Employment Risk and Optimal Trade Policies

This paper considers trade policies and welfare in a Harris–Todaro model with risk-averse workers. Workers are assumed to have identical and homothetic preferences, but their incomes differ, depending on whether and where they are employed. When workers are equally valued, maximizing social utility is equivalent to maximizing the utility of a rural worker. An optimal policy consists of a production subsidy on the exportable and an import tariff. This model explains the widespread use of import tariffs on manufactured goods along with production subsidies on the export sectors in many LDCs.
JEL Classification Numbers: F13, D8.     

Optimal monetary policy under Calvo pricing with Bertrand competition

We consider a NK model characterized by a small and fixed number of firms competing in prices à la Bertrand and we study the implications for monetary policy under both exogenous and endogenous market concentration. We find that the implied NKPC has a lower slope compared to a standard NK model with atomistic firms, and the determinacy region enlarges assuming a standard Taylor rule. We characterize the impact of competition on the optimal monetary rules within the linear-quadratic approach of Rotemberg–Woodford. The optimal monetary rule requires a less aggressive reaction to inflationary shocks compared to monopolistic competition, but an increase in competition, due to either an increase in substitutability between the goods or in the number of firms, makes it optimal to adopt a more aggressive reaction in front of inflationary shocks. Finally, more competition increases the gains from commitment.     

Balanced-Budget Rules: Welfare Loss and Optimal Policies

Most economic models do not suggest an optimal fiscal policy in which the government's budget is balanced each period. Conventional wisdom suggests that the government run surpluses and deficits to smooth taxes. In this paper, I use an approach which brings together real business cycle theory and the theory of public finance to evaluate the effects of a balanced-budget restriction. Four fiscal policies are investigated in a model with growth. All models are solved numerically using a multidimensional collocation parameterized expectations algorithm. The welfare consequences of each policy are measured, and the optimal Ramsey policies are characterized. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: E62.     

就业弹性、自然失业和宏观经济政策--为什么经济增长没有带来显性就业?

尽管通常的计算低估了中国的就业弹性 ,但调整后的弹性数值仍属偏低。为什么经济的增长没有带来相应的就业增长呢 ?首先 ,反周期的宏观经济政策对解决自然失业是无能为力的 ;其次 ,在反周期的宏观经济政策所能调节的周期性失业方面 ,由于宏观经济政策所引导的投资方向往往是就业密集度较低的行业 ,进而导致反周期措施拉动就业的能力大为降低。因此 ,完善劳动力市场机制、加强职业培训体系建设、推动高就业产业发展 ,应成为经济政策的重点。     

Family Policies and Female Employment in Japan

This paper discusses how childcare and parental leave policies affect female employment by reviewing the international evidence and recent papers on Japan. These papers estimate causal effects of policies by exploiting policy changes, which is a more credible identification strategy than those applied in earlier observational studies. The literature on parental leave finds that a more generous leave package tends to delay mothers’ return to work, but it does not have detrimental effects on maternal labour supply in the medium to long run. Some papers also find that provision of job protection for around 1 year can increase maternal employment, but longer job protection has little additional effects. The literature on childcare policies finds that maternal employment does not necessarily increase, because the expansion of childcare may crowd out informal childcare arrangements, such as care provided by grandparents. Findings by recent papers on Japan are largely consistent with the international evidence.     

Optimal Unemployment Insurance and Employment History

In existing unemployment insurance programmes, it is standard to condition eligibility on the previous employment record of unemployed workers. The purpose of this article is to study conditions under which the efficient contract exhibits these properties. In order to do so, we characterize the optimal unemployment insurance contract in asymmetric information environments in which workers experience multiple unemployment spells. We show that if quits cannot be distinguished from layoffs, it is optimal to condition the benefits paid to unemployed workers on their employment history, in particular, the coverage should increase with the length of previous employment spells.     

城镇灵活就业问题研究

灵活就业的涵义。灵活就业是指在劳动时间、工作场地、收入报酬、劳动关系、保险福利等方面不固定的各种就业形式,如非全日制就业、临时就业、季节性就业、钟点工等。其从业人员主要是国有或集体企业离岗下岗失业人员、城镇新增就业中缺乏劳动技能者和农民工等,这是我们当前研究的重点,部分具有较高知识水平或特殊技能者也采用这种就业形式。     

The Employment Potential of Site Remediation Policies: A Micro-Economic Simulation

This paper deals with the impact on employment of a particular environmental protection policy: contaminated site remediation. We provide quantitative results on the employment level and also on qualifications in the case of France, by making different assumptions regarding the number of sites to be cleaned up and the decontamination level. We use a composite methodology: the engineering estimation method to obtain costs and direct jobs and a reversed input-output matrix to assess indirect employment, i.e., jobs incurred by the production of inputs. Given the high diversity of contaminated sites, we have selected two case studies, the first gathering gasworks and coke ovens and the other dealing with petrol filling stations. As regards the level of decontamination for each site, labour intensity follows a 'bell curve' with the highest labour intensity for intermediate levels of decontamination. By contrast, an increase in the number of sites to be treated has an important positive net effect on employment. Hence, a programme of site remediation of a large number of sites, preferably with an intermediate level of decontamination, would lead to a significant increase in employment, even when we take into account the jobs destroyed elsewhere in the economy by the funding of the clean-up.     

