UNDERSTANDING THE EVOLUTION OF THE US WAGE DISTRIBUTION: A THEORETICAL ANALYSIS

In this paper, we propose an analytically tractable overlapping‐generations model of human capital accumulation and study its implications for the evolution of the US wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. The key feature of the model, and the only source of heterogeneity, is that individuals differ in their ability to accumulate human capital. Therefore, wage inequality results only from differences in human capital accumulation. We examine the response of this model to skill‐biased technical change (SBTC) theoretically. We show that in response to SBTC, the model generates behavior consistent with some prominent trends observed in the US data including (i) a rise in overall wage inequality both in the short run and long run, (ii) an initial fall in the education premium followed by a strong recovery, leading to a higher premium in the long run, (iii) the fact that most of this fall and rise takes place among younger workers, (iv) a rise in within‐group inequality, (v) stagnation in median wage growth (and a slowdown in aggregate labor productivity), and (vi) a rise in consumption inequality that is much smaller than the rise in wage inequality. These results suggest that the heterogeneity in the ability to accumulate human capital is an important feature for understanding the effects of SBTC and interpreting the transformation of the US labor markets since the 1970s.     

The Employment Relationship and Inequality: How and Why Changes in Employment Practices are Reshaping Rewards in Organizations

We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships, focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, contingent work, outsourcing, and performance pay as well as the success of social identity movements in shaping employment benefits. In doing so, we address the role of organizations as sites of conflict within and between stakeholder groups, examining how struggles among stakeholders have contributed to reorganizing employment relationships. We also examine how these changes have affected inequality by (i) influencing the distribution of rewards within organizations (via changes in the determination of pay and benefits and in the allocation of workers to jobs) and (ii) altering, on a macro level, how rewards are distributed among different stakeholders. In closing, we identify areas where future work is urgently needed.     

发展模式和经济平等——苏南和温州的比较

本文通过对我国转型经济中两个有代表性的区域经济发展模式——苏南模式与温州模式——的研究,探讨了经济发展中政府和市场(企业家)对经济平等和社会分层的影响。同传统的智慧和人们的直觉——认为市场有产生不平等的天然倾向,而国家(政府)则有再分配和校正不平等的能力和企图——不一致的是,本研究发现政府主导的发展模式(苏南)导致了更大的不平等,产生了收入和社会结构的两极分化,而企业家推动的发展模式(温州)则出人意料地导致了相对平等的结果。导致这种结果的根本原因在于两地在发展的关键时期机会结构的不同。研究结论对于我们寻求在发展的同时尽量达到公平和建立和谐社会具有重要的实践意义。     

Higher Education Levels,Firms’ Outside Options and the Wage Structure

Abstract. We analyze the consequences of an increase in the supply of highly educated workers on relative and real wages in a search model where wages are set by Nash bargaining. A key insight is that an increase in the average education level exerts a negative externality on wages through its positive externality on the firms’ outside option. As a consequence, the real wage of all workers decreases in the short run. Since this decline is more pronounced for less educated workers, wage inequality increases. In the long‐run a better educated work force induces firms to invest more in physical capital. Wage inequality and real wages of highly educated workers increase while real wages of less educated workers may decrease. These results are consistent with the US experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Based upon differences in legal employment protection we also provide an explanation for the diverging evolution of real and relative wages in Continental Europe.     

Schumpeterian Growth Theory and the Dynamics of Income Inequality

In this lecture, it is argued that Schumpeterian Growth Theory, in which growth is driven by a sequence of quality‐improving innovations, can shed light on two important puzzles raised by the recent evolution of wage inequality in developed economies. The first puzzle concerns wage inequality between educational groups, which has substantially risen in the US and the UK during the past two decades following a sharp increase in the supply of educated labor. The second puzzle concerns wage inequality within educational groups, which accounts for a large fraction of the observed increase in wage inequality, although in contrast to between‐group wage inequality it has mainly affected the temporary component of income.     

Size,Skill and Sorting

Abstract. The rise in inequality between the 1970s and the 1990s and the persistent gap in pay between large and small employers are two of the most robust findings in the study of labor markets. Mainstream economists focus on differences in observable and unobservable skills to explain both the overall rising inequality and the size–wage gap. In this paper we model how increasing returns to skill can affect the size–wage gap both with constant sorting and with size‐biased, skill‐biased technological change (e.g. if large firms always had access to computers, but small firms gained access to computers with the rise of affordable personal computers). We analyze the Current Population Surveys from 1979 to 1993 to determine whether large and small employers are converging in terms of mean wages (the employer size–wage effect), wage structures by occupation and education, characteristics of employees, and wage structures by region. We find mixed evidence of convergence and no consistent support for any single version of human capital theory.     

