美国最低工资制度的发展及启示

美国最低工资有联邦与州之分。由于适用普遍性与合理工资水平之间的内在紧张难以消除,最低工资呈向下发展趋势。为了补足最低工资的低水平,20世纪90年代,一些地方政府启动了生活工资立法,形成新的最低工资形式。我国最低工资实施的背景与美国有相似之处,可考虑借鉴其经验,构建多元最低工资结构,这种多元结构应建立在劳动者"参与中心型"的立法机制之上。     

Right-to-work legislation and the economic position of black workers

Recent empirical analysis of state right-to-work legislation indicates that a negative wage effect may result as a consequence of banning union shop contracts. It has been previously shown that industrial unionism tends to improve the relative wage position of black workers. Thus, it is hypothesized that if state right-to-work laws weaken the economic power of unions to raise wages, black workers will experience a disproportionate decline in their relative wage position. Black workers in right-to-work states would therefore experience a reduction in their relative economic position unless a strong positive relative employment effect occurs in response to the decline in wages. Using a cross-sectional regression model this article examines the relative employment effect due to right-to-work legislation. The results indicate that black workers experience a statistically significant decline in their relative employment rate within right-to-work states. When this finding is coupled with the hypothesized negative wage effect, it is concluded that right-to-work legislation results in a worsening of the net economic position of black workers.     

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF HARVESTER

A century has elapsed since the ‘New Protection’ policy of the newly established Commonwealth government of Australia gave birth to the ‘basic wage’ principle following the ‘Harvester’ judgement. This paper re‐examines, with special reference to economic considerations – unemployment, the tariff, and the wage structure – the controversy surrounding the initial formulation of this principle and the evolution of its application under the federal wage fixing tribunals and the legislation under which they operated. It concludes that even the vestigial remains of the concept underlying Harvester have progressively disappeared from Australian wage fixing principles.     

The political economy of state-level fair employment laws, 1940-1964

This paper explores the political economy of anti-discrimination legislation during the ascendancy of the Civil Rights Movement. It traces the diffusion of state-level fair employment laws and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political, and economic factors in promoting such legislation. Activism by Jewish organizations, the NAACP, and unions (particularly the CIO) were key factors in securing the adoption of fair employment legislation. Less unemployment, a larger Catholic population, more competitive political systems, and Democratic governorships appear to have been less important. Predicted times for the adoption of fair employment laws by the southern states underscore the necessity of federal intervention to establish legal protection from job market discrimination.     

我国农业机械化演进轨迹与或然走向

基于诱致性技术变迁的视角,运用1990～2009年时间序列数据分析农村居民的工资性收入对农户采用农业机械决策的影响。结果表明,工资性收入对农户采用农业机械的决策具有显著效应,工资性收入增加,农业机械采用水平也会增加。20世纪90年代以来我国农业机械使用水平的大幅上升主要是因为农业劳动力相对稀缺导致的,因此要改变优先发展农业生物化学技术的观点,而应注重农业机械技术与生物化学技术并重发展。     

Can robots reshape gender role attitudes?

In this paper, we study the impact of robotization on gender role attitudes in China. We show that robot adoption promotes egalitarian gender role attitudes; and the impact is statistically larger for women, urban, and younger generation subsamples. We provide evidence to show that the reshaping of gender role attitudes is mainly due to the improvement and rationalization of women's employment performance: robot adoption increases females' non-agricultural employment opportunity and their wage, and also improves females' relative economic status both in the workplace and in the household.     

Minimum wage and employment in the fast food industry

Recent empirical studies on the impact of minimum wage legislation generate results that are inconsistent with conventional economic theory. Employing a methodology that compares affected with unaffected areas, these investigations indicate that employment levels are not adversely affected by the imposition of a minimum wage. Two studies in particular focus on the fast food industry. Although one study has come under attack for improperly measuring employment, an interesting theoretical question remains. This paper derives the demand for labor function of a fast food outlet facing price and profit margin constraints dictated by the company. The results of a minimum wage constraint are consistent with current empirical literature.     

Spinning the industrial revolution

The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.     

Tax evasion and intertemporal choice

It has often been argued that the misreporting of regular wage income is limited by third-party withholding and reporting requirements. However, income arising from savings investment is often not subject to such withholding requirements. This paper uses a simple dynamic model to examine the problem of tax evasion of investment income. Assuming that individuals can misreport investment income but not wage income, it is shown that alterations in the audit rate and penalty rates affect an individual's saving (or investment) decisions. This suggests that parameters traditionally used to control tax evasion impact the aggregate output of an economy and the rate of economic growth. This paper is based on the author's dissertation completed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The author is indebted to the dissertation committee, Helmuth Cremer (co-chair), Firouz Gahvari (co-chair), Catherine Eckel, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Richard Steinberg for their guidance and suggestions. All remaining errors are the author's responsibility.     

