Gender wage differentials and discrimination in Korea: comparison by knowledge intensity of industries

This study estimates the relative size of the non-productivity-related gender wage gap across industries with differing knowledge intensities. More specifically, a gender wage premium was estimated from a modified Mincerian earnings equation, and an Oaxaca's discrimination coefficient was computed. Empirical evidence indicates that gender wage differentials tend to be less subject to potential discrimination in knowledge-based industries than in other industries with lower knowledge intensity. The estimated discrimination effect is least noticeable in top hierarchical occupations such as professionals and technicians, while it is most sizeable in production workers and sales/service workers, regardless of industrial affiliation.     

Optimal subsidies to declining industries: Efficiency and equity considerations

This paper considers equity versus efficiency in a small economy that subsidizes an industry facing falling world market prices. Subsidies keep up output in the short run when wages and factors are rigid. But once introduced, subsidies become permanent, because of pressures from vested interests. This creates missalocation of resources in the long run. An optimal efficiency subsidy balances the short-run gains and long-run losses. It should be raised when prices fall if there is full employment initially and lowered if there is unemployment. An optimal distribution subsidy, which aims at maintaining the existing income distribution, should always be raised.     

Earnings differentials and household-income differentials in Hungary—Policies and practice

Since about 1970 it has been the policy of the Hungarian leaders to widen earnings differentials for incentive reasons and, simultaneously, to narrow household-income differentials for equity reasons. The two policies work in opposite direction.This paper analyzes the policies and their actual results. Hungary has managed indeed to considerably narrow income differentials due to rapid expansion of transfer payments. The introduction of the NEM in 1968 was marked by a widening of earnings differentials in order to increase economic efficiency. However, since 1973 an opposite development has taken hold for political reasons and is still going forward.     

Constant-utility paths in a resource-based economy

This paper analyzes a social planner's solution in a resource-based economy under a constant-utility criterion. The utility function includes social progress in a multiplicative form. The resulting paths of consumption include the patterns of growth that are conventionally used in the literature. A closed form solution, derived for the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow (DHS) model, includes the Solow–Hartwick result as a special case. This paper extends the link between the utilitarian criterion and the maximin for the cases with finite elasticity of marginal utility. The result also implies that economic growth in a resource-based economy may be slower than exponential; therefore, the expression for utility with social progress may become a more appropriate measure of sustainable growth than the percentage of consumption growth.     

The resource-based theory and human resources

This paper applies the resource-based theory on human resources and analyzes its effect on human resource management. This focus considers that each firm is heterogeneous, and it can keep that heterogeneity for a long period of time. A resource is a kind of production factor which is at the firms' disposal, that is, each one is controlled by the firm in spite of having no property right to it. Additionally, any resource is able to create a competitive advantage if it has certain features. This paper will analyze whether human resources can be considered strategic. The answer will be positive because employees are able to create a sustainable competitive advantage, making human resource management a key function. Finally, some practices of human resource management will be named that could make it possible to attain a higher position than a competitor.     

Generalized measures of wage differentials

This paper considers measures of wage differentials not solely determined by mean comparisons but summarizing differences across complete wage distributions. The approach builds on considerations of risk or inequality aversion and on standard expected utility concepts. In an application to the gender pay gap in Luxembourg the disadvantage of women persists according to the proposed measures: lower mean wages for women are not compensated by differences in higher moments of wage distributions (e.g., by less dispersion) at least for realistic assumptions about women preferences toward risk and inequality. The paper also illustrates an original empirical model for wage distributions in the presence of covariates and under endogenous labour market participation.     

Efficiency and its determinants in pharmaceutical industries: ownership,R&D and scale economy

The purpose of this article is to measure the efficiency of pharmaceutical firms and identify their determinants using Korean and American samples from 1992 to 2004. We document some stylized facts in the patterns and sources of efficiency change in Korean and American pharmaceutical firms. The evidence shows that ownership structure can substantially influence the efficiency of pharmaceutical firms. Especially, institutional ownership rate affects corporate efficiencies negatively, corroborating the myopic institutional investor hypothesis. The hypothesis is supported by both Korean and American samples. However, we find evidence that foreign ownership in Korea promotes efficiency of pharmaceutical firms. It is shown that R&D intensity is positively related to contemporaneous largest ownership rate and prior foreign ownership rate in Korean pharmaceutical firms. In contrast, little evidence is found on the relationship between ownership structure and R&D intensity in the American pharmaceutical industry. These empirical results are robust even after we check the causal links among efficiency, R&D and ownership.     

