Wages, Experience and Seniority

In this paper we study the sources of wage growth. We identify the contribution to such growth of general, sector specific and firm specific human capital. Our results are interpretable within the context of a model where the returns to human capital may be heterogeneous and where firms may offer different combinations of entry level wages and firm specific human capital development. We allow for the possibility that wages are match specific and that workers move jobs as a result of identifying a better match. To estimate the average returns to experience, sector tenure and firm specific tenure within this context, we develop an identification strategy which relies on the use of firm closures. Our data source is a new and unique administrative data-set for Germany that includes complete work histories as well as individual characteristics. We find positive returns to experience and firm tenure for skilled workers. The returns to experience for unskilled workers are small and insignificant after 2 years of experience. Their returns to sector tenure are also zero. However, their returns to firm tenure are substantial.     

Incumbency advantages in the Canadian Parliament

Abstract We apply a regression discontinuity approach to determine incumbency advantages in the Canadian Parliament, finding that incumbents enjoy a 9.4–11.2% increased probability of winning over non‐incumbents. Owing to the presence of multiple parties, an incumbency advantage in terms of vote share does not always translate to an increased probability of winning, because incumbents do not necessarily obtain votes from their closest opponent. Also, under the assumption that strategic exit is not an issue, we are able to split the incumbency advantage into party incumbency and individual candidate incumbency components, finding that the advantage is almost entirely due to the individual.     

The Informational Value of Incumbency

This paper exploits the informational value of incumbency: incumbency confers voters information about governing politicians not available from challengers. We propose a measure of incumbency advantage that improves the use of pure reelection success. We also study the relationship between incumbency advantage, ideological bias, and terms in office. Our argument emphasizes that incumbency affects candidates' chances of winning even if they had no opportunity to strategically utilize policies.     

Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two‐period electoral campaign with two policy issues, an incumbent and a possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent's true competence; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent's expected competence on his signature issue.     

Conflict in the labor market: Seniority rules and unemployment

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of two labor-market institutions that play an important role in worker-management interactions: seniority-based layoffs and majority voting on wage proposals. Together, these make the median worker, rather than the marginal worker, the important decision maker for wage and employment outcomes. Since he is risk-averse, he will trade off higher wages for greater security of employment; therefore, the equilibrium level of unemployment will be much less than 50%, but higher than the conventional natural rate of unemployment. Median-worker behavior helps to explain both the greater frequency of excess supply than excess demand (59.4% versus 40.6% of the time since 1890) and the wage concessions of 1981–1983. A new Phillips curve is derived which incorporates systematic influences of the size of the labor force (to correct for the inappropriate measure of excess supply) and Tobin's “q” variable (to measure the risk of unemployment for the median worker). With U.S. data for 1957–1983, this new Phillips curve has a higher explanatory power than the traditional one. Additional forces that influence wages and employment in this setting are identified: firms have an incentive to bargain actively over wages rather than accept union demands passively and senior workers have a “social contract” with junior workers that reduces the extent to which the former exploit the latter.     

Fragmented Legislatures and the Budget: Analyzing Presidential Democracies

What impact does party fragmentation have on the likelihood of democracies to run a fiscal deficit? Past research is almost unanimous in finding that as the number of parties in a country's legislature or government grows, so does its probability of overspending. However, this finding is based largely on parliamentary systems, and there is no reason to believe that it should hold when executives are independent. In this article, I develop a theory for the impact of legislative fragmentation on budgetary politics in presidential democracies. I argue that unified presidential systems should tend most toward fiscal solvency but that increasing fragmentation should actually facilitate budget balancing when government is divided. The logic is that presidents, who are likely to prefer balanced budgets due to their broad constituencies, will be better able to craft acceptable governing coalitions from divided legislatures than from ones controlled by a single opposing party. They will also be better able to circumvent such fragmented legislatures should a coalition prove impossible. I test these propositions quantitatively in all presidential democracies from 1976 to 2007. The results provide support for the theory and highlight the contrasting impact of legislative fragmentation on public policy in presidential vs. parliamentary systems.     

