Trade and Labor Approaches to Wage Inequality

The paper compares the trade and labor approaches to wage inequality. It first looks at the theoretical differences, stressing the different roles ascribed to sector and factor bias, labor supply and the theory of technical change in trade models with endogenous prices. It then briefly reviews some of the evidence on the sector bias of prices and technology.     

关于经济增长与不平等的综合评价——满意度、熵与社会福利

本文试图探讨关于经济增长与不平等的综合社会福利评价体系.建立社会福利评价体系一般面临两个困难:找出合理的社会福利函数和关于收入的个人效用函数.为此,本文把效用函数和社会福利函数标准化为满意度函数,并证明了,唯一满足齐次性和对称性的社会福利函数是个人满意度的几何平均,不存在常弹性或常相对风险规避的个人满意度函数,常二阶弹性的个人满意度函数意味着效用的收入弹性递减.以地区收入分配为例,计算结果显示我国地区不平等有长期增加趋势,若综合考虑收入增长与不平等,我国的社会福利水平有稍微上升的趋势.     

The Labour Market and Inequality

Newspoll reported in 2000 that by a margin of 70 to 28 per cent, Australians would prefer the gap between rich and poor to get smaller rather than have the nation's overall wealth grow as quickly as possible. This article examines the reasons for the increase in the dispersion of earnings, and changes in unemployment and workforce participation, which are central to this concern about inequality. The major finding is that the widening dispersion of earnings and changes in labour force status are principally due to changes in the structure of labour demand in favour of more skilled jobs. The article then considers what this changing job mix implies for policy directed to maintaining income inequality.     

The Environmental Tax: Effects on Inequality and Growth

Environmental and Resource Economics - Within an R&D-driven growth model, this paper studies how an environmental tax and its cost both for firms and consumers affect individuals’...     

The Technology Cycle and Inequality

Motivated by the observed rise in the trade of technology, I analyse how technology would spread in a frictionless market. In such a world, low-skilled agents prefer to use old technology because it costs less; their skills do not justify the use of frontier technology. The model generates a technology-life cycle of somewhere between 68 and 124 years and per-capita income differential factors between 2.3 and 4.5. The model matches fairly well the cross-section relation between a country's income per capita and the average age of the technologies that its residents use. It is also consistent with aspects of the observed positive relation between income and imports of technology.     

Poverty and the Atkinson BI/FRT model: A note

By endogenizing an income-oriented poverty line in Atkinson’s (1995) model, welfare maximizing conditions for a basic income/flat rate tax scheme in economies with income poverty are derived and briefly discussed. (JEL: I38)     

The Changing Pattern of Sources of Income and its Impact on Inequality: The Method and its Application to Australia, 1975–94

This paper proposes a new method of explaining the temporal change in economic inequality in terms of changes in the sources of income. The method is based on the decomposition of the Gini coefficient by source of income. Using this method, the paper also examines changes of the sources of private income in Australia over the last two decades and their impact on the distribution of income. It will be seen that not only have the shares of income from different sources changed, but that there has been significant change in inequality of distribution of the components themselves.     

Intelligence, Human Capital, and Economic Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) Approach

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests and conclude that intelligence tests provide one useful measure of human capital. Using a new database of national average IQ, we show that in growth regressions that include only robust control variables, IQ is statistically significant in 99.8% of these 1330 regressions, easily passing a Bayesian model-averaging robustness test. A 1 point increase in a nation’s average IQ is associated with a persistent 0.11% annual increase in GDP per capita.     

Inequality amongst the wealthiest and its link with economic growth

In this article, we correlate the key features of the distribution of wealth of the 500 wealthiest individuals in the Netherlands with economic growth and stock market returns for the period 1998 to 2009. We show that each year the distribution obeys a power law and that the key parameter measures the degree of inequality. Our main finding is that more inequality amongst the wealthiest is associated with higher economic growth.     

试论当前政府外债管理体制及其改进措施

借用外债是利用外资的一个重要组成部份，而借用政府外债又在外债中起着举足轻重的作用，本文探讨了我国当前政府外债管理体制中存在的问题并提出相应的改进措施。     

The Great Recession,Austerity and Inequality: Lessons from Ireland

The advent of the Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and its effects. We examine how the distribution of income in Ireland—a country which experienced one of the most severe economic contractions—has evolved over the years 2008 to 2013. Standard cross‐sectional analysis of the income distribution shows broad stability in the Gini coefficient and in decile shares, with one main exception: the share of the bottom decile fell sharply, with the largest fall in average incomes being for that group. Longitudinal analysis shows that the falls in the average income for the bottom decile were not due to decreasing income for those remaining in the bottom decile, but to falls in income from those initially located in higher deciles. The extent of redistribution through taxes and transfers increased strongly, as measured by the Reynolds‐Smolensky index, which rose from 0.20 before the onset of the crisis to 0.27 in 2013. Analysis indicates that about three‐quarters of this increased redistribution is due to automatic stabilisers and one‐quarter to discretionary policy changes.     

