Wealth Distribution,Elasticity of Substitution and Piketty: An ‘Anti‐Dual’ Pasinetti Economy

This paper studies the dynamics of wealth distribution between workers and capitalists in a neoclassical growth model with differential saving rates. It shows that if capitalists are thriftier than workers and the factors elasticity of substitution is high enough to ensure endogenous growth, capitalists’ share of total wealth asymptotically tends to one. It is also proved that a tax on capital income shifts the long run distribution of wealth in workers’ favor, and that the capitalists’ share of total wealth is a decreasing function of the tax rate. The results of the paper are compared to Piketty's ‘fundamental laws’ of capitalism.     

CAPITALISTS,WORKERS AND SOCIAL SECURITY

This paper elaborates an exogenous growth model that nests overlapping generations of workers who save for life cycle reasons with dynastic agents who save for bequest reasons (‘capitalists’). The model overcomes Marglin's objection that the overlapping generations framework requires special assumptions about technology, and it also provides a natural environment to revisit Samuelson's analysis of lump‐sum transfers between generations. The ability of a benevolent planner to improve workers' welfare is severely restricted by the control capitalists exercise over the accumulation process. Prefunding social security assumes renewed significance because it overcomes this restriction.     

Income shares,secular stagnation and the long-run distribution of wealth

Four alarming stylized facts have recently emerged in the United States: (a) a decline in the labor share of income; (b) a decline in labor productivity; (c) an increase in the top 1% wealth share and (d) an increase in the capital-income ratio. In Capital in the XXI Century, Thomas Piketty's argument is that the r > g inequality determines an increase in the capital-income ratio; if the elasticity of substitution in production is above one, the profit share rises. We provide a contrasting explanation that draws from the Post Keynesian approach to differential saving propensities between classes and the Classical-Marxian theory of induced technical change. In a simple model of “capitalists” and “workers,” we show that institutional changes that lower the labor share—declining unionization, increasing monopsony power in the labor market, the global ‘race to the bottom' in unit labor costs or the exhaustion of path-breaking scientific discoveries—can reduce labor productivity growth because of the lessened incentives to innovate to save on labor costs. A falling labor share reduces workers' total savings, and wealth concentrates in the capitalists' hands. A higher profit share and wealth share both put pressure on accumulation: but the long-run growth rate, which is anchored to labor productivity growth, has fallen. To restore balanced growth, the capital-income ratio must rise, independent of the elasticity of substitution. These tendencies are not inevitable: taxation can be used to implement any wealth distribution targeted by policymakers, while worker-crushing institutional arrangements can also in principle be reversed through policy. Neither change appears likely given the current institutional and global policy climate.     

AN ENVIRONMENTAL RESTRICTION AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN A CAPITALIST ECONOMY

Let us consider a growing economy where capitalists organize production emitting pollutants. The government is supposed to issue emission rights in order to control the amount of emitted pollutants, while capitalists must control their emission of pollutants in accordance with the amount of emission rights they buy. It is assumed that workers are also allowed to purchase emission rights. We show that the conventional inverse relationship holds between the wage rate and the profit rate, and between per capita consumption and the growth rate in this economy. We also study how economic variables such as the wage rate and per capita consumption are affected by the workers' purchase of emission rights.     

A Stochastic Model of Wealth Accumulation with Class Division

This paper is aimed at contributing to the literature on income and wealth inequality by proposing a simple stochastic model in which wealth accumulation depends on the ‘social relation’ between two classes: capitalists or workers. As a result, the society may evolve towards an unequal outcome with few rich and many poor individuals. We study the dynamic properties of the model by means of computer simulations. A maximum likelihood estimation procedure is applied to analyse the Pareto or power law tail of wealth distribution. We also provide a scenario analysis to explore the system's behaviour under alternative parameter settings.     

Income Distribution,Consumer Debt and Keeping up with the Joneses

We extend Kaldor's theory of income distribution to include workers' debt accumulation and their motive to emulate rentiers' consumption. Our results show that (i) the interaction between income distribution and emulation can produce instability; (ii) instability is more likely when the workers' emulation motive is strong and bankers' lending decisions are highly accommodating; and (iii) a plausible assumption on the non‐linearity of emulation behavior can generate a limit cycle. Our analysis provides an alternative perspective on the increase in household indebtedness for the decades before the recent crisis and the subsequent deleveraging process.     

