国际失业属性理论回溯

失业属性是失业理论发展的重要观察视角.本文基于对失业属性的认识.从凯恩斯对劳动供求数量失衡的观察到"后凯恩斯主义"对劳动供求结构失衡的认识和人力资本理论对劳动供求质量失衡的认识,以及发展经济学对发展中国家工业化过程中劳动数量供给特殊性的观察,正是在人们对失业属性的认识逐步深化过程中,失业理论得到了不断发展.     

Unemployment Expectations: The Impact of Private Information on Income Uncertainty

The formation and accuracy of unemployment expectations are investigated in this paper. Unemployment expectations were found to contain predictive information that was not captured by past trends in unemployment and other economic variables. The predictive content of expectations was based on private information about future unemployment and overall economic prospects. The data indicated a greater consistency with the rational expectations hypothesis than with adaptive, extrapolative, and error-learning models, although households did not optimally use all available information. The data indicate that unemployment expectations are to an important extent derived from more general expectations about the future performance of the economy.     

Keynes,investment, unemployment and expectations

In Keynes’ General Theory, investment determines effective demand, which determines unemployment and the labour market plays a negligible role. In New Keynesian models, labour market institutions determine the natural rate of unemployment and the speed at which unemployment adjusts to it. Investment is mostly ignored as a key variable behind the problem of high unemployment, despite a strong empirical association between investment and unemployment. We discuss the evolution of the ‘Keynesian’ model, and how in the process of domesticating the General Theory, the central relationship between unemployment and investment and the role of the state of confidence was bred out of the model. We then present some evidence of the centrality of investment and expectations to the long‐term evolution of unemployment in OECD countries. We also argue that recent results in finance, which find that individuals do not behave rationally and, moreover, that there may be no basis for rational calculation, provides support for Keynes’s notion that animal spirits play a central role in investment.     

Consumption in the shadow of unemployment

By how much do employed households reduce their consumption when the aggregate unemployment rate rises? In Spain during the Great Recession a one point increase in the unemployment rate was related to a strong reduction in household consumption of more than 0.7% per equivalent adult. This reduction is consistent with forward-looking agents responding to downward revisions of their expectations on future income growth rates: the shadow of unemployment. Using consumption panel data that include information on physical quantities we show that the drop in consumption expenditure was truly a reduction in quantities, and not a switch to cheaper alternatives.     

Endogenous employment rate in the efficiency wage shirking approach

The aim of New Keynesian theorists is to obtain Keynesian results on the basis of maximizing behavior. Accordingly, the New Keynesian shirking models depict a world of fully rational maximizing agents where equilibrium unemployment is the main consequence of the payment of efficiency wages. The problem is that oversimplified nature of most shirking models has until now prevented a full investigation of the interdependence of unemployment, the effort supplied by workers and labor demand. This article shows that the existence of this interdependence weakens the whole approach. In particular, when the unemployment rate is considered a truly endogenous variable, the stability of the macroeconomic equilibrium is generally incompatible with the existence of unemployment ascribed to the fact that firms pay efficiency wages.     

Imperfectly competitive cycles with Keynesian and Walrasian features

We consider a multi-sector overlapping generations model with oligopolistic firms in the output markets and wage-setting trade unions in the labour markets. A coordination problem between firms creates multiple temporary equilibria which are either Walrasian or of the Keynesian unemployment type. There exist many deterministic and stochastic equilibrium cycles fluctuating between Keynesian recession and Walrasian boom periods with arbitrarily long phases in each regime. The cycles are in accordance with certain empirical regularities. Money is neutral and superneutral, but appropriate countercyclical fiscal policies stabilize the cycles in a textbook Keynesian way.     

