent in the 1930s. The effect on farm employment was to reduce it by about 54,000 (6.5 per cent) in 1929 up to a peak of 97,000 (13.3 per cent) in 1937. The minimum wage lifted out of poverty many families of farm labourers who remained employed, but it significantly lowered the incomes of farmers, particularly during the 1930s.     

“民工荒”对我国乡镇企业可持续发展的启示

“民工荒”现象意味着农业劳动边际产量为0的绝对农业剩余劳动力被转移完毕,但农业劳动边际产量大于0意义上的农业剩余劳动力仍大量存在。对习惯了采用低工资、低技术发展战略的乡镇企业而言,它们必须改变自己的发展战略,用资本、技术来替代劳动,用高素质劳动力替代低素质劳动力,使用更加资本密集化的方法进行生产,努力实现企业的产品升级、技术升级、管理升级。     

Reciprocity information and wage personalization

This paper considers a modified principal-agent environment, where principals can use personalized offers based on agents' reciprocity-related information. With such information, principals can either impose stronger financial incentives or try to “trigger” agents' positive reciprocity by offering a higher fixed rate. Theory suggests that principals who believe in agents' reciprocity would personalize offers so that reciprocal agents increase their effort beyond the self-regarding benchmark. Using a lab experiment, we test the behavior of principals and agents. Our experimental market witnesses significant wage personalization when reciprocity information is available. However, agents' effort levels and principals' payoffs are lower under wage personalization, compared with the sessions where principals cannot personalize offers. Our structural analysis shows that, under wage personalization, agents expect higher fixed wages and reciprocate higher wages less. Information about agents' individual reciprocity is more correlated with the expected wages, rather than the strength of reciprocity toward higher or lower wages. Principals grant higher fixed wages to workers with lower wage expectations, but because principals cannot personalize offers effectively according to the strength of reciprocity, the performance of wage personalization is limited.     

Optimal wages for politicians

I consider a society that has to decide on the wage that it offers for an elected official. Potential candidates differ in their abilities, which determines their effectiveness in office and their opportunity cost. They consider the wage when deciding whether to enter as candidates, and if they do, how hard to campaign. The remuneration for the official that maximizes ordinary citizens’ expected utility is a function of the proportion of competent voters who are better informed about the quality of the candidates and are not influenced by the campaign. I use the data on U.S. governor salaries over six decades to evaluate some implications of the model. Specifically, the proportion of the state's population with a bachelor's degree—a proxy for the proportion of competent voters—is negatively correlated with the governors’ salaries when controlled for other factors.     

The supply of labor in agriculture and food prices: The cases of Japan and Egypt

It is hypothesized in this paper that as the relative cost of food increases, labor supply in agriculture declines and, ceteris paribus, the real wage in agriculture will increase. This hypothesis was tested by using data drawn from Japan for the period 1885 to 1920 and Egypt for the period 1950 to 1974. The results of the empirical analysis confirmed the hypothesis. Thus, recent activities by farmers in labor-abundant less developed nations to mechanize their operations may be partly due to increased labor costs, rising real wage, brought about by the relative scarcity of food.     

Do high profits imply low wages?

Summary It is argued in this paper that, contrary to what may be commonly believed, high wages are not inconsistent with monopsony power (neoclassical exploitation). In fact, it is argued, when a monopsonistic firm has economically profitable product-market monopoly power, which would seem to be the typical real world case, the firm's wages are expected to be high. Clearly, the situation described by the combination of profitable monopoly-monopsony conditions explains a high wage insofar as these conditions represent a profit opportunity which provides an incentive to pay a high wage and without which the high wages would not be offered or paid. Empirical evidence based on an exhaustive sample is offered which, although not over-whelmingly convincing, tends to support the theoretical arguments of this paper.     

Wage Gaps Large and Small

The law of one wage does not strictly hold, nor should it be expected to hold, in contemporary labor markets. The law of one wage, however, provides a surprisingly good first approximation of the structure of U.S. wages. This generalization is drawn from research on a diverse set of topics: the Mincerian wage equation and earnings imputation, union wage differentials, product market regulation and the labor market, wages in male and female jobs, the wage effects of military service, and interarea wages and cost of living.     

Labour Market Trends and Structures in ASEAN and the East Asian NIEs

The paper reviews the literature on labour markets in the region with special emphasis on the impact of economic growth and structural change on employment and wages. It deals with labour supply trends, employment creation outside agriculture (especially export orientated industrialization and new high-tech industries), labour absorption in agriculture, wage differentials and the functioning of rural and urban labour markets.
The creation of efficient and equitable labour market institutions and labour market flexibility have emerged as dominant issues in the NIEs. In the ASEAN-4, because of concentration of employment in low productivity and low wage jobs and underutilization of labour, the rate of modern sector labour absorption remains the major policy concern.     

