外包、创新与工资不平等

本文构建了一个纳入发达国家创新活动的外包模型,来研究发达国家对发展中国家的外包转移,对发达国家和发展中国家之间的工资不平等以及作为发包方的发达国家企业创新活动的影响.我们发现,外包转移活动中不同因素对发达国家和发展中国家之间的工资不平等有着较为复杂的影响效应;更为重要是,发达国家对发展中国家的外包转移程度越大,越能激励作为发包方的发达国家企业的创新活动.进一步,考虑到作为外包转移接受方的发展中国家之间普遍存在的模仿行为特征,在外包模型中引入了发展中国家企业之间的模仿系数.模型结果表明,发展中国家代工企业之间的模仿程度越大,则会缩小发达国家和发展中国家之间的工资不平等;而且,作为代工方的发展中国家企业之间的模仿程度越大,越能激励作为发包方的发达国家企业的创新活动,越能激励发达国家对发展中国家的外包转移.本文的结论对于重新思考与理解外包活动对作为发包方的发达国家和作为接包方的发展中国家所具有的复杂影响效应,无疑具有非常直接的现实政策含义.     

Wage Inequality and Wage Mobility in Europe

Using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, this paper investigates wage inequality and wage mobility in Europe. Decomposing inequality into within‐ and between‐group inequality, we analyze to what extent wage inequality and mobility can be explained by observable characteristics. Furthermore, we investigate which individual and household characteristics determine transitions within the wage distribution. We find that overall, mobility reduces wage inequality. While a large part of wage inequality is due to unobservable characteristics, the equalizing effect of mobility mainly occurs within groups. Furthermore, both personal and household characteristics play an important role for wage transitions. Finally, our findings reveal large cross‐country differences across Europe.     

Trade, Technology and UK Wage Inequality

This paper examines the impact of international trade and technical change on changes in the UK skill premium. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth. Then we relate price and TFP changes to a set of underlying forces. Among our results are (a) changes in prices, not TFP, were the major force behind the rise in inequality in the 1980s; (b) changes in OECD prices and UK tariffs significantly raised 1980s skill premia through their effects on prices, and that industry concentration significantly raised 1980s skill premia through its effect on TFP.     

Globalization,Worker Mobility and Wage Inequality

In the present paper, I integrate frictional labor markets with on‐the‐job search into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firm model of intra‐industry trade. Most importantly, I show that the returns to workers' inter‐firm mobility are higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky. Intuitively, by favoring large and productive firms, international trade amplifies the disparities in profitability between small and large firms. Hence, the returns to labor reallocation across firms rise. In view of the empirically observed higher inter‐firm mobility among high‐skill workers, this suggests a skill‐biased impact of trade liberalization.     

Emigration,Finite Changes and Wage Inequality

This article shows that large outmigration of labor leads to finite changes in the structure of production at source. We argue that sectors may vanish as they cannot pay higher wages consequent to emigration. We also inquire whether emigration of one type of labor hurts the other non‐emigrating type in this setup. Various situations when real incomes of the emigrating and the non‐emigrating types do not move together are demonstrated. This generalizes some of the existing results in the literature. In particular, emigration can lead to a drastic change in the degree of inequality depending on which of the sectors survive in the postemigration regime.     

Technology Transfer,Welfare, and Wage Inequality

We use a linear two‐country, two‐factor, two‐product, two‐different technologies (2×2×2×2) model to study technology transfer and its effects on each country's welfare and factor prices. We demonstrate that technology transfer could benefit both the recipient and the transferring countries. For the recipient country, technology transfer increases the price of the factor that is more intensively used and decreases the price of the other factor. Our results provide an alternative explanation of a trend observed in the past half century: a rise in real wage inequality between relatively skilled workers and less‐skilled workers because of technological progress in numerous countries.     

贸易、技术进步和工薪差距——关于克鲁格曼和利默之争的探讨

20世纪80年代以来,经济全球化进程日益加快。除了全面快速地提高全球经济的发展外,经济全球化的负面效应也逐渐凸显出来。在美国,从20世纪70年代开始,90%的工人实际工资上升了大约15%,而其余10%的工人工资下降了大约25%^[1]。     

Product Market Integration,Rents and Wage Inequality

Globalization in the form of product market integration affects labor markets and produces winners and losers. While there are aggregate gains, it is in general ambiguous how inequality is affected. We explore this issue in a Ricardian model and show that it depends on the balance between “protection” and “specialization” rents. In particular, wage inequality among similar workers (residual wage inequality) may be U ‐shaped, at first decreasing and then increasing in the process of product market integration. Consequently, there may be gains in both the efficiency and the equity dimension until integration reaches a certain level at which a trade‐off arises.     

International Outsourcing, Technological Change, and Wage Inequality

This paper analyzes the impact of international outsourcing on UK wage inequality during the 1990s by applying the mandated wage approach proposed by Feenstra and Hanson (1999 ). The methodology is extended in order to obtain additional insight into the relative importance of the factor and sector bias of international outsourcing and technological change. The results indicate that technological change is the predominant force behind the increase in wage inequality, but international outsourcing also contributed significantly. In explaining the increase in wage inequality the factor bias of technological change was slightly larger than its sector bias, while for international outsourcing the sector bias was much more important. The relative importance of the two effects hinges crucially on the estimated rate of productivity passthrough.     

Foreign Competition and Wage Inequality

The author argues that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. A model is presented of general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) in which a reduction in import barriers (whether technological or policy–imposed) encourages more strategic investment by incumbent firms. The predictions accord with many of the stylized facts: higher skill premia; higher ratios of skilled to unskilled workers employed in all sectors and throughout the economy; little change in import volumes or prices; and rapid technological progress with rather little change in total factor productivity.     