DEA as a tool for predicting corporate failure and success: A case of bankruptcy assessment

Using an additive super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, this paper develops a new assessment index based on two frontiers for predicting corporate failure and success. The proposed approach is applied to a random sample of 1001 firms, which is composed of 50 large US bankrupt firms randomly selected from Altman's bankruptcy database and 901 healthy matching firms. This sample represents the largest firms that went bankrupt over the period 1991–2004 and represents a full spectrum of industries. Our findings demonstrate that the DEA model is relatively weak in predicting corporate failures compared to healthy firm predictions, and the assessment index improves this weakness by giving the decision maker various options to achieve different precision levels of bankrupt, non-bankrupt, and total predictions.     

Business innovation through strategic community creation: a case study of multimedia business field in Japan

For the last few years, the video conferencing system market represented by multimedia technology has enjoyed strong growth in Japan. Behind the recent upturn in this market was the strategic alliance of NTT, Japan’s largest telecommunications carrier, and PictureTel of the US, followed by the birth of business communities centered around or outside NTT, thus intensively creating and boosting a new market referred to as interactive video communication. This case study reviews the challenges that faced NTT, one of the big businesses in Japan, followed by PictureTel and other players within and outside NTT, all of which were lined up to create various strategic business communities. The article gives careful consideration to the measures taken by these players who achieved success in such a way as to alter employee consciousness, vitalize organizational morale, entrench the new NTT “Phoenix” brand (video conferencing system) in the Japanese market, and create an emergent new video conferencing market.     

Corporate raiders don't cut investment in R & D

A focal point of the public debate over the effects of corporate mergers and acquisitions is their impact on the level of spending on long term projects. This study examines the pre-and post-merger levels of spending on R & D and the more general category of capital expenditures. Analysis of expenditures for a sample of firms drawn from the largest corporate mergers in the US during the late 1970s indicate that long term spending rises significantly in the post-merger environment. This supports the view that acquiring firms. whether hostile or friendly, recognize the relationship between such spending and firm value.     

Earnings Inequality and the Gender Gap: An Accounting Exercise for Sweden 1975–1991

Using the Household Income Survey, the earnings of full time, full year workers in Sweden are studied. Earnings inequality as well as the gender earnings gap were found to decrease up to the beginning of the 1980s, when both started to increase. The following questions are also addressed: How much has the changed earnigns gap contributed to changes in earnings inequality? How much should earnings inequality decrease in the case of men and women having the same mean income while keeping inequality within each gender category constant?     

GOVERNMENT SPENDING COMPOSITION,TECHNICAL CHANGE,AND WAGE INEQUALITY

In this paper we argue that government spending played a significant role in stimulating the wave of innovation that hit the U.S. economy in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, as well as the simultaneous increase in inequality and in education attainments. Since the late 1970s U.S. policymakers began targeting commercial innovations more directly and explicitly. We focus on the shift in the composition of public demand toward high‐tech goods, which, by increasing the market‐size of innovative firms, functions as a de facto innovation policy tool. We build a quality‐ladders non‐scale growth model with heterogeneous industries and endogenous supply of skills, and show that an increase in the technological content of public spending stimulates R&D, raises the wage of skilled workers, and, at the same time, stimulates human capital accumulation. A calibrated version of the model suggests that government policy explains between 12% and 15% of the observed increase in wage inequality in the period 1976–1991. (JEL: E62, J31, O33, O41)     

充分发挥“超大规模性”优势 推动我国经济实现从“超大”到“超强”的转变

经济超大规模性,是一个经济体依托超大规模的人口、国土空间、经济体量和统一市场所形成的叠加耦合效应,在运行效率、产业构成、空间格局、动态演化、全球影响等方面所展现出的特性。经济超大规模性使我国在生产率持续提高、建立完整的产业体系、进行高水平创新创业创造、孕育世界级都市圈和城市群以及在全球范围配置资源等方面具备了比较优势。我国的经济超大规模性是在党的领导下,通过最大范围地动员人民参与现代化建设、统筹布局区域发展、重视基础产业发展、持续丰富产业体系、着力提升创新能力、不断扩大对外开放、努力推进全国市场一体化所取得的。未来要充分依托和发挥经济超大规模性优势,促进我国经济持续平稳发展和全球地位的提升,推动我国经济实现从"超大"到"超强"的转变。     

Educational Inequality

Abstract. This paper develops a theoretical model of the inequality in wages and salaries associated with differences in years of schooling (educational inequality, for short). Our model assumes that in the long run individual decisions to become more educated equalize the lifetime earnings of more educated workers and comparable less educated workers. Given this assumption, our model implies that innovations that increase the relative demand for more educated labor, and which cause short‐run increases in educational inequality, in the long run induce offsetting increases in the relative supply of more educated labor. But our model also has the novel implication that innovations that increase differences between the wages and salaries received by workers with the same years of education who are more or less able (ability premiums, for short) cause a smaller fraction of workers to choose to become more educated. Consequently, innovations that increase ability premiums in the long run also cause educational inequality to be larger than otherwise. In applying our theory to recent changes in educational inequality in the USA, we suggest that, to the extent that innovations that increase ability premiums are contributing to educational inequality, the increases in educational inequality during the 1980s and 1990s are unlikely to be reversed soon.     

