Job search,unemployment and savings

This paper examines optimal search policies on the basis of two alternative assumptions, first that individuals consume income as it is received, and second, that individuals can save and subsequently draw from their savings. In this model workers search for heterogeneousjobs, which are characterized by fixed wages and random duration of employment spells. Workers choose jobs which will maximize the total expected lifetime utility of consumption. The optimal steady-state job acceptance policy in both cases takes the form of a fixed partition of the set of all job offers into acceptable and unacceptable ones. In the absence of a capital market, employment duration appears to be irrelevant for the marginal job offer and all jobs offering wages which exceed the marginal one are also acceptable independent of the distribution functions of employment duration. Nevertheless, the dispersion of employment duration at inframarginal acceptable jobs affects job choice. It is shown that when individuals can save, and if current utility and probability density functions are exponential, then steady-state rates of saving during periods of employment, and of dissaving during periods of unemployment, are independent of wealth and constant. The model developed is then used to examine the determinants of unemployment and the properties of optimal savings rates, and to obtain a number of testable hypotheses about savings behavior and job security.     

On optimal unemployment compensation

The design of an optimal unemployment compensation scheme is analyzed, using a dynamic principal-agent relationship between a risk-neutral planner (the principal) and risk-averse workers (the agents), where the planner's inability to observe workers’ job-search efforts creates a moral hazard problem. To design an implementable scheme, we require that each agent is guaranteed a minimum level of expected discounted utility, regardless of his past history. In contrast with previous studies, we find that the optimal contract is quite close to actual unemployment compensation schemes, both qualitatively and quantitatively.     

Productivity and unemployment over the business cycle

The low correlation between cyclical unemployment and productivity over the post-war period hides a large sign switch in the mid-1980s: from significantly negative the correlation became significantly positive. Using a search model of unemployment with nominal rigidities and variable labor effort, I show that technology shocks can generate a positive unemployment-productivity correlation whereas non-technology shocks (i.e. aggregate demand shocks) tend to do the opposite. In this context, I identify two events that can quantitatively explain the increase in the correlation: (i) a sharp drop in the volatility of non-technology shocks in the mid-1980s, and (ii) a decline in the response of productivity to non-technology shocks, which from procyclical became acyclical in the last 25 years.     

Optimal retirement with unemployment risks

This paper investigates the optimal retirement of an individual in the presence of involuntary unemployment risks and borrowing constraints in a complete market with frictions. We use an intensity model and loading factors to illustrate the involuntary unemployment risks and frictions in unemployment insurance markets. Using reasonably calibrated parameters, we observe that high involuntary unemployment intensity and loading factors could be important explanations for the empirical findings emphasized in recent studies. We also find that an individual with high leisure demand after retirement reduces consumption during retirement and increases stockholdings as retirement time approaches.     

IPO的发展与优势

IPO作为一种重要的企业融资方式深受各大企业的青睐。近期阿里巴巴的IPO问题更是成为金融界和互联网界的热门话题．再次将IPO推向风口舌尖。人们常说,每一个企业都有一个IPO梦想。那么,IPO融资到底是怎样的一个面目．又有着怎样的魔力使得各大公司为之赴汤蹈火呢？且看汉鼎咨询深度分析。     

Pension reform,retirement, and life-cycle unemployment

This paper investigates the labor market impact of four often proposed policy measures for sustainable pensions: strengthening the tax benefit link, moving from wage to price indexation of benefits, lengthening calculation periods, and introducing more actuarial fairness in pension assessment. We consider the impact on three margins of aggregate labor supply, retirement behavior, job search, and hours worked. We provide some analytical results and use a computational model to demonstrate the economic impact of recent pension reform in Austria. Reducing the distortion in the retirement decision by introducing pension supplements and discounts conditional on the chosen retirement date promises the largest gains. We also find that the pension reform is far from sufficient to offset the fiscal implications of projected demographic change in Austria.     

Creating corporate advantage

What differentiates truly great corporate strategies from the merely adequate? How can executives at the corporate level create tangible advantage for their businesses that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts? This article presents a comprehensive framework for value creation in the multibusiness company. It addresses the most fundamental questions of corporate strategy: What businesses should a company be in? How should it coordinate activities across businesses? What role should the corporate office play? How should the corporation measure and control performance? Through detailed case studies of Tyco International, Sharp, the Newell Company, and Saatchi and Saatchi, the authors demonstrate that the answers to all those questions are driven largely by the nature of a company's special resources--its assets, skills, and capabilities. These range along a continuum from the highly specialized at one end to the very general at the other. A corporation's location on the continuum constrains the set of businesses it should compete in and limits its choices about the design of its organization. Applying the framework, the authors point out the common mistakes that result from misaligned corporate strategies. Companies mistakenly enter businesses based on similarities in products rather than the resources that contribute to competitive advantage in each business. Instead of tailoring organizational structures and systems to the needs of a particular strategy, they create plain-vanilla corporate offices and infrastructures. The company examples demonstrate that one size does not fit all. One can find great corporate strategies all along the continuum.     