Heterogeneous expectations,indeterminacy, and postwar US business cycles

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model extended to include heterogeneous expectations: consumers and firms form either rational or boundedly-rational expectations. The inclusion of heterogeneous expectations alters the determinacy properties of the model, with the details of expectations potentially becoming more influential than the Taylor principle for equilibrium stability.The model is estimated with Bayesian techniques, using rolling windows and allowing the parameters to fall both in the determinacy and indeterminacy regions. The estimates reveal large shares of agents who depart from rational expectations. Heterogeneous expectations are decisively preferred by the data everywhere in the sample.Finally, the paper revisits the narrative that sees postwar US macroeconomic data as consistent with indeterminacy in the pre-1979 sample, with a switch to determinacy starting in the early 1980s, and it shows that it is overall robust to inclusion of heterogeneous expectations.     

REGIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT DISPARITIES: AN EVALUATION OF POLICY MEASURES*

This paper analyses the efficacy of regional and federal government policies in reducing inter‐regional unemployment disparities. We use as our framework a two‐region general equilibrium model with a given freely‐mobile supply of labour. We assume inter‐regional migration to occur in response to inter‐regional utility differentials. Each region has households, firms and a regional government. In addition to regional governments, there is a federal government. The firms in a region use a single factor, labour, to produce a single good which we assume to be different to that produced in the other region. It is supplied to households and to the regional government in the form of payroll taxes. Households consume some, trade some with households in the other region and give some up to the federal government as income tax. Firms and households bargain over wages and firms then choose employment to maximise profits. The resulting equilibrium will generally not be a full‐employment one. We simulate a linearised numerical version of the model. We examine seven alternative policies, six carried out by a regional government and one by the federal government. In the first group there are traditional tax/expenditure polices as well as policies which might be seen as attacking the natural rate of unemployment: changes in unemployment benefits, changes in union power, changes in the labour force and changes in labour productivity. The federal government policy is a regionally‐differentiated fiscal policy. Contrary to expectations, many policies which have traditionally been recommended to alleviate unemployment are found, in fact, to exacerbate the unemployment problem.     

The Dynamic Interactions Between the Phillips Relation and the IS-LM Model*

In this paper the IS-LM model is extended dynamically by the addition of a price-adjustment relation (the Phillips relation) and a quantity-adjustment relation. Three specifications of the Phillips relation are considered. It is shown that the nature of the price-adjustment process has important implications for stability; in fact the price-adjustment processes which yield clockwise (counter-clockwise) Phillips loops may also be unstable (are not unstable). On the other hand, the speed of the price-adjustment process is not relevant for stability. The speed of quantity adjustment is only important in the expectations case and there the slower the speed of adjustment the more likely is instability. No clear conclusions emerge, in general, concerning the slopes of the IS-LM relations and stability. In conclusion the results are related to the debate on the micro-foundations of Keynesian economics.     

Do professional forecasters behave as if they believed in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve for the euro area?

This paper finds that participants in the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters have submitted forecasts that are consistent with a (mostly forward-looking) empirical version of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve for the euro area. The estimation technique takes advantage of the panel nature of the Survey of Professional Forecasters’ dataset to exploit both its time series and cross-section dimensions, and to control for unobservable individual heterogeneity across forecasters. The estimation results suggest that euro-area inflation forecasts have reacted less to unemployment forecasts after the start of the financial crisis but another cost measure (energy inflation) remains significant. This finding is consistent with a flatter Phillips Curve in the euro area after 2007. However, the reasons suggested by the International Monetary Fund for this finding, namely a better anchoring of inflation expectations and increases in structural unemployment do not seem to find support in the survey data. Instead, the expectations for compensation per employee submitted by professional forecasters are consistent with the existence of downward real-wage rigidities in euro-area labour markets.     

The economics of the Phillips curve: Formation of inflation expectations versus incorporation of inflation expectations

This paper examines the theory of the Phillips curve, focusing on the distinction between “formation” of inflation expectations and “incorporation” of inflation expectations. Phillips curve theory has largely focused on the former. Explaining the Phillips curve by reference to expectation formation keeps Phillips curve theory in the policy orbit of natural rate thinking where there is no welfare justification for higher inflation even if there is a permanent inflation–unemployment trade-off. Explaining the Phillips curve by reference to incorporation of inflation expectations breaks that orbit and provides a welfare economics rationale for Keynesian activist policies that reduce unemployment at the cost of higher inflation.     