农业转移人口地域歧视的工资效应分析

基于广东省顺德区的调查数据,使用无条件分位数回归及分解方法,文章分析了外来与本地农业转移人口的工资效应。结果显示:外来与本地农业转移人口面临不同的工资决定机制;地域差异对工资的影响存在异质性,只有收入在88%分位点以上的外来农业转移人口才会受到地域歧视的影响,且随着收入分位点的上升,工资受地域的影响变大;地域因素与人力资本因素交织,通过婚姻、教育、工作岗位和经验等变量的作用产生影响;教育对于外来农业转移人口的工资具有增长效应,但无法完全消除地域歧视的影响。因此,除了提高外来农业转移人口的教育水平,还需改善外来农业转移人口融入城市的条件,促进外来农业转移人口家庭融入城市。     

Does Hukou pay? Evidence from nanny markets in urban China

This paper quantifies the effect of the Chinese Hukou (household registration) on expected wage of nannies in urban China. Using a novel data set with detailed individual information of nannies from 12 Chinese cities during 2015–2016, this study finds that a 1% increase in Hukou Index, a measure of inter-regional migration restrictions, leads to a 0.05% increase in expected wage of nannies. The effect is heterogeneous for sub-categories of Hukou policies and among different types of nannies. Migration networks also play a significant role, and the effects are different for migration networks of different sizes. These findings reveal the unexpected consequences of China’s tight control of internal migration and the change in wages of a relatively low-skill service sector.     

Labor market developments in China: A neoclassical view

This paper assesses the applicability of two alternative theories in understanding labor market developments in China: the classical view featuring a Lewis turning point in wage growth versus a neoclassical framework emphasizing rational choices of individuals and equilibrating forces of the market. Empirical evidence based on multiple data sources fails to validate the arrival of the Lewis turning point in China, showing continuous and coordinated wage growth across rural and urban sectors instead. Consistent with the neoclassical view, we find that rural workers expanded off-farm work when mobility restrictions were lifted, interprovincial migration responded to expected earnings and local employment conditions, and returns to education converged gradually to the international standard. These findings suggest major progresses in the integration of labor markets in China.     

Effects of Educational Mistmatch on Wages in the Korean Labor Market*

Using data on Korean workers from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the present study empirically investigates the incidence and wage effects of educational mismatch. Among full‐time workers aged 25–54, approximately 27 percent are overeducated and 15 percent are undereducated. Our results reveal that, after controlling for omitted variable bias and measurement errors, return to an additional year of overeducation is significantly less than that to a year of required education, whereas undereducated workers do not appear to suffer wage penalties associated with their deficit schooling. The findings also show that returns to a year of overeducation vary across fields of study. The returns to overeducation for college graduates from health and welfare, engineering and manufacturing, and social sciences, business and law are relatively high compared with those in agriculture, services, and humanities and arts.     

Unemployment with trade and firm heterogeneity

By specifying the setting of the footloose capital model with firm heterogeneity, this paper examines the effects of trade liberalization on unemployment through two different mechanisms: firstly, we embed search frictions into the labor market; and secondly, we consider fair wages as the source of unemployment. In the model with search frictions, we find that both the expected wage and employment rate could be higher for a small country with better search technology. In the fair wage setting, the results show that an increase in trade freeness increases the unemployment rate of the large (small) country when the trade freeness is sufficiently high (low). Finally, we try to compare the welfare levels under different scenarios and discover that unemployment may lead to a deterioration in the welfare gains from trade.     

最低工资标准、工资支付能力与中小企业创新产出——基于浙江的调查

最低工资标准的提高可能会增加企业的劳动力成本而挤压其创新资源的投入,也可能通过倒逼企业创新或改善创新预期收益而增加创新产出.文章基于浙江省企业创新障碍调查数据,利用Weibull潜变量模型方法分组对比发现,工资支付能力不同的企业的创新产出存在显著差异;次序logit模型检验发现最低工资标准对工资支付能力较弱的中小企业的创新产出有显著的负面影响,表现为挤出效应;而对工资支付能力较强的中小企业的专利申请数量有正面影响,对创新利润占比没有显著影响.     

Union membership,union coverage and wage dispersion of rural migrants: Evidence from Suzhou industrial sector

Using the data from an original survey on rural migrant workers from Suzhou industrial sector in 2013, we estimate the wage effect of both union membership and union coverage across the wage distributions using decomposition approach based on unconditional quantile regression. The results show that union membership has a significant effect on the wage level of rural migrant workers across the wage distribution. The effect of coefficient differences which results from the different rewarding systems explains the majority wage differentials between union members and non-members in non-unionized firms. There is also significant union coverage effect at the lower part of the distribution when comparing the union-covered non-member to the nonunion-covered non-member, which is also mainly caused by the coefficient effect. By contrast, wage differentials between union members and non-members in unionized firms are attributed to significant composition effect, which reveals that union members are positively selected within unionized firms. As a result, the positive wage effect of union is limited to the more advantaged group among migrant workers.     

The role of migration in regional wage convergence: Evidence from Sweden 1860–1940

Sweden experienced a decline in inter-county real wage differentials for agricultural workers between 1860 and 1940, historical evidence of early labor market integration well before widespread unionization in agriculture occurred. By means of dynamic panel data analysis, this paper examines whether internal and external migrations caused real wage beta convergence across Swedish counties. To account for statistical problems such as endogeneity of migration, time-invariant county characteristics and autocorrelation in the regression model, we adjust our estimates using fixed effects, instrumental variables and GMM. The preferred model shows that both internal and external migrations contributed to wage convergence before the First World War and internal migration mainly during the interwar years. The agglomeration effects of urbanization were not sufficiently pervasive to offset the labor supply effects of internal and external migrations.     

Structural change in Malawi since independence: Consequences of a development strategy based on large-scale agriculture

This paper investigates the nature of the structural change which has occured in the Malawian economy since independence and identifies key policies pursued by the government which it is argued have been decisive in shaping this development. The salient feature of structural change is shown to be the rapid growth of large-scale agriculture, associated with an equally rapid transfer of labour into wage employment and a decline in the importance of peasant production. The implications of these changes for living standards and future development and policy are considered.