Labor tax reform, unemployment, and search

A key obstacle to reducing payroll taxes in many industrialized and transition countries is the direct revenue loss to the government that it implies. This paper studies a simple and practical labor tax reform of reducing a payroll tax and increasing a progressive wage tax that keeps the marginal tax wedge unchanged. Such a strategy increases employment, reduces the equilibrium unemployment rate, and increases public revenue as long as workers do not have all the bargaining power in wage negotiations. Moreover, welfare rises if workers’ bargaining power is sufficiently large to exceed a critical value determined by the second-best Hosios condition.      

Liquidity provision,interest rates,and unemployment

The effective liquidity supply of the economy—the weighted-sum of all assets that serve as media of exchange—matters for interest rates and unemployment. We formalize this idea by adding an over-the-counter market with collateralized trades to the Mortensen–Pissarides model. An increase in public liquidity through a higher supply of real government bonds raises the real interest rate, crowding out private liquidity and increasing unemployment. If unemployment is inefficiently high, keeping liquidity scarce can be socially optimal. A liquidity crisis affecting the acceptability of private assets as collateral widens the rate-of-return difference between private and public liquidity, also increasing unemployment.     

Understanding European unemployment with matching and search-island models

To understand European and American unemployment during the last 60 years, we use a search-island model and four matching models with workers who have heterogeneous skills and entitlements to government benefits. When there is higher turbulence, in the sense of worse skill transition probabilities for workers who suffer involuntary layoffs, high government mandated unemployment insurance (UI) and employment protection (EP) in Europe increase unemployment rates and durations. But when there is lower turbulence, high European EP suppresses unemployment rates despite high European UI. Four matching models differ in how they assign unemployed workers to matching functions. That affects how strongly unemployment responds to increases in turbulence. Heterogeneity among unemployed workers highlights the central role of adverse labor market externalities in matching models and reveals that the cost of posting vacancies is the lynchpin of a matching model.     

Optimal unemployment benefit policy and the firm productivity distribution

This paper provides a novel justification for a declining time profile of unemployment benefits that does not rely on moral-hazard or consumption-smoothing considerations. We consider a simple search environment with homogeneous workers and low- and high-productivity firms. By introducing a declining time profile of benefits, the government can affect the equilibrium wage profile in a manner that enhances the sorting of workers across low- and high-productivity firms. We demonstrate that optimal government policy depends on the dispersion and skewness of the firms’ productivity distribution.     

Efficiency in academe: Comparative advantage vs. “publish or perish”

A basic tenet of economic theory is that production increases in total whenever factors of production specialize according to their comparative advantages. This very basic law of comparative advantage is not restricted in its application to merely the physical factors of production such as land. Labor, or human capital, is a factor of production, and thus total production is greater if individuals specialize according to their natural, or acquired, talents. Despite the fact that academics propound this law of comparative advantage, very little has been done to implement the law into faculty assignments. Rather, we find that most academic departments at universities require their faculty to not only teach, but also to perform research. This assignment policy occurs even though not all faculty have equal capabilities in both teaching and research. The authors criticize this tendency toward standardization of faculty, using the economic law of comparative advantage as the theoretical justification for their criticism.     

新三板有哪些要求与优势

新三板市场特指中关村科技园区非上市股份有限公司进入代办股份系统进行转让试点,因为挂牌企业均为高科技企业而不同于原转让系统内的退市企业及原STAQ、NET系统挂牌公司,所以称为新三板.2001年,为解决主板市场退市公司与两个停止交易的法人股市场公司的股份转让问题,由中国证券业协会出面,协调部分证券公司设了代办股份转让系统,被称之为三板.但在三板中挂牌的股票品种少,三板市场多年沉寂.为了给更多的高科技成长型企业提供股份流动的机会,北京中关村科技园区建立了新的股份转让系统,被称为新三板.     

A quantitative analysis of unemployment benefit extensions

Extensions of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits have been implemented in response to the Great Recession. This paper measures the effect of these extensions on the unemployment rate using a calibrated structural model featuring job search and consumption-saving decisions, skill depreciation, and UI eligibility. The ongoing UI benefit extensions are found to have raised the unemployment rate by 1.4 percentage points, which is about 30% of the observed increase since 2007. Moreover, the contribution of the UI benefit extensions to the elevated unemployment rate increased during 2009–2011; while the number of vacancies recovered, the successive extensions kept search intensity down.     

Optimal taxation and redistribution in an OLG model with unemployment

This paper concerns redistribution via nonlinear income taxation in an overlapping generations model with two ability-types. We assume that the wage rates are determined by bargaining between unions and firms, meaning that the equilibrium is characterized by involuntary unemployment. We show that the policy instruments that are used to calculate the marginal labor income tax rate for each ability-type give rise to intertemporal tax base effects. In addition, since the relationship between the employment and the capital stock implies intertemporal production inefficiency at the second best optimum, imperfect competition in the labor market may itself justify capital income taxation.