Divergence or convergence?: Income inequality between cities,towns and villages in Japan

Researchers have emphasized different aspects of income inequality, including the statistical evidence of interregional per capita income convergence (following the economic growth theory) and the increase in individual income inequality. This study clarifies these issues, by analyzing the interregional income inequality of cities, towns and villages data in Japan from 1986 to 1999. The results of this empirical analysis show that the interregional income inequality decreases in the 1990s, in spite of the increase in individual income inequality.     

ADULT EDUCATION AND EARNINGS: EVIDENCE FROM BRITAIN

This paper uses the National Child Development Study to investigate the relationship between adult schooling and labour market earnings for men. In line with several other studies, the findings suggest that there are returns to all educational qualifications acquired early in life. A variety of statistical models are estimated to try to measure the causal effect of adult education on earnings. Careful analysis reveals that there are no genuine returns to additional qualifications awarded in middle adulthood. The central conclusion of this paper is that rates of return to human capital are greater for individuals who were educated early in life.     

Manufacturing Wage Differentials and Employment in Some Scandinavian Countries, the U.S. and the U.K.: An Analysis of Variance Approach

This paper presents some empirical evidence on the factors determining changes in wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers and in their employment. An ``analysis of variance' (ANOVA) model is estimated using UN data for five OECD countries in order to assess the relative importance of industry-specific, country-specific and international shocks (as well as interactions between industry and country effects). It is found that both international shocks and national policies affect wage differentials over the whole sample, whilst skill-biased technical change (SBTC) was a significant factor in the seventies. Employment responds mainly to international shocks, although national policies and SBTC were important determinants in the seventies and eighties respectively. Some of the results are found to be sensitive to the technology level of the industries considered.     

Institutional environment,ownership and firm taxation

This paper examines how ownership type and institutional environment affect firm taxation. Using a sample of Chinese‐listed firms from 1999 to 2006, we find that private firms enjoy a lower effective tax rate than local state‐owned enterprises. In addition, the preferential taxation of private firms is associated with local government incentives to promote local economic growth. We find that private firms located in regions with a lower level of privatization receive preferential tax treatment. Our results also suggest that decentralization and interjurisdictional competition lead to financial interdependence between local governments and private firms.     

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.     

Firm Size and Wages in Germany – Trends and Impacts of Mobility

The analysis of firm-size wage differentials in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, firstly corroborates the finding that wages rise with firm-size and shows that the rank order of mean wages between firm-size classes is stable for the period 1984–1993. Secondly, the most important novel results are as follows: (i) wage differentials between firm-size classes increased during the period investigated after controlling for individual attributes and computing with deflated values; (ii) average levels of the qualification of employees have diverged noticeably between small and large firms; (iii) movers from small to larger firms have to accept wages below the average pay of incumbents with comparable attributes in the new firms: (iv) movers to smaller firms, however, retain a portion of their higher wages in larger firms; and (v) wage differentials between smaller and larger firms decline with increasing unemployment.     

Environmental Policy in the European Community: Harmonization or National Standards?

This paper explores the claim that the setting of environmental standards needs to be centralized in order to avoid a competitive race to the bottom. Such a claim represents a fundamental challenge to the basic theory of fiscal federalism. But the theory of interjurisdictional competition, although diverse in approach and findings, does not provide a fully compelling basis for this proposition. Moreover, the terminology is itself misleading. The paper suggests that in the absence of environmental spillover effects across jurisdictional boundaries, there remains a strong case for decentralized environmental management.     

中国城镇人口失业与性别的收入差异

在以往的数十年间,与世界上其它国家相比,中国城镇就业人口的性别差异并不是很大,但20世纪90年代以来的大规模失业有可能打破这一局面。利用oaxaca分解方法和2003年的《城镇居民再就业状况调查》数据对再就业者的性别工资差异进行了定量分析,发现再就业者在失业前就存在着性别的工资差异,而失业经历使得这一差异更加显著。这一结论的政策含义是中国政府应该实施更有利于女性的再就业政策。     

探究区域经济发展差距 促进区域经济协调发展

改革开放以来,我国的区域经济得到长足发展,但是,随着改革的推进,区域经济发展不协调现象日益明显,突出表现为区域发展差距扩大。区域经济发展不平衡是客观规律,但如果差距扩大,就会引起经济、社会、民族甚至国家安全等方面的问题,影响改革、发展、稳定的大局。因此,坚持区域经济的协调发展,逐步缩小地区差别是完全必要的。     

Inter-city wage differentials and intra-city workplace centralization

We explore the interaction of inter-city and intra-city wage differentials by occupation. The paper makes two main contributions. 1) We construct an occupation-specific index of workplace centralization that accounts for the difference between average employment density from the perspective of employees in each occupation and average employment density from the perspective of all employees. 2) We provide empirical evidence that relative wages of central to non-central occupations increase with city size, or equivalently, the elasticity of wages with respect to city size increases with occupational centrality. We conjecture that this empirical regularity arises because, as city size increases, workers in more central occupations face an increasingly less desirable locus of housing prices and commuting times relative to workers who have jobs in residential areas. The results are robust to the inclusion of individual-specific human capital variables and city-specific fixed effects.