Occupational Mobility and Wage Inequality

In this article we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related. We are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the U.S. was as high as 16% a year in the early 1970's and had increased to 21% by the mid-1990's. We develop a general equilibrium model with occupation-specific human capital and heterogeneous experience levels within occupations. We find that the model, calibrated to match the level of occupational mobility in the 1970's, accounts quite well for the level of (within-group) wage inequality in that period. Next, we find that the model, calibrated to match the increase in occupational mobility, accounts for over 90% of the increase in wage inequality between the 1970's and the 1990's. The theory is also quantitatively consistent with the level and increase in the short-term variability of earnings.     

技能型技术进步、南北贸易与工资不平衡

本文试图将技能型技术进步与产业内贸易置于一个框架中对工资不平衡现象进行理论解释。自由贸易通过促使发达国家产品质量阶梯提升型的技术进步而加剧了该国的工资不平衡程度;同时,自由贸易通过促使发展中国家产品种类数增加型的技术进步而加剧了该国的工资不平衡程度。南北贸易在拉大相对工资差距的同时促进了技能型技术进步。     

Gender Wage Inequality and Economic Recession

The Paper develops a two sector full employment general-equilibrium model for a small open developing economy, with both male and female labor. One sector produces low-skilled export commodity while other sector produces high skilled import competing commodity. The effects of world-wide economic recession on gender wage inequality have been examined in such an economy. The analysis concludes that low demand for high skilled commodity and/or low volume of foreign direct investment due to recession may aggravate the average gender wage inequality in the economy.

     

General Purpose Technology and Wage Inequality

The recent changes in the US wage structure are often linked to the new wave of capital-embodied information technologies. The existing literature has emphasized either the accelerated pace or the skill-bias of embodied technical progress as the driving force behind the rise in wage inequality. A key, neglected, aspect is the general purpose nature of the new information technologies. This paper formalizes the idea of generality of technology in two ways, one related to human capital (skill transferability) and one to physical capital (vintage compatibility) and studies the impact of an increase in these two dimensions of technological generality on equilibrium wage inequality.     

Capital Flows, Vertical Multinationals, Wage Inequality, and Welfare

Wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor in the US and its trading partners, Mexico and Chile, has increased since 1980, while Taiwan's wage inequality has decreased since the mid‐1980s. The authors provide a new explanation for the latter, involving a rise in capital flows from Taiwan to less‐developed countries (LDCs) in the form of vertical multinationals (MNEs), and a corresponding rise in intermediate‐good exports from the MNEs to subsidiaries in LDCs. Moreover, national income in both countries definitely improves.     

Indra-Industry Trade,Endogenous Technical Change,Wage Inequality and Welfare

By using alternative intra-industry trade models (1. New goods cannot be introduced into the economy; 2. The possibility for a set of capital goods available in the economy to vary; the models consider the existence of intersectoral linkages), I show by means of Applied General Equilibrium (AGE) analysis that trade rises wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers; but the impact on wage inequality is far larger, when countries are assumed to exchange differentiated capital goods. The latter result has been obtained by using an imperfect competitive model, which embodies a sector bias technological change that arises from trade. In addition, the gains from trade, insignificant under the standard trade hypotheses, are extraordinarily large when endogenous technological change is taken into account. The main policy conclusion is that if policy makers of flexible wage economies introduce trade barriers to reduce wage inequality, these protective measures, by affecting the diffusion of technology, would cause a large welfare loss. [D58, f12, F43, J3, O3]     

最优专利制度、技术进步方向与工资不平等

本文把专利分类为技能密集型产业的技术专利和劳动密集型产业的技术专利,它们分别与熟练劳动力和非熟练劳动力匹配。本文的研究表明,两类专利的最优宽度都是有限的,且受到劳动力禀赋结构的影响。当非熟练劳动力多于(少于)熟练劳动力时,劳动密集型产业的技术专利宽度宽于(窄于)技能密集型产业的技术专利。本文的研究也表明,劳动力禀赋结构可以通过影响最优专利制度来影响技术进步方向,从而对熟练劳动力和非熟练劳动力之间的工资不平等产生影响。     

Trade and Labor Approaches to Wage Inequality

The paper compares the trade and labor approaches to wage inequality. It first looks at the theoretical differences, stressing the different roles ascribed to sector and factor bias, labor supply and the theory of technical change in trade models with endogenous prices. It then briefly reviews some of the evidence on the sector bias of prices and technology.     

技能溢价与工资不平等理论研究进展

尽管技能偏向性技术进步假说为理解技能溢价和工资不平等提供了一个较好的分析框架,但依然存在不一致的研究结果.争议主要集中在资本与技能之间的互补关系、劳动力市场制度变迁以及技术和贸易哪一个是造成收入差距拉大的主要原因等几个方面.未来的研究将会建立一个统一的理论框架,分析各因素在解释工资不均衡程度增加时的相互作用.     

Trade Liberalization and Gender Wage Inequality in Mexico

Abstract

After twenty years of trade liberalization in Mexico, the relationship between gender wage inequality and trade remains insufficiently studied, in spite of evidence of increasing numbers of women in industrial employment. This study aims to analyze the effects of export orientation and other characteristics that represent the industrial underpinnings of restructuring on gender wage inequality for 2001–5. There is consistent evidence of the negative impact of export orientation on men's and women's wages and the gender wage ratio, signifying that women lose in both absolute and relative terms. This result holds after controlling for women's share of employment and the skills of both genders, contrary to the expected effect from trade on equality. There is also a negative relation between a rise in the proportion of unskilled workers and the gender wage ratio, which suggests that the trade-induced skill hypothesis cannot be considered an adequate explanation for gender inequality.