在华日资企业年功意识的改造与重塑

植根于日本传统文化中的年功意识在战后演进为一种企业人力资源管理制度,并作为母国的价值取向移植成为在华日资企业经营管理中的潜规则。通过对其文化渊源、形成机制等的梳理与分析可以看出,由于雇用体制的不同,在华日资企业不具备实施年功制的基础条件:封闭性的内部劳动力市场。年功意识强行注入到在华日资企业中,其非合理性的一面得到凸显。应该扬利抑弊,对固化、压抑员工创造力和积极性的年功制管理制度进行改造,将年功意识引导为忠诚文化,使之成为在华日资企业实现跨文化管理的有效手段。     

Protection with many sellers: An Application to Legislatures with Malapportionment

What effect, if any, does legislative malapportionment have on international trade protection? This paper argues that in malapportioned legislatures, such as the U.S. Senate, industries become over‐represented in a legislature if they are disproportionately located in small constituencies. As a result, industries that are disproportionately located in smaller constituencies are likely to receive greater protection from international trade. To argue this point theoretically, this paper develops a new model, combining legislative bargaining and a model of lobbying to study trade protection while allowing for a legislature with multiple legislators and differently sized constituencies. We then test the predictions of this new model using tariff votes from the U.S. Senate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a panel of tariffs and non‐tariff barriers to trade in the U.S. in the 1990s. Considerable support is found for the model's predictions. Industries concentrated in states where the population is low receive greater protection from imports.     

Incumbency advantage in a proportional electoral system: A regression discontinuity analysis of Irish elections

The existence of a large incumbency advantage in the winner-takes-all plurality system of the United States is well documented. It is unclear whether incumbents in proportional systems should enjoy such a large advantage. Multi-seat constituencies make it difficult for individual incumbents to claim credit for the provision of local public goods and services. Moreover, multiple incumbents may dilute media attention thereby limiting name recognition advantage. We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of incumbency using election data from Ireland’s system of proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV). Incumbency causes an eighteen percentage point increase in the probability that a candidate in Ireland’s lower house of parliament wins a seat in the next election. Our results indicate that the protection of vulnerable incumbents from intra-party competition may be a source of incumbency advantage in multi-member district elections.     

文凭、工龄与人际关系 --转型阶段职工收入的差异性分析

本文试图定量分析人力资本和社会资本对不同资源配置环境下职工收入的影响,导入路径依赖变量进行解释.研究的主要发现是市场化程度越高,教育的收入回报越大;人力资本中的工龄,对职工收入几乎没有影响,以再分配为体制背景的年资效应业已消失.在急剧进行市场化的原再分配体制中,工龄对于收入具有负效应.处于不同分配体制下的群体,社会资本的回报显示出明显差异.     

Political accountability and public service delivery in decentralized Indonesia: Incumbency advantage and the performance of second term mayors

To what extent do voters hold local elected leaders accountable for public service delivery in fiscally and politically decentralized environments, as theory suggests should be the case? We examine political accountability and service delivery in subnational Indonesia, through the lens of mayoral incumbency advantage. We apply regression discontinuity methods to a unique data set on local elections to identify the causal impact of incumbency on election outcomes and relate those effects to changes in citizen access to local public services. We find that voters in Indonesia are, in general, very willing to return incumbents to office compared to their counterparts in other countries. We also determine that the incumbent advantage is conditional on advances in local service provision: as service access expands more quickly, voters are more likely to vote incumbents back into office. Finally, we find that electorally successful incumbents—second term mayors—spend substantially less on education and health and more on infrastructure, manage their budgets less prudently, and deliver public services neither more nor less effectively than their first term equivalents. We conjecture that term limits and the attendant lack of electoral incentives leads to the disappointing second-term mayor performance.     

