Short-term pain for long-term gain: Market deregulation and monetary policy in small open economies

This paper explores the effects of labor and product market reforms in a New Keynesian, small open economy model with labor market frictions and endogenous producer entry. We show that it takes time for reforms to pay off, typically at least a couple of years. This is partly because the benefits materialize through firm entry and increased hiring, both of which are gradual processes, while any reform-driven layoffs are immediate. Some reforms – such as reductions in employment protection – increase unemployment temporarily. Implementing a broad package of labor and product market reforms minimizes transition costs. Importantly, reforms do not have noticeable deflationary effects, suggesting that the inability of monetary policy to deliver large interest rate cuts in their aftermath – either because of the zero bound on policy rates or because of the membership in a monetary union – may not be a relevant obstacle to reform. Alternative simple monetary policy rules do not have a large effect on transition costs.     

Incremental Reform and Distortions in China's Product and Factor Markets

The purpose of economic reform is to reduce distortions andenhance efficiency. However, when reforms are partial and incremental,individuals and local governments are often able to capturethe rent inherent in the gradual transition process. Young (2000)warned that such rent-seeking behavior might lead to increasingmarket fragmentation. Empirical studies have shown the oppositein the product market. This article argues that as the rentfrom China's product market has been squeezed out due to deepeningreforms, rent-seeking behavior may have shifted to the capitalmarket. Further reforms are needed in the capital market tosqueeze out these rent-seeking opportunities, just as thosefrom the product and labor markets were squeezed out earlier.     

Finance and employment: Evidence from U.S. banking reforms

Economic theory offers competing hypotheses about how the cost and availability of finance influence labor market outcomes. Making use of the U.S. banking reforms between the 1970s and the 1990s as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper studies the impact of credit market development on employment. This paper documents the significant effects of these reforms on employment growth. Potential channels between finance and employment are also investigated. Changes in the growth of the number of self-employed individuals, the entry and exit of firms, and investment growth do not explain most of the employment growth following the reforms. The reforms had a substantially higher impact in industries with higher labor intensity, which is consistent with the idea that labor has fixed costs that need to be financed.     

Organized Labor and the Political Economy of Product Market Distortions

Why are economic reforms reversed through strikes and demonstrationsin some countries, but backed by the labor movement in othercountries? Why do product and labor market distortions differso much across countries? This article addresses these questionsby means of a simple, heuristic model of the economy that replicatesin an integrated manner several independent results from therecent political economy literature. Unlike most of this literature,however, the model focuses on the role played by organized labor,rather than by rent-seeking firms and guilds. A two-stage gamebetween the government and organized labor determines the levelof product market distortions (for example, import tariffs).In the first stage, the players may undertake costly actions,such as redistributing income or striking, in order to increasetheir bargaining power. In the second stage, they negotiateover product market distortions and wages. Under very generalassumptions, several policy regimes exist: Changes in the keyparameters of the economy may trigger a switch in the strategyof trade unions from confrontation to cooperation and hencechange the policy regime. Cross-country data highlight that,in spite of its simplicity, the model reproduces some observedempirical regularities.     

担保物权制度改革与企业劳动力结构北大核心

本文以《物权法》出台为标志的担保物权制度改革为准自然实验情境,考察资本市场制度建设对企业劳动力结构的影响。结果发现:相比固定资产占比较高企业,固定资产占比较低企业在改革后高技能劳动力增长显著更多、高技能员工在全体员工中占比显著提高。机制检验表明,担保物权制度改革通过加大企业的先进机器设备投资及研发活动进而影响了劳动力结构,特别是对改革前信贷可获得性较低或融资约束较高的企业更明显,这使担保物权制度改革、资本技能互补及企业劳动力结构间的逻辑关系得以进一步增强。横截面差异检验发现,法律制度环境较差地区企业以及成长机会较高企业,其劳动力结构更可能受《物权法》影响。最后,担保物权制度改革对企业劳动力结构的改变能提高其全要素生产率及盈利能力。本文从劳动力结构视角为识别《物权法》实施后果提供了证据支持,对于理解法律制度建设的经济效益、破解我国劳动力市场难题具有启示意义。     

On the political economics of tax reforms: survey and empirical assessment

Political constraints and incentives are the true driver of tax reforms. This paper reviews the political economics literature on personal income tax systems and reforms to see how political mechanisms help explain tax reforms. We take some of the implications of these theories to the data using LABREF, a database that identifies labor tax reforms in the European Union for the period 2000–2007, and control for economic and labor market factors. We find that political variables carry more weight than economic variables, and we show empirical regularities that support political economy theories. We also find that governments tended to reform more in better economic times, engaging in pro-cyclical behavior.     