Pipeline congestion and basis differentials

In the U.S., natural gas pipeline transport has undergone a wave of deregulatory actions over the past several decades. The underlying motive has been the presumption that removing regulatory frictions would facilitate spot price arbitrage, helping to integrate prices across geographic locations and improve efficiency. Yet certain frictions, specifically the effect of congestion on transportation costs, inhibit positive deregulatory impacts on efficiency. With the increase in domestic production and consumption of natural gas over the coming decades, upward pressure on the demand for transport will likely result in an increased occurrence of persistently congested pipeline routes. In this paper we explore the relationship between congestion and spot prices using a simple network model, paying particular attention to the influence of storage. We find that as congestion between two hubs increases, the scarcity value of transmission capacity rises, driving a wedge between spot prices. We empirically quantify this effect over a specific pipeline route in the Rocky Mountain region that closely resembles our structural design. Although our results paint a stark picture of the impact that congestion can have on efficiency, we also find evidence that the availability of storage mitigates the price effects of congestion through the intertemporal substitution of transmission services.     

Another look at compensating differentials

Empirical tests of the theory of compensating differentials using a wage-change formulation have had mixed success in providing support for the theory. Previous studies have differed with respect to the measurement and type of working conditions, the sample of workers examined, and the inclusion of firm- specific information. To isolate the role of the differences between previous studies in providing support for the theory, the author estimates a wage-change model using data from a broad sample of workers with self-reported job characteristics. The conclusion is that the general theory of compensating differentials be revised to include firm-specific information. However, it is not clear if any test of the theory can be supported over a broad range of occupations in the short run.     

A resource-based view of Schumpeterian economic dynamics

This paper seeks to offer a theoretical platform where the modern “resource-based view” of the firm might meet with evolutionary economics and the study of entrepreneurship, and with the economics of industrial organization. It does so by proposing the concept of the “resource economy” within which productive resources are produced and exchanged between firms. This is presented as the dual of the mainstream goods and services economy – where the “resource economy” captures the dynamic capital structure of the economy. The paper is concerned to bring out the distinctive principles governing resource dynamics in the resource economy, capturing competitive dynamics in such categories as resource creation, replication, propagation, exchange and leverage; evolutionary dynamics in terms of resource variation, selection and retention; entrepreneurial dynamics in terms of resource recombination and resource imitation, transfer and substitution; and industrial organizational dynamics in terms of resource configuration, resource complementarities and resource trajectories.     

Wage differentials across sectors in Europe

Using a unique harmonized linked employer–employee dataset, this paper analyses the structure and determinants of inter‐industry wage differentials in Central and Eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland) and compares them to those observed in Western European states. Findings show substantial differences in earnings across sectors in all countries, even when controlling for a wide range of employee, job and employer characteristics. The hierarchy of sectors in terms of wages appears to be quite similar in Eastern and Western European countries, although the former tend to have higher levels of dispersion of inter‐industry wage differentials.     

Male-female wage differentials: Additional evidence

By applying a richer data set than others have used to a simultaneous equation regression model, the analysis sheds new light on the existence and magnitude of the male-female wage differential.     

Compensating wage differentials for job stress

Recent medical studies have demonstrated a strong relationship between mental stress and cardiac events such as myocardial infarction and stroke. In the workplace, stress once accounted for less than 5% of all occupational disease claims, but it now accounts for over 15%. Although research on the effects of mental stress is increasing, few studies offer an economic perspective. In this paper, we examine the effects of job stress on weekly wages and explore the possibility that stress commands a compensating wage differential. Our findings suggest that, ceteris paribus, a wage differential does exist between workers experiencing mental stress and their ‘non-stressed’ cohorts. After controlling for other demographic and occupational factors, we found a statistically significant wage premium ranging from 3 to 10% attributable to mental stress. In addition, the magnitude of the differential varies by gender.     

Wage differentials, discrimination and efficiency

I analyze a large labor market where homogeneous firms post wages to direct the search of workers who differ in productivity. I show that the model has a unique equilibrium. The wage differential depends positively on the workers’ productivity differential only when the latter is large. When the productivity differential is small, high-productivity workers get a lower wage than low-productivity workers. This reverse wage differential remains even when the productivity differential shrinks to zero. However, the equilibrium is socially efficient. High-productivity workers always get the employment priority and higher expected wages than low-productivity workers. Although discrimination in terms of expected wages does not exist, conventional measures are likely to incorrectly find discrimination in the model.     