Foreign Direct Investment and Training in the Host Country: The Tariff-Jumping Argument Revisited

We analyze the direct investment versus export decision of a multinational firm in competition with a potential entrant in a host country. We consider a workers' skills asymmetry between the host and the multinational home countries. We also give the multinational the possibility to train all (or a part of) the hired workers when investing. We show that an improvement in the workers' skills in the host country does not systematically increase the multinational incentive to invest. We also demonstrate that the tariff-jumping investment can improve the welfare of the host country even if it excludes the local firm from the market.     

THE WAGE–WAGE‐ . . . ‐WAGE–PROFIT RELATION IN A MULTISECTOR BARGAINING ECONOMY

The equalization of profit rates across industries subject to firm‐level bargaining over wages generates an interindustry wage structure with higher wages in capital‐intensive sectors. The familiar inverse wage–profit relation gives way to a wage–wage‐ . . . ‐wage–profit surface on which the profit rate can vary directly with the wage paid in an individual industry. Institutional changes that decrease workers' bargaining power and increase the incomes of the unemployed tend to compress the wage distribution; these changes draw political support from cross‐class coalitions of low‐wage workers and capital‐intensive firms. Some capital‐using, labor‐saving technical changes that raise capitalists' profits in current prices lower the equilibrium profit rate.     

PROFIT,SURPLUS PRODUCT,EXPLOITATION AND LESS THAN MAXIMIZED UTILITY: A NEW EQUIVALENCE PROPOSITION ON THE FUNDAMENTAL MARXIAN THEOREM

Morishima's Generalized Fundamental Marxian Theorem (GFMT) is an extended form of Okishio's Fundamental Marxian Theorem, which showed the equivalence between positive profit and the exploitation of labor. GFMT is not developed as a system of equivalence proposition between five conditions, which I call ‘The Strong System of Exploitation Theory’. But by the definition of this system, there remains the possibility of positive profit without exploitation. In this paper, I demonstrated an alternative system of equivalence proposition, naming it ‘The Weak System of Exploitation Theory’, in which positive profits always mean exploitation. Here I introduced workers' utility function to define the exploitation concept. Then I could also show that the exploitation is equivalent with the situation where workers' utilities are under‐maximized.     

Transformational leadership and R&D workers' multiple commitments: Do justice and span of control matter?

This study examines how transformational leaders influence research and development (R&D) workers' commitment to their organizations and leaders. The study investigates the mediating role of organizational justice (i.e., procedural and interactional) based on social exchange theory and the moderating role of span of control in this relationship. In a sample of 445 Turkish R&D personnel, the study finds that transformational leadership significantly influences followers' organizational commitment partially through procedural justice and their supervisory commitment partially through interactional justice. Second, the findings reveal that transformational leaders boost perceptions of procedural justice and organizational commitment when the span of control is relatively narrow. Interestingly, when the span of control is large, transformational leadership has significant positive effects on supervisory commitment, but no significant effects on organizational commitment among R&D workers.     

中国式分权、转移支付与居民收入不平等

本文首先采用基尼系数对我国城乡、城镇和农村居民收入不平等程度进行重新测度,然后以政府转移支付为门限变量建立面板门限回归模型,对财政收支分权与居民收入不平等之间关系进行实证检验,结果发现:一是财政收入分权与收入不平等显著负相关,财政支出分权与收入不平等显著正相关;二是财政收支分权对不同类型收入不平等的作用效果存在较大差异.其中,无论是财政收入分权抑或支出分权对收入不平等的政策效应大小依次是城镇居民＞农村居民＞总体居民;三是政府转移支付在不同区制对居民收入不平等的影响呈现显著地非线性特征.即从相对较低的第一区制跨入较高的第二区制时,转移支付对居民收入不平等的影响由负转变为正.本文以上研究结论不仅对于全面构建央地新型政府间财政关系,还可以为促进公平收入分配提供理论依据与决策参考.     

Migrants' remittances and economic activity

The impact of migrant workers' remittances on economic activity in their home countries was long overshadowed by the manifestly positive balance of payments effect. Only gradually did it come to be recognized that it was not just the scale of remittances but also the way in which they are used that is of crucial significance for the economies of the migrants' home countries. This article estimates the contribution that such remittances made to GDP, private consumption expenditure, saving and imports in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey in the period from 1960 to 1981.     