Accounting Choices and Risk Management: SFAS No. 115 and U.S. Bank Holding Companies*

This paper provides evidence that regulatory contracts affect firms' accounting choices and risk‐management decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether an exogenous shock to regulatory risk induced by Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 115, “Accounting for Certain Investments in Debt and Equity Securities” (SFAS 1993), encouraged U.S. banks to deviate from portfolio and risk benchmarks when they adopted the standard. Because we cannot observe relevant benchmarks, we model portfolio and risk decisions as functions of macroeconomic and firm‐specific factors using data from a period when regulatory capital was immune to SFAS No. 115 accounting. We examine a sample of 230 publicly traded banks and find that (1) irrespective of adoption timing, banks classified too few securities available for sale (AFS) relative to estimated benchmarks; (2) weaker banks that adopted the standard early classified far more securities as AFS relative to benchmarks; (3) banks altered the size of their securities portfolios along with the levels of interest‐rate risk and credit risk as regulatory capital decreased; and (4) the level of interest‐rate risk on banks' loan portfolios increased at the time of SFAS No. 115 adoption. We also explore the 1995 Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) amnesty when firms could “readopt” SFAS No. 115. We find that banks used the 1995 FASB amnesty to undo strategic initial SFAS No. 115 adoption decisions. Taken together, our findings suggest that SFAS No. 115 caused some of the accounting and economic consequences predicted by bankers, analysts, and academics.     

最低工资文献综述

最低工资制度是国家通过立法的形式干预工资分配的一种制度,该制度设计是为了保障低收入劳动者,但是在实施中却引来了很多的争论。对此经济学家们分别从理论和实证的角度对实施最低工资的后果进行了分析。文章尝试对这些不同的观点进行梳理,以期能对最低工资的研究提供参考。     

The effect of institutional regime change within the new deal on industrial output and labor markets

Markets during the New Deal operated under a number of different institutional regimes, which were marked by executive orders, the passage of various pieces of legislation, and Supreme Court rulings on their constitutionality. Specifically, we break the New Deal period into the following six regimes: the Hundred Days, the President's Reemployment Agreement, the National Recovery Administration Codes of Fair Competition, the Schechter era, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under these various regimes industrial markets were subject to different regulations relating to hourly wage rates, hours of work, the nature of competition, and unionization. Vector Autoregressive (VAR) regressions are run using a monthly panel of employment, weekly hours worked, wage rates, prices, and output for 11 major industries. We find that key policy and legal changes were associated with large and statistically significant movements in economic variables. Furthermore, changes in institutional regimes impacted different types of industries unevenly. For example, low-wage industries saw the largest increases in wages, and drops in output, after the mandated wage increases in 1933.     

Modellen en vooroordelen: Het artikel van Prof. Dr. J. Pen

Summary The author points out that the review article of Schouten's new book by J. Pen (see De Economist 1968, nr. 1, p. 16) is largely based on misapprehensions, and he refutes Pen's objections. Schouten pursues primarily an integration of monetary and non-monetary growth and trade cycle theories.Volume I is devoted to the trade cycle in a growing economy, and the conclusion drawn from the analysis is that a complete stabilization of the cycle is usually impossible. Schouten points out that, in times of structural inflation, an advanced anti-boom policy will be more effective than the conventional anti-recession policy. Furthermore, he believes that a combination of wage and investment policies is better than the traditional fiscal policy.Volume II treats the structural aspects. It is mainly concerned with the costs of structural policy, and with the problem of the possibilities and impossibilities of such a policy. Here, too, it is concluded that a co-ordination of wage and investment policies is the most important instrument.     

Books and publications received

ABSTRACT

Economic theory predicts that regional wages will converge as transport and communication technologies bring labour markets together. An exploration of this transition from labour market segmentation to unification requires long-term evidence of nominal wages and cost of living by region. This paper presents new evidence of wages for male manufacturing workers and cost-of-living indices across 24 Swedish counties between 1860 and 2009. Our findings indicate that the Swedish regional wage differentials were a great deal larger in the 1860s than in the 2000s. Most of the compression took place between the 1860s and World War I, as well as in the 1930s and during World War II. Differences in expenditures on housing impact on our assessment of convergence in the post-World War II decades: the nominal measure declines, while the real one stays constant. Our concluding discussion engages with the assumption that before World War I, regional wage convergence was associated with labour mobility, spurred by improved communication and transportation technologies as well as by the implementation of modern employment contracts. In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, regional wage convergence can be traced to high unionisation and centralised collective bargaining in the labour market, two distinguishing features of the Swedish Model.     