Unemployment and interindustry labour mobility in Canada in the 1980s

The determinants of interindustry mobility of labour, and its relationship to the unemployment rate is examined, using micro-data on Canadian workers from 1980/81, 1982/83 and 1985/86. It contrasts the implications of the ‘dynamic reallocation’ model (Lilien, 1982) in which rising aggregate unemployment is due to in creased dispersion in the net hiring rates of firms (implying positive covariance of interindustry mobility and unemployment rates) with the older ‘Keynesian’ perspective that high unemployment ‘chills’ labour market mobility, implying a neative relationship. Qualified support is obtained for the ‘chilling’ model, as well as standard results on the role of job tenure, hours worked, etc. The general moral is the cyclical sensitivity of labour market behaviour, i.e. individuals appear to react to the aggregate unemployment rate.     

DRIFTING APART: CANADIAN AND U.S. LABOR MARKETS

Canadian and U.S. unemployment rates moved together within a narrow margin from 1961 to the mid-1970s. Since then, Canadian rates have exceeded U.S. rates by large margins—at times as much as 3 percentage points. Throughout this period, interest rates in the two countries have been nearly identical. Aggregate demand stimulation by government deficits has been greater in Canada than in the U.S., and the trade surplus in Canada has added to demand while the trade deficit in the U.S. has subtracted from demand. Therefore, it seems that conventional Keynesian arguments cannot explain the recent differences in unemployment rates.
Differences in labor market developments, however, can do so. During a period when real wages rose 35 percent in Canada, they fell 5 percent in the U.S. Since the recession of 1981, U.S. wages have dropped while Canadian wages have remained constant. Differences in labor productivity do not account for these developments. A strong case exists for the argument that the different paths of unemployment rates are due to different paths of real wage developments.
It is argued that the causes for these differences in labor market conditions are associated with substantial growth and decreases in unionization rates in Canada and the U.S., respectively. In addition, the unemployment insurance system in Canada is shown to be considerably more generous than that in the U.S.     

On the theory of macroeconomic quasi-equilibria

Conclusion It has been shown that for the Classical System a quasi-equilibrium cannot exist, unless we make the ad hoc assumption of inflexible nominal wages⁸. The equilibrium in the classical regime corresponds to the general competitive equilibrium, and of course the validity of Walras' Law cannot be questioned. At the same time, however, it has been shown that to extend these conclusions to the Keynesian system as well is not justified. The Keynesian system has, in general, a quasi-equilibrium. The model constructed in this paper and the resulting conclusions are significant because the model: (a) Incorporates the Keynesian notion of effective demand, which includes the demand for capital goods (investment) as being performed by a group of people distinct from the consumers (and so, answering Negishi's point, there is a prince in Hamlet!), (b) Unlike other models (like the recent paper by Glustoff), it does not rely on nominal wage rigidity to explain unemployment, but instead, again answering Negishi's remark, it explains rather than postulates why real wages do not adjust in the presence of unemployment so as to eliminate it. (c) It verifies the validity of Clower's proposition that in the Keynesian System Walras' Law holds only in equilibrium. (d) It reconsiles Bent Hansen's original quasi-equilibrium model with the Keynesian proposition of an unemployment equilibrium, against the apparent view of Hansen that to do that would require the assumption of a Phillips curve, a view also shared by Arrow and Hahn, and many others.An earlier version of this paper was presented in the December 1974 meeting of the Econometric Society in San Francisco. The author wishes to thank Prof. R. Clower, Prof. B. Hansen, Prof. S. Black, and Dr. G. Winckler for their valuable comments, but he obviously claims any errors for himself.     