努力对机会不平等的影响:测度与比较

本文致力于检验当全体居民的努力提高之后,由外部环境差异导致的收入分配机会不平等能否显著降低,从而回答努力能否改变命运的问题。具体而言,本文将CGSS样本按出生年代划分为50后、60后、70后和80后四个群体,采用基于随机参数Logit模型的倾向得分匹配方法(PSM),构造所有个体均付出最高努力时的反事实收入分布,测算并比较实际收入分布和反事实收入分布的机会不平等指数,从而检验努力提高能否改善收入分配的机会不平等程度。结果显示,四个出生年代居民的收入分配机会不平等占比达到35%-43%;当所有个体的努力达到最高程度时,50后居民的收入分配机会不平等仅降低4.98%,60后和70后居民机会不平等的降幅高达50%左右,而80后居民机会不平等则降低22%;优势和劣势环境群体因努力程度提高而实现的收入增长幅度不同,是不同出生年代机会不平等指数降幅存在明显差异的原因。本文认为,政府应致力于弱化外部环境的影响,提高努力的回报,对因外部环境不利而陷入贫困的居民进行重点救助,为弱势群体通过努力改变命运创建足够的平台和畅通的渠道。     

The Intensity and Shape of Inequality: The ABG Method of Distributional Analysis

Inequality is anisotropic: its intensity varies by income level. We here develop a new tool, the isograph, to focus on local inequality and illustrate these variations. This method yields three coefficients which summarize the shape of inequality: a main coefficient, α, which measures inequality at the median; and two correction coefficients, β and γ, which pick up any differential curvature at the top and bottom of the distribution. The analysis of a set of 232 microdata samples from 41 different countries in the LIS datacenter archive allows us to provide a systematic overview of the properties of the ABG (α β γ) coefficients, which are compared to a set of standard indices including Atkinson indices, generalized entropy, Wolfson polarization, and the GB2 distribution. This method also provides a smoothing tool that reveals the differences in the shape of distributions (the strobiloid) and how these have changed over time.     

The Uncertainty of Academic Rent and Income Inequality: The OECD Panel Evidence

The article presents an alternative view on the education—income inequality relationship, which calls into question the neoclassical claim that education increases labor productivity and hence contributes to a higher output, wage and consequently more even income distribution. In the context of public policies, education needs to be seen not only as a factor of income mobility, but also as a “positional good,” which benefits graduates at the expense of non-graduates. Education generates “academic rent,” by which we mean uneven remuneration of workers based on academic signs of distinctions that do not necessarily reflect differences in productivity. Using the robust panel model on a sample of OECD (Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development) countries from 1980 to 2015, we show that investments in human capital lead to lower inequality, but overinvestments tends to increase income inequality, which may be related to academic rent. In discussing this result, we consider that uncertainty of academic rent under the condition of a rapid transformation of the workplace caused by the fourth industrial revolution.     

The Proportionality of Electoral Systems: Electoral Welfare and Electoral Inequality

This paper argues that measuring the degree of proportionality in an electoral system is equivalent to measuring the degree of electoral inequality, defined in terms of inter-party differences in the seats-to-votes ratio. It proposes an index of the degree of electoral inequality which is based on Atkinson's (1970) index, applied originally to measuring income inequality. This index satisfies all the criteria proposed in the literature for evaluating measures of electoral proportionality. In addition, such an Atkinson-type index of electoral inequality can also be given a welfarist interpretation by directly relating its value to the level of electoral welfare. Under such an interpretation, the disproportionality in an electoral system may be interpreted as being the result of the system imputing voting shares to the different political parties which are different from their actual voting shares. The larger this difference, the greater the degree of disproportionality in the system. The use of this index is illustrated by an application to the outcomes of Irish General Elections from 1923 till 1997.     

会计信息的复杂性:表现与度量

会计信息披露问题是资本市场发生危机的一个重要原因。而会计信息的复杂性则是会计信息披露问题的一个重要方面。本文分析了会计信息复杂性的表现形式。提出了会计信息复杂性的度量模型,并对中国上市公司会计信息复杂性进行了抽样数据测试,指出,会计信息复杂性具有行业差异,复杂性的度量为投资者和管制者估计会计信息质量具有修正价值。     

Classical and modern business cycle measurement: The European case

This paper intends to harmonize two different approaches employed in the analysis of business cycles and, in doing so, it retrieves the stylized facts of the business cycle in Europe. We start with the classical approach proposed in Burns and Mitchell (1946) of dating and analyzing the business cycle. The stylized facts retrieved are commented and compared to those obtained by Harding and Pagan (2002) for the U.S.. Two conclusions can be extracted from the results: a) though the turning points obtained for individual countries seem to cluster and would suggest the idea of a common cycle, there are relevant differences in the stylized facts characterizing the business cycle in the individual European economies under analysis; b) moreover, we find relevant differences in the business cycle stylized facts of the European countries and the U.S., mostly in terms of the duration, the amplitude of the cycle and the shape of the recovery. We then adopt the modern alternative: the Markov-switching vector autoregression (MS-VAR). The models regime probabilities provide an optimal statistical inference of the turning point of the European business cycle. For assessing the capacity of the parametric approach to generate the stylized facts of the classical cycle in Europe, the stylized facts of the original data are compared to those of simulated data. Contrary to the results reported by Harding and Pagan (2002) , we show that the MS-VAR model is a good candidate to be used as an statistical instrument to improve the understanding of the business cycle.JEL Classification: E32, F43, F47, C32We are grateful to Mike Artis, Mike Clements and Adrian Pagan for useful comments and discussions. Financial support from the UK Economic and Social Research Council under grant L116251015 is gratefully acknowledged by the first author. The research of the second author was supported through a European Community Marie Curie Fellowship, contract HPMF-CT-2000-00761. Corresponding author: Juan Toro