After the Black Death: labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in late-medieval western Europe

The Black Death spurred monarchies and city-states across much of Western Europe to formulate new wage and price legislation. These legislative acts splintered in a multitude of directions that to date defy any obvious patterns of economic or political rationality. A comparison of labour laws in England, France, Provence, Aragon, Castile, the Low Countries, and the city-states of Italy shows that these laws did not flow logically from new post-plague demographics and economics—the realities of the supply and demand for labour. Instead, the new municipal and royal efforts to control labour and artisans' prices emerged from fears of the greed and supposed new powers of subaltern classes and are better understood in the contexts of anxiety that sprung forth from the Black Death's new horrors of mass mortality and destruction, resulting in social behaviour such as the flagellant movement and the persecution of Jews, Catalans, and beggars.     

Estimating the Effect of Individual Time Preferences on the Use of Disease Screening

Economists have long been interested in evaluating the role that time preferences play in a wide range of economic decisions. In the health care arena, time preferences may be an especially important determinant of many decisions—particularly the use of preventative health care. One potential barrier to patient adoption of preventative screening regimens is that they impose current costs on consumers with the hope of lower costs in the future. Using data from a national survey, we jointly estimate latent discount rate and preventative service demand models using a limited information maximum likelihood estimator (iterated M‐estimator). The results suggest that discount rates are generally inversely related to the likelihood of most screening tests.     

Millennials and the Gender Wage Gap in the U.S.: A Cross-Cohort Comparison of Young Workers Born in the 1960s and the 1980s

Using two cohorts of young workers born in the early 1960s and early 1980s, this paper analyzes the temporal change in the U.S. gender wage gap and its determinants, which persists for both explained and unexplained reasons. Results suggest that the gender wage gap closed four (seven) percentage points at the mean (median) between cohorts. It finds cross-cohort evidence that young females’ increasing returns to marriage and a changing occupational wage structure contributed to a narrowing of the gap. Nonetheless, the majority of this convergence remains unexplained due to relative improvements in unobservable institutional factors or heterogeneity for females. Compared to the previous generation, millennials likely entered a more progressive, female-friendly labor market. It is also possible that female millennials are more ambitious and competitive in their early years of work experience relative to females born in the 1960s.     

Spatial spillovers of regional wages: Evidence from Chinese provinces

This study investigates the effects of spatial interactions on local wages based on a panel data from 31 Chinese provinces between 2001 and 2010. Using the Global Moran's I statistic, we provide empirical evidence for the presence of spatial dependencies in provincial wages. Then, we estimate the provincial wage equation using a spatial panel model that controls for spatial heterogeneity and spatial interdependence as well as other regional characteristics. The empirical results show that spatial wage spillover plays an important role in the determination of local wages. Furthermore, we find that human capital and economic growth are two underlying forces strengthening wage spillovers across provinces.     

The Impact of Pharmacy-Specific Any-Willing-Provider Legislation on Prescription Drug Expenditures

Many states have implemented some form of Any-Willing-Provider (AWP) legislation, which requires a managed care organization (MCO) to accept any provider, who agrees to the managed care organization’s reimbursement rates, terms, and conditions, into its network. AWP laws may result in larger networks, more patient choice, and greater competition among providers. Opponents cite AWP legislation as prohibiting managed care organizations from selective contracting and obtaining discounts by offering providers a larger volume of patients. Such legislation is therefore argued to prevent MCOs from effectively reducing health care costs. A small literature exists on the effect of these laws on hospital expenditures, physician expenditures, and total health care expenditures. Most studies, however, fail to recognize that the vast majority of the existing laws target pharmacies exclusively, as opposed to more comprehensive laws that also apply to physicians and hospitals. If AWP legislation prevents cost reduction available through selective contracting, then states with such legislation may incur higher health care expenditures. I find that pharmacy-specific AWP legislation is associated with increased pharmaceutical expenditures. This result is robust to several alternative specifications.     

Institutions and economic performance: evidence from the labour market

We analyse the institutional determinants of economic performance,taking European labour-market institutions as a case in point.European economic growth after the Second World War was basedon Fordist technologies, a setting to which the continent'sinstitutions of solidaristic wage bargaining were ideally suited.They eased distributive conflicts and delivered wage moderation,which in turn supported high investment. The wage compressionthat was a corollary of their operation was of little consequenceso long as the dominant technologies were such that firms couldrely on a relatively homogeneous labour force. But as Fordismgave way to diversified quality production, which relied moreon highly skilled workers, the centralization of bargainingand the compression of wages became impediments rather thanaids to growth. Assuming that growth will rely even more inthe future on rapidly changing, science-based, skilled-labour-intensivetechnologies, countries with centralized labour-market institutionswill have to move still further in the direction of decentralization.Whether Europe in particular can accommodate these demands willhelp to determine whether it is able to re-establish a fullemployment economy in the twenty-first century.