Inequality and endogenous trade policy outcomes

An enduring puzzle in international economics is why trade interventions are biased in favor of import-competing rather than export sectors and therefore restrict trade. In this paper, we show that if the government's objective reflects a concern for inequality then trade policy generally exhibits an anti-trade bias. Importantly, under neutral assumptions, the mechanism that we analyze generates the anti-trade bias independently of whether factors are specific or mobile across sectors. The mechanism also generates an anti-trade bias between large countries even after they sign reciprocal trade agreements that eliminate any terms-of-trade motivation for the use of trade protection.     

Wage expectations in northern and southern Italian regions: An interpretation based on psychological and social factors

Individual wage expectations of Italian unemployed are studied. The analysis is carried out separately for the North‐Central and southern Italian regions using semiparametric additive models. Results show a marked difference in expectations formation across regions. We argue that as far as the labour market information in the South is less diffuse and more ambiguous than in the North, the divergence between the econometric model based on a utility‐maximisation mainstream theory and the actual wage expectation mechanism may be large. A tentative explanation based on psychological and social factors is offered.     

Income, income inequality, and health: Evidence from China

This paper tests using survey data from China whether individual health is associated with income and community-level income inequality. Although poor health and high inequality are key features of many developing countries, most of the earlier literature has drawn on data from developed countries in studying the association between the two. We find that self-reported health status increases with per capita income, but at a decreasing rate. Controlling for per capita income, we find an inverted-U association between self-reported health status and income inequality, which suggests that high inequality in a community poses threats to health. We also find that high inequality increases the probability of health-compromising behavior such as smoking and alcohol consumption. Most of our findings are robust to different measures of health status and income inequality. Journal of Comparative Economics 34 (4) (2006) 668–693.     

基于相对剥夺理论的基尼系数子群分解方法研究

度量收入差距最常用的统计指标是基尼系数,但是由于基尼系数在按群组分解时的问题使得应用中受到许多限制,因此本文把相对剥夺理论引入基尼系数的子群分解中,得到了一个新的基尼系数子群分解公式,分解公式使群内差距和群间差距具有相同的形式,而且不仅能够计算高收入子群对低收入子群的相对剥夺,还能计算低收入子群对高收入子群的相对剥夺。并利用天津市2008年城镇居民住户调查数据进行了实证分析。     

Endogenous job destructions and the distribution of wages

This paper considers a matching model with both idiosyncratic productivity shocks that hit jobs at random and heterogeneity of workers according to ex ante unobservable abilities. We argue that firms' decisions about reservation productivity can help explain the shape of wage distributions. This is shown from numerical experiments, calibrated to French data, by considering alternative ranges of productivity shocks.     

Wage inequality and between-firm wage dispersion in the 1990s: A comparison of rural and urban enterprises in China

Using a worker–firm matched sample, this paper compares the changes of wage structures of urban and rural enterprises following public sector restructuring in China's manufacturing sector. While the wage responses of rural firms with respect to firm characteristics are found to have declined steadily, compensation of urban workers has become increasingly linked to their firms' ability to pay. Our analysis reveals that industrial restructuring has weakened the influence of institutional factors, such as market power, soft budget constraints, and insider influence, on the wage determination of rural firms but it has enhanced their impact on urban firms. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (4) (2005) 664–687.     

Multidimensional inequality with variable population size

Summary. We study inequality in a context of more than one variable by extending a celebrated result of Hardy, Littlewood and Pölya (1934) to the case of distributions with variable population sizes, whose individuals differ in many characteristics besides income. A new ordering between rectangular matrices, representing such distributions, is provided and characterized by convexity theory.Received: 19 October 2003, Revised: 7 September 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D31, D63, I31.I am indebted to C. d’Aspremont, V. Dardanoni, G. Koshevoy, K. Mosler and especially J. Weymark and an anonymous referee for many useful comments.     

结构冲击与结构转换对中国地区差距变化的影响

中国各地之间存在显著的产业结构差异,但现有关于中国地区收入差距的文献多受新古典单部门增长模型的影响,忽视结构冲击与结构转换的作用。通过构造变量,本文将各地区的实际增长率分解为结构冲击、结构转换9生产率增长三部分,从而克服了以往研究之不足。研究发现,结构冲击在1978年-1990年缩小了地区差距,但1990年—2002年扩大了地区差距;结构转换在整个改革期间均缩小了地区差距,从而加快农业发展和中西部地区产业结构转换有助于改善中国的地区收入分配状况。     

从《劳动合同法》的实施争议看劳资博弈的地位失衡

《劳动合同法》的实施引起资方的强烈反对。一部旨在保护劳动者权益促进劳资关系和谐发展的法律引起相关各方的争议本属正常,但在这一劳资双方利益博弈的过程中,劳动者的失语却凸显了劳动者与资方的不对等关系。只有赋予切实赋予劳动者与资方同等的政治地位与权利,完善集体谈判和集体合同的制度保障,才能根本上改变劳动者的地位,促进劳动者权益的保护。     

Inequality of Opportunity in Europe

Using the EU‐SILC database, we estimate and compare the Inequality of Opportunity (IO) of 23 European countries in 2005. IO is estimated as the between‐type (ex‐ante) inequality component following the parametric procedure of Ferreira and Gignoux (2011 ), which allows for the inclusion of the large set of circumstances in the database. We also measure the degree of correlation between IO estimates and a set of past and contemporaneous economic factors related to the degree of development, labor market performance, investment in human capital, and social protection spending.