Learning for Innovation and the Skill Premium

The computer revolution took very long to pay off in productivity growth in the computer-using sectors. The relative wage of skilled workers, however, has risen sharply from the early days of the computer revolution onward. As skilled workers wages reflect their productivity, the two observations together pose a puzzle.This paper provides a micro-based explanation for the long diffusion period of the computer revolution. The general equilibrium model of growth zooms in on the research process and provides an explanation for sluggish growth with booming relative wages of the skilled. Technological progress in firms is driven by research aimed at improving the production technology (innovation) and by assimilation of ideas or principles present outside the firm (learning). A new General Purpose Technology (GPT) like the computer revolution generates an initial slowdown in economic growth and an increase in the skill premium.Acknowledgement I am indebted to Theo van de Klundert for suggestions and encouragement. Suggestions by Jan Boone, Bas Jacobs, Patrick Francois, Henri de Groot, Lex Meijdam, Niek Nahuis Sjak Smulders, Harald Uhlig and anonymous referees have contributed to the paper.     

Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Regulated Labor Market: The Case of Austria

We study Austrian job reallocation in the period of 1978 to 1998, using a large administrative dataset where we correct for spurious entries and exits of firms. We find that on average 9 out of 100 randomly selected jobs were created within the last year, and that about 9 out of randomly selected 100 jobs were destroyed within the next year. Hence, the magnitude of Austrian job flows seems to be comparable to other countries, similar to the well-known results of Davis et al. (1996) for the United States. Job reallocation appears to be driven primarily by idiosyncratic shocks. However, job creation increases significantly during cyclical upswings whereas job destruction rises in downturns. We also find substantial persistence of job creation and destruction. The pronounced pattern of job reallocation rates falling with firm size and age continues to hold when we use a set of controls. Finally, we show that – controlling for sector and firm size composition – Austrian job reallocation rates are only half the rates for the U.S. This result is not surprising given the impact of tighter regulation and labor law in Austria.     

新农村建设:一个政治经济学视角的解析

新农村建设是对城乡经济社会发展不平衡的一个积极回应,它包含经济增长和社会发展两个层面.从政治经济学视角出发,在经济增长方面,户籍、土地、保障等制度性因素制约到农村劳动力的有效流转,从而对劳动生产率提升和农业发展产生负面影响;在社会福利方面,农民的数量优势没有转化为谈判优势,对市场价格和政策制定的影响力较小,其社会福利获取以及发展程度处于不利地位.据此,新农村建设必须对相关制度性、组织性因素进行完善和改革,部分农民的真正流转和留守农民的自发组织将尤其重要.     

控制权性质影响税收敏感性吗?——基于企业劳动力需求的检验

西方学者研究表明企业所得税是劳动力需求的重要影响因素,这一理论在中国是否适用?中国大部分上市公司为国有控股企业,这一特殊的制度背景是否会影响企业所得税与劳动力需求的关系?本文基于2007年企业所得税改革这一外生政策变化,在检验西方企业所得税与劳动力需求关系的理论在中国是否适用的基础上,就不同控制权的性质是否会影响企业劳动力需求的税收敏感性进行了检验。研究发现企业所得税税率降低和"就业税盾"增加提高了企业劳动力需求,但这种税率和"就业税盾"的变化对国有控股企业劳动力需求变化的影响要显著小于非国有控股企业。这表明税收是影响企业劳动力需求的重要因素,但国有控制权使得这种税收敏感性变弱。本文的研究结果不仅丰富了相关领域的国际学术文献,而且对我国就业政策的制定具有政策含义。     

International Comparisons of Australia's Infrastructure Performance

International benchmarking has played a key role in the reform of Australia's infrastructure industries by promoting indirect or yardstick competition, in highlighting the need for further reform and building a consensus for implementing necessary changes. The international benchmarking of infrastructure performance by the Bureau of Industry Economics (BIE) between 1991 and 1996 did much to focus attention on the need for change. The BIE examined the performance of eight infrastructure industries relative to international best practice: electricity, rail freight, telecommunications, the waterfront, road freight, coastal shipping, aviation and gas supply. Performance comparisons concentrated on indicators of price, service quality, labour productivity and capital productivity. This paper reviews and summarises the performance comparisons the BIE undertook over the last three years of its infrastructure benchmarking program. The BIE international benchmarking program provides a useful role model for other countries wanting to seriously pursue reform of their infrastructure industries.     

Distinguishing external from internal scale effects: The case of public infrastructure

The recent applied production theory literature focusing on the economic performance of firms has increasingly recognized the importance of scale effects on costs and therefore efficiency. These scale effects may include short run returns due to fixity of privately demanded inputs (i.e., capital, long run internal returns to scale, and external factors affecting costs. Since these different types of scale effects can be thought of as shifts in and movements along cost curves, the different cost effects of such factors can be identified in a framework which explicitly takes them into account in the definition ofscale.In this article we formalize such a framework, and then use it to measure short run, long run (internal) and external scale effects from fixity of private capital, nonconstant returns to scale and public infrastructure. We then use these measures to identify the impacts of these different scale factors on productivity growth. The focus on public infrastructure as an important external scale factor is motivated by the current theoretical and policy interest in this issue; we show how a structural production theory model provides a rich basis for the analysis of the cost effects of infrastructure investment.     

基础设施在中国农业全要素生产率中的作用

This paper uses the Malmquist index to examine the sources of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in Chinese agriculture. The overall goal of this study is to create a framework for assessing the trend of China’s agricultural infrastructure and to measure its impact on Total Factor Productivity. The main methodological contribution is to provide more contributive measure of crop-specific technologies. Based on the province-level panel data set during 1988–2002, the primary finding is that infrastructure has positively and statistically significant association with the estimated coefficient on Total Factor Productivity for rice, wheat, maize, and bean. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Do Institutions Cause Growth?

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that (a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, (b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and (c) subsequently improve their political institutions.     

Joint outputs and real wage rates

The magnification effect in standard international trade theory asserts that if the relative price of the labor-intensive commodity increases, the real wage will also increase, as will the wage/rental ratio. This result depends upon the assumption that both activities are nonjoint—each combining labor and capital to produce a single output, so that if activities are joint instead, the results are in jeopardy. It is shown that if the difference between the share of commodity one produced in the first activity and in the second activity exceeds the difference between the labor distributive shares in the first activity and the second, an increase in commodity 1's relative price raises the wage/rental ratio. The real wage unambiguously rises in this case if and only if the ratio of the commodity output shares in the two activities exceeds the ratio of labor shares.     

论社会主义社会的劳动和劳动价值

本文探讨了社会主义社会劳动和劳动价值理论。文中指出 ,必须全面、准确地把握马克思关于价值创造的理论与方法 ;澄清传统政治经济学中一系列并不完全符合马克思原意、更脱离现实经济生活的观念 ;发展马克思主义的劳动价值理论 ,扩展价值创造和生产性劳动的领域