Conflict inflation: estimating the contributions to wage inflation in Australia during the 1990s

One of the major emerging macroeconomic problems during thepast century has been the tendency for inflation to accelerateunder prolonged periods of full employment. According to Isaacand Kaldor, this arises because the three major objectives ofwage earners often conflict. The first objective is the desireto maintain relativities; the second is the desire to have a‘fair’ share of companies' profits; and the thirdis a reluctance to allow any encroachment on achieved standardsof living owing to unfavourable (exogenous) events. This papertests how well these three objectives explain wage inflationin Australia using a pseudo-panel data based on the period 1989–2000.The authors find that wages are sensitive to the three majorobjectives, but not to occupational unemployment rates.     

Urban agglomeration, wages and selection: Evidence from samples of siblings

The large and significant relationship between city population and wages has been well-established in the agglomeration literature, and the influence of selection effects on this wage premium is important. This paper contributes new evidence to the understanding of this premium by using two different data sets of siblings in order to estimate the agglomeration premium while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity with a family-specific fixed effect. The inclusion of a familial fixed effect into the regression framework makes the city size wage premium insignificant, and there is a large return to a variable representing the correlation between familial ability and residence in an urban area in all of the data sets used in the analysis. The results are discussed in the context of the existing literature, and they demonstrate the importance of family background and selection effects for interpreting the agglomeration premium, which is small in the fixed effects regression.     

效率工资的必要条件与经济效应

索洛模型和萨默斯模型存在局限性,在建立效率工资一般模型时,应当同时考虑到绝对工资水平、相对工资高低和失业率对工人劳动效率的影响。效率工资机制依赖于两个必要条件：间接计量的工资形式和竞争关系的存在。当效率工资的条件成立时,工资调整将存在粘性,均衡工资高于劳动力市场出清工资,且存在均衡失业。     

Rising household debt: Its causes and macroeconomic implications--a long-period analysis

The article analyses the rise in household indebtedness fromthe point of view of its causes and long-run macroeconomic implications.The analysis is focussed on the US case. Differently from life-cycleinterpretations of the phenomenon, and from interpretationsin terms of erratic deviations of current income flows fromtheir long-run trend, the rising household debt is viewed asthe outcome of persistent changes in income distribution andgrowing income inequalities. Through household debt, low wagesappear to have been brought to coexist with relatively highlevels of aggregate demand, thus providing the solution to thecontradiction between the necessity of high and rising consumptionlevels, for the growth of the system's actual output, and aframework of antagonistic conditions of distribution which keepswithin limits the real income of the vast majority of society.The question of the long-run sustainability of this substitutionof loans for wages is finally discussed.     

Coalitional strategy-proofness and fairness

This paper considers the problem of assigning a finite number of indivisible objects, like jobs, houses, positions, etc., to the same number of individuals. There is also a divisible good (money) and the individuals consume money and one object each. The class of fair allocation rules that are strategy-proof in the strong sense that no coalition of individuals can improve the allocation for all of its members, by misrepresenting their preferences, is characterized. It turns out that given a regularity condition, the outcome of a fair and coalitionally strategy-proof allocation rule must maximize the use of money subject to upper quantity bounds determined by the allocation rule. If available money is nonnegative, objects may be jobs and the distribution of money a wage structure. If available money is negative, the formal model may reflect a multi-object auction. In both cases fairness means equilibrium, i.e., that each individual receives a most demanded object. I would like to thank Tommy Andersson, Bo Larsson, Zaifu Yang and the participants of the seminars in Copenhagen and Lund for helpful comments on this paper. I will also thank an anonymous referee for very valuable comments. Financial support from The Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.     

关于新一轮个人所得税调整的思考——工资薪金改革角度的探讨

近些年以来,个人所得税的改革一直都是大众所关心的话题。本文首先对此次新一轮个人所得税的改革做一个简单的回顾,通过较为详细的数据对比,分析了年终奖在缴纳个人所得税时,存在奖金增加反而税后收入减少的现象,然后以新、旧个人所得税法间的比较为出发点,对新个人所得税法可能产生的诸多影响进行简单的探讨。     

The gender pay gap in the transition from communism: some empirical evidence

This short paper investigates the gender pay gap in a number of former communist countries of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The main findings are that, in general, the gender pay gap has not exhibited an upward tendency over the transitional period to which available data relate. Most of the gender pay gap is ascribed to the ‘unexplained’ component using conventional decompositions and this may partly be attributable to the proxy measure for labour force experience used in this study. Quantile regression analysis indicates that in all but one country, the ceteris paribus gender pay gap rises as we move up the wage distribution.     

Implicit contracts and the cyclicality of the skill-premium

To examine the cyclical behavior of the skill-premium, this paper introduces implicit labor contracts in a DSGE model where production is characterized by capital-skill complementarity and the utilization of capital is endogenous. It is shown that this model can reproduce the observed cyclical patterns of wages and the skill-premium. The feature of capital-skill complementarity coupled with variable capital utilization rates does not come at odds with the acyclical behavior of the skill-premium. The paper argues that the skill-complementarity of capital is not a quantitatively significant factor at high frequencies. The key aspects are the contracts and the capital utilization margin.     

The labor market impact of immigration in Western Germany in the 1990s

In this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in Western Germany. Using administrative data for the period 1987-2001 and a labor-market equilibrium model, we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels. Instead, it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages. These asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets. In a simple counter-factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage-bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller.     

The end of the 'iron rice-bowl': whither Chinese human resource management?

This study examines the degree to which enterprise reforms in the PRC have affected human resource management practices over the 1990s. A comparison is made between state-owned enterprises and joint venture firms, involving a national sample of sixty-two companies ranging from those in the North to those in the South. Our main findings show how organizational inertia has obstructed the change of the mind-sets associated with the 'iron rice-bowl' that characterized Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) before economic reform. The main conclusions of the research point to ownership, location and size of the firm as the main factors affecting the evolution of HRM in Chinese enterprises.