Fairness,trade, and inequality

We develop a model of international trade between two symmetric countries that features inter-group inequality between managers and workers, and also intra-group inequality within each of those two groups. Individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their managerial ability, and firms run by more able managers have a higher productivity level and make higher profits. There is rent sharing at the firm level due to fair wage preferences of workers, and hence firms with higher profits pay higher wages in equilibrium in order to elicit their workers' full effort. We show that in this framework international trade leads to a self-selection of the best firms into export status, with exporting firms having to pay a wage premium. Aggregate welfare increases, but there is also larger inequality along multiple dimensions: Involuntary unemployment and income inequality between managers and workers increase, and so does inequality within these two subgroups of individuals, as measured by the respective Gini coefficients.     

STEADY‐STATE GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION WITH AN ENDOGENOUS DIRECTION OF TECHNICAL CHANGE

A model of labor‐constrained accumulation and economically directed technical progress has a stable steady state at which the class distribution of income is invariant with respect to population and saving parameters yet sensitive to workers’ stances in wage bargaining and to the tax and transfer policies of a redistributive state.     

Jobs,education and the underdevelopment trap

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complementarity between job opportunities and the level of worker education as a cause of the underdevelopment trap. I show that if firms or workers in the labour market have to spend money or time searching for a partner, then an underdevelopment trap may occur. This underdevelopment trap occurs due to thc complementarity between the firms' decision about their entry into the market and the workers' choice of the length of her education. This paper stresses the importance of a decrease in private costs of receiving higher education and recruiting new workers.     

A note reconsidering a post-Keynesian model of growth and distribution in the globalization context

We treat an extension of the Metcalfe and Steedman model of growth and distribution in a small open economy with government activity. We show, simultaneously, that certain kinds of taxation and government expenditures will not affect the essential nature of the “Cambridge Equation.” This is important due to the increasing process of Financial Globalization which can be responsible for changing the profit distribution between capitalists and workers. The present note aims at integrating the public sector and the foreign trade together into the model, based on previous literature that, with few exceptions, treats them separately. To do so, a new framework is proposed. Our contribution shows that workers’ income grows when the Current Account in the balance of payments is in surplus, a result not studied by Teixeira and Araújo. The discussion includes recent literature concerning with limits of applicability of such analytical model, dealing with more realistic economies including the process of globalization.     

Old-Young Differences in Consumer Expenditure Patterns

It has been claimed that transfer payments to retired people reduce aggregate private saving. In their attempts to understand this issue, some writers have called for additional research to clarify the spending behavior of the older and younger households. The present paper uses regression analysis to examine the old-young differences in expenditure patterns as revealed by the 1972–73 BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. With data limitations noted, the findings suggest that, for consumer units headed by older (65+) and younger (<65) persons, the marginal and average propensities to spend relative to after-tax income were virtually the same when estimated at the mean values of their respective characteristics, such as after-tax income and family size. The statistical model utilized also suggests that, if given the older units' mean values for these characteristics, the younger group would have exhibited higher propensities to spend than the older.     

HARROD'S KNIFE-EDGE AND CONSUMPTION FUNCTIONS

This paper reconsiders Harrod's knife-edge instability of the capitalist economy. An investment function of the type used by Harrod is combined with a consumption function of the relative income hypothesis type. It will be shown that, even under such an investment function, knife-edge instability can be ruled out if a part of consumption behaves steadily and capitalists do not change their expectations very rapidly.     

Training opportunities and employee exhaustion in call centres: mediation by psychological contract fulfilment

The aim of this study is to analyse psychological contract fulfilment as a mechanism through which training affects stress in call centres. The hypotheses were tested on a sample of 412 call centre operators, using structural equation modelling to analyse their survey responses. Our results demonstrated that training is negatively related to workers' exhaustion and that the relationship is fully mediated by the fulfilment of socio‐emotional obligations. We found that it was the fulfilment of balanced obligations, and not relational obligations, which mediated the relationship between training and exhaustion. Hence, we verified that training was related to lower levels of employee exhaustion through fulfilment of the balanced psychological contract. Our findings highlight the centrality of psychological contract fulfilment to call centre workers, and the importance of training in constructing positive employment relationships with workers. We discuss implications for human resource management in call centres.