German Wage Moderation and European Imbalances: Feeding the Global VAR with Theory

German labor market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s are generally believed to have driven the large increase in the dispersion of current account balances in the Euro Area. We investigate this hypothesis quantitatively. We develop a three‐region open economy New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions from which we derive robust sign restrictions for wage bargaining and matching efficiency shocks which we term wage moderation shocks. We impose these restrictions on a Global VAR consisting of Germany and eight EMU countries to identify a wage moderation shock in Germany. Our results show that, although the German current account was significantly affected by wage moderation shocks, their contribution to European current account imbalances was negligible. We conclude that the German labor market reforms cannot be the lone driver of European imbalances.     

Transitions in the German labor market: Structure and crisis

Since the so-called Hartz IV reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008/2009, the German labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this performance. Calibrating unemployment benefits to approximate legislation before and after the reforms, we find a large reduction in unemployment and its duration, with the transition concluding after about three years. During the crisis, the extended use of short-time labor subsidies that prevent jobs from being destroyed is likely to have prevented strong increases in unemployment.     

A positive analysis of labor-market institutions and tax reforms

In this paper, we investigate the structure of the “Laffer curve” for taxes on labor and other factors of production, under different institutional frameworks of the labor market. Using a Cobb–Douglas production technology allows us to characterize important properties of the “Laffer curve” in terms of the wage share for a competitive labor market, the monopoly union model, the right-to-manage approach, the insider-dominated union, and efficient Nash bargains simultaneously. In this way, we are able to highlight the menu of factor tax systems, and thus of potential tax reforms available to a government, without perfect knowledge of the mechanism of the labor market. In particular, we show that the employment-maximizing tax system features a constant energy tax, while the energy mini-/maximizing tax system features a constant labor tax. We also illuminate to what extent these results must be modified if we either employ a CES production function, or if we allow for an endogenous reservation wage.     

Fiscal sustainability and demographic change: a micro-approach for 27 EU countries

The effect of demographic change on the labor force and on fiscal revenues is topical in light of potential pension shortfalls. This paper evaluates the effect of demographic changes between 2010 and 2030 on labor force participation and government budgets in the EU-27. Our analysis involves the incorporation of population projections, and an explicit modeling of the supply and demand side of the labor market. Our approach overcomes key shortcomings of most existing studies that focus only on labor supply when assessing the effects of policy reforms. Ignoring wage reactions greatly understates the increase in fiscal revenues, suggesting that fiscal strain from demographic change might be less severe than currently perceived. Beyond, our micro-based approach captures the impact on fiscal revenues more accurately than previous studies. Finally, as a policy response to demographic change and worsening fiscal budgets, we simulate the increase in the statutory retirement age. Our policy simulations confirm that raising the statutory retirement age can balance fiscal budgets in the long run.     

Stock market development under globalization: Whither the gains from reforms?

Over the past decades, many countries have implemented significant reforms (including financial liberalization, privatization, and regulatory and supervisory improvements) to foster domestic capital market development. Despite these policies, the performance of capital markets in several countries has been disappointing. To understand the effects of reforms, we study the impact of six capital market reforms on domestic stock market development and internationalization. We find that reforms tend to be followed by increases in domestic market capitalization and trading. But reforms are also followed by an increase in the share of activity in international equity markets, with potential negative spillover effects.     

Labor Market Analysis and Public Policy: The Case of Morocco

This article uses detailed industry and household data to understandwhy Morocco's labor market performed poorly in 1985–95.The data indicate that marked structural changes and weak demandin the product market were responsible. This article makes twocontributions to the literature. The first is specific: it underscoresthat the demand for labor is a derived demand and that the performanceof the product market is an important determinant of the performanceof the labor market. The second is more general: it demonstratesthat this kind of microeconomic analysis, using data sets thatare often available in developing countries, can inform policydesign.     

Credit Reallocation,Deleveraging, and Financial Crises

This paper studies how the process of reallocation of credit across firms behaves before and after financial crises. Applying the methodology typically used for measuring job reallocation, we track credit reallocation across Korean firms for over three decades (1980–2012). The credit boom preceding the 1997 crisis featured a slowdown of credit reallocation. After the crisis and the associated reforms, the creditless recovery (deleveraging) masked a dramatic intensification and increased procyclicality of credit reallocation. The findings suggest that the intensification of reallocation was efficiency‐enhancing.     