Post Keynesian endogenous money theory: A theoretical and empirical investigation of the credit demand schedule

The article investigates the relationship between interest rates and loan amounts provided by commercial banks from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Theoretically, some scholars belonging to the post Keynesian endogenous money tradition advocate that a decrease (increase) in interest rates leads to a positive (negative) effect on the amount of loans demanded by households and firms. On the other hand, some heterodox economists maintain that interest rates do not stimulate firms’ credit demand but that a certain degree of influence is allowed for loans provided to households. By applying a vector autoregression (VAR) and vector error-correction model (VECM) methodology to European Central Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data for the eurozone, this article proposes an empirical validation of such theoretical premises by analysing the relationship between the different types of credit provided by commercial banks and the corresponding interest rates. The main results show a negative relationship between the interest rates and the credit provided for the purchase of houses. Conversely, no significant relationship is found between loans granted to enterprises and loans for the purchase of consumption goods and the corresponding interest rates.     

Keynesian unemployment as a nash equilibrium with endogenous wage/price setting: An example

A simple 3 good, 1 consumer, 1 firm model of fixed price, quantity constrained equilibrium is developed. A game is then defined on the set of (globally unique) equilibria. The consumer sets the money wage, the firm sets the money price of output (money is numeraire). Nash solutions of the game exist and may involve Keynesian unemployment but never involve Classical unemployment or Repressed inflation.     

Further evidence on alternative theories of inflation and unemployment:the Scandination countries

The objective of this study is to estimate the inflation and unemployment models of various of macroeconomics as suggested by Sargent, Stein and Rea, and to test the validity of their propositions using the data of four Scandinavian countries, namely Denmark, Finland Norway and Sweden. The results provide some support for the new classical models on unemployment, but the monetory variables, as monetarists argue, have a significant effect on unemployment. With regard to inflation, the data of the Scandinavian countries do not support the monetarist proposition that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. However, the results support Keynesian propositions that economic slack represented by unemployment is important in explaining the rate of inflation.     

Devaluation in a neo-Keynesian temporary equilibrium

We analyse a two sector open economy model in which prices are rigid and markets clear by quantity adjustments. We consider the case of Keynesian unemployment (excess supplies of labour and of the non-traded good), and derive conditions under which devaluation will be expansionary and will improve the balance of trade.     

The rise of part-time employment in the great recession: Its causes and macroeconomic effects

During the Great Recession, the U.S. economy witnessed a substantial rise in part-time employment for a sustained period. We extend the New Keynesian unemployment model by Galí et al. (2012) to allow substitutions between full-time and part-time labor, and estimate the model’s parameters by using the Bayesian method. In our model, households and firms can optimally allocate full-time and part-time labor, and disturbances exist in part-time labor supply (household disutility from part-time labor) and part-time labor demand (firms’ efficiency to use part-time labor). As for the Great Recession, the initial increase in part-time employment at the outset of the financial crisis is mostly explained by the rise of the risk premia; the persistently high level of part-time employment in the later period is mainly explained by an exogenous increase in part-time labor supply. A part-time labor supply shock also explains a significant portion of slow recovery in the gross wage during the recession, as the shock lowers the part-time wage and the proportion of full-time workers in total employment. Notably, the results from our model suggest that though the transition from full-time to part-time jobs contributed to mitigating the sharp contraction in total employment and labor force during the Great Recession, it played only a limited role in relieving recessionary pressure.     

Rational expectations macro models with possible steady-state inflation andunemployment

Consider an economy exhibiting the conventional IS-LM relationships, Phillips curve type price adjustment equations, and rational inflationary expectations. We demonstrate that starting from the disequilibrium situation of either the Keynesian unemployment or the demand inflation type in which money is nonneutral, the economy converges to an equilibrium situation in which all markets clear. On the other hand, starting from the disequilibrium situation of the classical unemployment type in which money is nonneutral, the economy converges to a state of rest in which the goods and the labor markets remain out of equilibrium. However, money is neutral at this state of rest.