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.     

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.     

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。     

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。     

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.     

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.     

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。     

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.     

Optimal Climate Change Policies When Governments Cannot Commit

We analyse the optimal design of climate change policies when a government wants to encourage the private sector to undertake significant immediate investment in developing cleaner technologies, but the relevant carbon taxes (or other environmental policies) that would incentivise such investment by firms will be set in the future. We assume that the current government cannot commit to long-term carbon taxes, and so both it and the private sector face the possibility that the government in power in the future may give different (relative) weight to environmental damage costs. We show that this lack of commitment has a significant asymmetric effect: it increases the social benefits of the current government to have the investment undertaken, but reduces the private benefit to the private sector to invest. Consequently the current government may need to use additional policy instruments—such as R&D subsidies—to stimulate the required investment.     

Spare the Young Fish: Optimal Harvesting Policies for North-East Arctic Cod

The North-East Arctic cod (Gadus morhua) fishery, as most other commercial fisheries, is wasting the larger part of its potential. Examining a detailed multi-cohort, multi-gear bioeconomic model, we show that the cause is rather a too small mesh size than excessive effort. Although internationally and nationally managed by quota allocations and regulations, the current exploitation pattern implies that essentially the wrong fish are targeted. Catching older and heavier fish could double the fishery’s Net-Present-Value. This increases harvested biomass while it reduces the number of fish removed from the ocean, highlighting the importance of age- and gear-specific modeling. Moreover, optimal harvesting policies would also lead to a much more robust and abundant cod stock.     

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。     

城镇劳动力市场雇佣关系的演化及影响因素

本文利用跨度为二十年(1988年到2007年)的微观家计数据,分析了我国城镇地区雇佣关系在经济转型时期从单一固定工向多元灵活雇佣关系转变的过程。将我国城镇地区的雇佣关系分成四种类型,探讨了雇佣关系构成从1988年到2007年的变化及其影响因素,以及各种因素的相对重要性。分析发现,从1988年开始,我国的雇佣关系构成中灵活雇佣比重开始逐步上升,到2002年,短期雇佣、无合同雇佣等灵活雇佣形式的比重达到一个较高水平,进入2007年,稳定雇佣关系的比重略有回升。扩展的Oaxaca-Blinder分解所得结果表明,从1995年到2002年,劳动力市场灵活性增强主要受到转型过程中制度变迁等不可观测因素的影响;进入2007年,稳定的雇佣关系比重略有回升,放松管制和市场深化的效应逐渐释放殆尽,特征变量对提高雇佣稳定性的作用开始显现。     

公共产品歧视性分配政策与城市人口控制

本文在一个二元经济框架内,通过一个改进的“亨利.乔治”模型,研究了转轨过程中的经济发展导向政府的城市人口控制问题。证明非歧视分配政策和任由城乡人口自由流动的政策组合并非一个有效率的户籍制度安排。不同主体之间在关于城市人口规模的控制上存在着利益差别,歧视性分配政策有助于缩小不同主体之间的利益差别。实行非歧视的公共产品分配政策同时对城市人口规模按照生产效率加以控制是现有体制下一个有效率的户籍制度安排。     

Rural–Urban Migration, the Informal Sector, Urban Unemployment, and Development Policies: A Theoretical Analysis

This paper develops a theoretical model like Gupta's to show the simultaneous existence of the urban informal sector and open unemployment in the urban sector in a Harris–Todaro type of model of rural–urbanmigration. A wage or a price subsidy policy to the rural sector, or a demand management policy like an export promotional scheme in the manufacturing sector, reduces the urban unemployment level, and provides a theoretical basis for the introduction of export promotional measures like the formation of duty-free Export Processing Zones (EPZs) to solve the urban unemployment problem. The policy conclusions of the present paper are different from those found in Gupta's 1993 model.     

Optimal Border Policies for Invasive Species Under Asymmetric Information

This paper analyzes the problem faced by a border protection agency if endogenous exporter abatement activities affect invasive species risk, allowing for unobservable differences in abatement cost. We show how the optimal inspection/penalty regime differs from the symmetric information case. Departing from previous literature, we allow for technical assistance, a policy instrument specifically permitted and commonly employed under Article 9 of the World Trade Organization Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement. We find the information asymmetry can make it optimal for the importing country to provide technical assistance grants for exporter risk abatement, even if it would otherwise be inefficient. Further, we show that fungibility of technical assistance with inputs in other sectors of the exporting economy affects the qualitative nature of optimal policy. If technical assistance has no outside value in the exporter’s country, optimal policy is characterized by a menu of contracts balancing higher tariffs with lower penalties for being caught with an invasive. If technical assistance can be used in other sectors of the exporter’s economy, it can introduce countervailing incentives making a uniform tariff/penalty combination optimal.