Taxing Mobile Capital with Labor Market Imperfections

Taxing internationally mobile factors of production has been dismissed as an inefficient means of raising tax revenue. This paper addresses the question of whether it is efficient to tax capital at source when labor markets and the taxation of lumpsum income suffer from imperfections. Four reasons for taxing capital are identified: (i) institutional constraints rendering any taxation of profit income infeasible; (ii) market power in the demand for labor; (iii) market power in the supply of labor if it increases with the employment of capital; (iv) unemployment benefits that are not tied to net real wages. It is argued that the case for taxing capital is not particularly strong. By reinterpreting capital as energy the results are applicable to the discussion about ecological tax reforms.     

Elderly empowerment,fertility, and public pensions

The economic role of elderly people is underestimated in the context of the debate on pension reforms. This is because, as healthy life expectancy increases, the elderly become more active not only in the labor market but also in household production. Using a three-period overlapping-generations model in which grandparents allocate time between labor and informal childcare (“grandparenting”), we analyze the interaction among grandparenting, fertility, elderly labor, and public pensions. We obtain two analytical results. First, increasing the pension contribution rate increases grandparenting. Second, elderly labor force participation rates are negatively (positively) related to the fertility rates among countries with small (large) public pensions. The nonlinear relationship between elderly labor and fertility is empirically supported.

     

违约与杠杆周期——一个带有救助的金融加速器模型

我国为应对2008年国际金融危机的冲击采取了一系列经济刺激政策,在发挥“稳增长”作用的同时,也在一定程度上导致我国企业部门杠杆水平快速上升,但与此同时,不良贷款率并没有随企业部门杠杆的上升而显著增加。为了解释企业部门违约与杠杆的周期特征,本文在金融加速器模型(Bernanke et al.,1999)基础上,引入政府对企业部门的违约救助机制,建立DSGE模型进行讨论。进一步地,本文还通过一个不合意的去杠杆政策试验表明,忽略资产价格稳定(或者说金融稳定)前提下的去杠杆政策,反而会使企业部门的杠杆和违约率同时上升到一个较高水平。最后,引入一个盯住预期资产价格的动态救助规则能够发挥稳定经济的作用,并提高社会福利水平。     

Trader Leverage and Liquidity

Does trader leverage drive equity market liquidity? We use the unique features of the margin trading system in India to identify a causal relationship between traders’ ability to borrow and a stock's market liquidity. To quantify the impact of trader leverage, we employ a regression discontinuity design that exploits threshold rules that determine a stock's margin trading eligibility. We find that liquidity is higher when stocks become eligible for margin trading and that this liquidity enhancement is driven by margin traders’ contrarian strategies. Consistent with downward liquidity spirals due to deleveraging, we also find that this effect reverses during crises.     

Tax reforms and the underground economy: a simulation-based analysis

This paper studies the effects of several tax reforms in an economy where taxes are partially evaded by means of undeclared work. To this purpose, we consider a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to Italy which explicitly accounts for underground production. We construct various tax reform scenarios, such as ex ante budget-neutral tax shifts from direct to indirect taxes, and tax cuts on labor and business financed by decreases of government spending. Our results indicate that neglecting the existence of the underground sector may lead to severely miscalculating the macroeconomic effects of tax reforms. Further, the dimension of the underground sector is permanently and considerably reduced by changes in the tax mix that diminish the labor tax wedge. Reductions of the business tax prove to be highly expansionary in the presence of a sizable informal sector.     

Flexible exchange rates and stabilizing speculation

This paper re-establishes the superiority of flexible exchange rates in small open economy models characterized by an efficient foreign exchange market and short-run imperfections in the product (labor) market.     

Public pensions and labor supply over the life cycle

In order to remain fiscally solvent, governments of many countries have reformed their public pension schemes to encourage labor supply at older ages. These reforms include reductions in the generosity of public pensions and reduced penalties for working past the normal retirement age. In this paper, we consider how reforms to public pension systems affect labor supply over the life cycle. We put the recent empirical evidence on the effect of government pensions on labor supply in a life cycle context, and we present evidence on the effectiveness of tax reforms for stimulating labor supply over the life cycle. Our main conclusion is that the labor supply of older workers is responsive to changes in retirement incentives. The labor supply of younger workers is less responsive. Thus the trend towards lower taxes on older workers in many developed countries should continue to fuel their trend towards later retirement.