Gender wage differentials by education in Italy

In this article we evaluate wage differentials in Italy combining gender and education perspectives. The main goal of this article is to verify whether the extent of the gender pay gap varies between highly- and low-educated workers, and whether or not the role played by gender differences in characteristics and in market rewards is similar in the two groups. We apply quantile regression analysis and an adaptation of the procedure suggested by Machado and Mata (2005) to evaluate the predicted wage gap at different points of the female wage distribution scale. The analysis is carried out on the Italian sample of the last available year of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We show that the extent and the trend of the gap predicted across the female distribution is sharply different between groups with diverse educational levels. In the case of low-educated workers, although the predicted gap is largely explained by differences in rewards, lower levels of education or experience are responsible for the gap, especially on the right-hand side of the distribution. On the contrary, highly-educated females have better characteristics than highly-educated men that partially compensate the rather high difference in returns, in particular at the extremes of the distribution.     

Interindustry wage differentials in dummy variable models

Normalized interindustry wage differentials à la Krueger and Summers [Krueger, A.B., Summers, L.H., 1988. Efficiency wages and the inter-industry wage structure. Econometrica 56, 259–293] derive from a general specification of wage equations with dummy variables which cannot be directly estimated. This note illustrates how they can be obtained from the coefficients of a more specific parameterization and how their estimated variances can be transformed accordingly.     

Inter-industry wage differentials and strategic trade policy

Recent studies suggest that inter-industry wage differentials exist which are neither caused by different endownments of the workers with human capital, nor by different working conditions, nor by institutional rigidities. Higher employment in high-wage sectors due to exports, therefore, raises welfare. According to empirical evidence presented here more likely than not net exports from sectors paying wage premia lead to some extra gains from trade (that cannot be explained by trade policy promoting primary sectors by high amounts of subsidies per employee) for the German economy. A case is made, however, against strategic trade policy in favour of these sectors pointing to uncertainty about the amount of the differentials, their international (dis)similarity, and their sources.

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Zusammenfassung Empirische Untersuchungen deuten darauf hin, daß auch in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Arbeitskräfte mit gleicher Humankapitalausstattung, die unter gleichen Arbeitsbedingungen in Unternehmen gleicher Größe in einer Region arbeiten, unterschiedlich entlohnt werden, wenn sie in unterschiedlichen Sektoren arbeiten. Bestehen solche Sektorlohndifferentiale, dann hat eine Ausweitung der Beschäftigung in Hochlohnsektoren positive Wohlfahrtseffekte. Es wird daher vielfach gefordert, diese primären Sektoren vor internationaler Konkurrenz zu schützen und sie durch Subventionen zu fördern. Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert empirische Evidenz dafür, daß die Bundesrepublik Deutschland Extra-Gewinne aus dem Außenhandel bezieht, weil zwischen der Netto-Exportquote und der Höhe des Sektorlohndifferentials ein positiver Zusammenhang besteht, ohne daß sich die Subventionspolitik an diesen Differentialen orientiert. Gegen eine gezielte Förderung der Hochlohnsektoren im Rahmen einer strategischen Handelspolitik werden dann drei Argumente vorgebracht, die mit Unsicherheiten über Höhe, internationale Ähnlichkeit und Ursachen der Differentiale zusammenhängen.

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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the international economists' group of the Verein für Socialpolitik at Hohenheim University in May 1991, at the Sixth Annual Congress of the European Economic Association in Cambridge in September 1991, and at the Universities of Hamburg and Bielefeld. I would like to thank participants at the discussions and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.     

New evidence on public sector wage differentials

This paper examines the nature of wage differentials for men and women in the public sector, using a sample selection approach. This includes the self-selection that occurs in the sectoral choice process as well as the selection that arises in context of the labour force participation decision of men and women. Using 1991 Current population Survey data, it is found that male workers in the public sector on an average earn higher wages than male private sector workers, whereas the wage premium earned by women is undermined by a slightly greater degree of discrimination in the public sector     

企业所有权性质与研发效率——基于随机前沿函数的高技术产业实证研究

本文运用随机前沿生产函数分别对我国高技术产业中国有及国有控股企业和三资企业的研发效率进行了度量,着重度量了企业规模、市场结构、出口、消化吸收经费投入等因素对该产业不同所有权性质企业研发效率的影响。通过企业所有权性质与研发效率的对比分析发现,国有企业研发效率整体偏低,但近年呈上升趋势,企业规模、市场竞争和消化吸收经费投入与该类企业研发效率显著正相关;三资企业电子及通信设备制造业研发效率近年来出现下降趋势,消化吸收费用对其研发效率提高作用不显著。