Effects of Incumbency and R&D Affiliation on the Legitimation of Electric Vehicle Technologies

Non-economic forces distort “rational” competitions among emerging technologies and associated trajectories. For example, incumbent and credibly affiliated firms use their legitimacy to promote their technological preferences and denigrate the efforts of less legitimate firms. This article reports results of a study which examined these dynamics in the competition among emerging electrochemical innovations aimed at the electric vehicle industry. It also presents the first-known use of the technology forecasting technique called morphological analysis in business academia. Similarities and differences between media representations of innovation activities, versus actual industry-wide developments, were found to have theoretical and practitioner implications. It was found that (1) incumbent firms were not participating meaningfully, rendering that variable largely moot; (2) effects of R&D affiliation were marginally significant; that while (3) performance advantages and disadvantages were reported in the media much more frequently than respective cost-price advantages and disadvantages, that (4) the relative performance advantages and disadvantages of competing innovations were reported in a balanced way, but that (5) the pattern of reports concerning cost-price was unbalanced in a way that favored the dominant design plus relatively modest departures from it. The overall interpretation indicated that relatively modest types of innovations were “winning” the early battle in a subtle but important way, despite representing a trajectory that was not certain to be the most rational, from a performance and/or cost-price focus.     

中美两国企业家年薪制的比较研究

本文从年薪构成，年薪支付方式、年薪额度、年薪绩效考核、年薪激励效果等方面对中美两国企业家年薪制进行了比较，分析了中美两国社会制度，社会文化和经济发展水平的差异对其企业家年薪制的 影响。最后对中国国有企业经营者年薪制的改进和完善提出了一些建议。     

Labor policies and capital mobility in theory and in EMU

Europe׳s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was characterized by large international imbalances and uneven national labor market reforms. In this paper׳s model, labor policies that aim to increase the welfare of capital-poor individuals within each country are influenced by financial integration across differently capital-abundant countries. The model predicts that capital outflows should be associated with labor market deregulation, as was the case in EMU, and helps interpret inequality developments and policy tensions in that experience.     

日本农业领域生物技术的研究开发与应用

进入新世纪,日本将生物技术产业纳入国家经济发展的最重要产业之一,政府和民间通过各种方式全力推进其技术研发和成果产业化进程。 在农业领域,日本虽然在基因育种等个别领域起步较晚,但凭借其在尖端技术研发和资金投入等方面的实力,农业生物技术的研发水平在短期内迅速提高,综合研发能力和许多单项技术水平已处于世界前列。基因组研究和转基因技术开发不断取得突破性进展,功能食品开发成果显著,胚胎移植和克隆技术已实际应用,利用不同生物手段育成大量的动植物新品种。许多研发成果已成功转化并实现产业化,生物技术在日本的现代化农业中起愈加重要的作用。 本文概述了目前日本农业生物技术的发展战略和政策措施,以及种植、畜产、水产等六大领域生物技术的研发现状和最新进展,并对农业生物技术主要研发机构的情况作了简要介绍。     

试论我国金融监管存在的问题与对策

文章针对当前我国金融监管普通存在着监管理念不清、法规不全、措施落后等诸多问题,应借鉴西方国家成功的监管模式和手段,应地制宜采取多种措施,以全面提高我国金融监管水平,增强国际竞争力。     

我国文化产业投融资存在的问题及对策研究

文化产业是为了满足精神文化需要从事的文化产品生产或提供文化服务的行业门类的总称。文化产业的快速发展是我国经济健康均衡发展的客观要求,文化产业投融资对文化产业的发展具有重要的推动力量。在我国文化产业融资中存在一些问题如政府对文化产业的投入资金不足、投入力度不大;文化产业投融资方面渠道较少、渠道不畅;文化产业知识产权评估体系不够完善科学,文化项目评估能力弱;风险投资对文化产业的支持力度不够;鼓励投入文化产业的相关政策不够完善等。为了正确认识和解决我国产业投融资中存在的问题,笔者从不同的方面提出了相关的建议和对策,以加快我国文化产业的快速健康发展。     

Inflation and output in the long and short run in Turkey

This paper firstly discusses the impact of inflation on real output in different theoretical models and then investigates this impact empirically in an economy facing persistent high inflation. We find some evidence of Sidrauski’s (Am Econ Rev 57:534–544, 1967) superneutrality of money for Turkey in the long run. However, it seems that inflation affects real output negatively in the short run. These results are more compatible with a class of utility functions in which real money balances and consumption are perfect complements as Asako (Econometrica 51(5):1593–1596, 1983) elucidates.