城市就业弹性与产业结构的实证分析

文章以天津市数据为例,通过统计分析,验证就业弹性与各产业的关联,分析产业结构调整对就业的影响,明确产业间内部调整的方向。     

The Design of Optimal Education Policies

This paper studies the education policy chosen by a utilitarian government. In the model, households differ in their income and in their children&'s ability; income is observed by the government, but ability is private information. Households can use private education, but cannot borrow to finance it. The government can finance education with income tax, but at the cost of blunting the individuals' incentive to exert labour market effort. The optimal education policy we derive is elitist: it increases the spread between the educational achievement of the bright and the less bright individuals, compared to private provision. It is also such that the education received by less bright individuals depends positively on their parental income. Finally, the optimal education policy is input regressive, in the sense of Arrow (1971, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 38, 175–208): households with higher income and brighter children contribute less in tuition fees towards the cost of the education system than households with lower income and less bright children.     

Modernization of Tax Administrations and Optimal Fiscal Policies

Since Sandmo (1981) , many articles have analyzed optimal fiscal policies in economies with tax evasion. All share a feature: they assume that the cost of enforcing the tax law is exogenous. However, governments often invest resources to reduce these enforcement costs. In a very simple model, we incorporate such investments in the analysis of an optimal fiscal policy. We characterize their optimal level and we show numerically how they interact with the other dimensions of the optimal fiscal policy. Finally, we highlight the differences between our results and those obtained in a model without investment in the tax administration.     

财政转移支付:支持农民工就业的政策研究

农民工是我国改革30年以来经济社会发展转型时期形成的一个特殊范畴,农民工亦工亦农、亦城亦乡,逐步向非农产业和城市转移。改革期间,工业发展对农民工的需求与农村转移劳动力的需求相契合,然而,城乡劳动力供求始终存在严重的总量矛盾和结构矛盾。在推进工业发展的过程中,政府如何通过转移支付等方式为农村转移劳动力提供职业教育和技能培训、构建解决农民工产业化生存的支持体系,值得深入探讨。     

Maybe Baby: Comparing Partnered Women's Employment and Child Policies in the EU-15

Abstract

This paper examines how child-related public policies influence women's employment in Europe. The analysis compares the difference in employment status between partnered mothers and nonmothers across the EU-15 using a wide range of self-constructed indicators of child policies such as childcare provision, parental leave, and tax-cash benefits. Using the recycled predictions method, it is possible to isolate the impact of the presence of a child from other characteristics likely to influence women's labor-market outcomes. Country-specific employment gaps among women are computed at different ages for the youngest child, for different outcomes (inactivity and part-time or full-time work), and for different levels of education. The main conclusion is that when it comes to securing equal labor-market access and conditions for mothers of young children and non-mothers, public childcare provision has the strongest impact. In the absence of public childcare, not even the most highly educated mothers can cope.     

英国城市公园政策及经验借鉴

在中国生态文明制度建设的背景下,梳理、总结了英国城市公园政策的起源、阶段特征,并结合中国国情和英国的经验、教训,提出了将城市公园制度建设及合作伙伴关系列入国家政策议程、加强顶层设计、强化地方领导、落实中央决策、实施决策监督和建立广泛合作伙伴关系的建议,以期促进我国城市公园的可持续发展。     

Expectations and the Stability Problem for Optimal Monetary Policies

A fundamentals based monetary policy rule, which would be the optimal monetary policy without commitment when private agents have perfectly rational expectations, is unstable if in fact these agents follow standard adaptive learning rules. This problem can be overcome if private expectations are observed and suitably incorporated into the policy maker's optimal rule. These strong results extend to the case in which there is simultaneous learning by the policy maker and the private agents. Our findings show the importance of conditioning policy appropriately, not just on fundamentals, but also directly on observed household and firm expectations.     

农民工进城就业歧视政策的外部性分析

某些城市政府人为设置了农民工进城就业的歧视性制度障碍,主要目的是为了缓解本地下岗职工的就业压力。但这种以行政权力为基础的强制性资源配置方式在实施过程中往往是低效率的。本文从经济学的角度对各种政策在不同情况下的实施效果进行了分析,并得出结论:限制农民工进城就业的资源配置方式,在对降低城市下岗失业率无实质性帮助的同时,也不利于劳动力市场的发育,在经济上是低效率的。     

Optimal Intervention Policies for a Small Monetary Economy

We analyze the gains from trade for a small cash-in-advance economy with endogenous labor supply and learning-by-doing in the accumulation of human capital. Contrary to previous findings, we show that free trade is not optimal independently of the relative amount of cash required for the purchase of each good. Furthermore, a monetary rule à la Friedman can eliminate distortions deriving from the cash-in-advance constraint only under segmented financial markets; in any case, it cannot restore the economic optimum. Finally, we identify government intervention policies, such as wage and export subsidies, that can be welfare improving.