The Structure of Wages in the Netherlands, 1986–98

Abstract. For many OECD countries an increase in wage inequality has been documented since the early 1980s. This is often attributed to a general rise in the demand for skilled workers resulting from recent technological change. Using the Organization for Strategic Labour Market Research (OSA) Labour Supply data, this paper studies the wage structure in the Netherlands over the period 1986–98 and demonstrates that wage inequality did not increase to any significant extent in the Netherlands. Using the accounting framework proposed by Juhn et al. (Journal of Political Economy 101: 410–442, 1993), it is shown that the relatively stable wage structure until at least the late 1990s can be attributed mainly to returns to observable components, such as education and experience, while residual wage inequality is found to be of minor importance in explaining the Dutch wage structure. These estimates suggest that the demand for skill in the Netherlands is likely not to have been rising to the extent it did in many other countries over this period.     

Optimal Inspection of Imports to Prevent Invasive Pest Introduction

The United States imports more than 1 billion live plants annually—an important and growing pathway for introduction of damaging nonnative invertebrates and pathogens. Inspection of imports is one safeguard for reducing pest introductions, but capacity constraints limit inspection effort. We develop an optimal sampling strategy to minimize the costs of pest introductions from trade by posing inspection as an acceptance sampling problem that incorporates key features of the decision context, including (i) simultaneous inspection of many heterogeneous lots, (ii) a lot‐specific sampling effort, (iii) a budget constraint that limits total inspection effort, (iv) inspection error, and (v) an objective of minimizing cost from accepted defective units. We derive a formula for expected number of accepted infested units (expected slippage) given lot size, sample size, infestation rate, and detection rate, and we formulate and analyze the inspector's optimization problem of allocating a sampling budget among incoming lots to minimize the cost of slippage. We conduct an empirical analysis of live plant inspection, including estimation of plant infestation rates from historical data, and find that inspections optimally target the largest lots with the highest plant infestation rates, leaving some lots unsampled. We also consider that USDA‐APHIS, which administers inspections, may want to continue inspecting all lots at a baseline level; we find that allocating any additional capacity, beyond a comprehensive baseline inspection, to the largest lots with the highest infestation rates allows inspectors to meet the dual goals of minimizing the costs of slippage and maintaining baseline sampling without substantial compromise.     

THE REPLACEMENT PROBLEM IN FRICTIONAL ECONOMIES: A NEAR‐EQUIVALENCE RESULT

We examine how technological change affects wage inequality and unemployment in a calibrated model of matching frictions in the labor market. We distinguish between two polar cases studied in the literature: a “creative destruction” economy, where new machines enter chiefly through new matches and an “upgrading” economy, where machines in existing matches are replaced by new machines. Our main results are: (i) these two economies produce very similar quantitative outcomes, and (ii) the total amount of wage inequality generated by frictions is very small. We explain these findings in light of the fact that, in the model calibrated to the US economy, both unemployment and vacancy durations are very short, i.e., the matching frictions are quantitatively minor. Hence, the equilibrium allocations of the model are remarkably close to those of a frictionless version of our economy where firms are indifferent between upgrading and creative destruction, and where every worker is paid the same market‐clearing wage. These results are robust to the inclusion of machine‐specific or match‐specific heterogeneity into the benchmark model. (JEL: J41, J64, O33)     

Michael Porter on competitive strategy reflections and round table discussion

In a recent series on “The Business of Excellence”, Thames Television, UK, transmitted a talk by Michael Porter on the competitive strategy of companies. A Round Table of executives with a special interest in the subject was then asked to discuss Porter's ideas. The European Management Journal is pleased to have been given the copyright to edit and publish the talk and the lively and wide-ranging debate which followed.Michael Porter is Professor at Harvard Business School and the foremost authority on competitive strategy. He is author of over thirty articles and six books, including Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage. The former is the leading work in the field, having been reprinted fourteen times and translated into nine languages. The Round Table set up to comment on Professor Porter's address included Sir Christopher Hogg, the Chairman of Courtaulds, Trevor Chinn from Lex Service Group which distributes Volvos in the UK and electronic components in the US and Europe, David Sainsbury of the UK's largest grocery chain, and Patricia Grant of Norfrost, who, with her husband, founded a company which makes chest freezers in the north of Scotland. Mrs Grant is also a recent Business Woman of the Year. The programme was introduced and chaired by Ian Hay Davison, advisor, Arthur Andersen and Company, and director. Midland Bank Group plc.     

Wage Inequality of US Truck Drivers

Using CPS data for the period 1979–2009, the wage dispersion of truck drivers (and subsets of the truck driving sample) is compared with the trends in wage dispersion of males economy‐wide. We find that truckers' wages experienced a decrease in inequality post‐deregulation, as expected given the literature on regulation's impact on the labor market. We also find that the wage dispersion for truckers is markedly different from males economy‐wide, providing evidence that the wage distribution of truck drivers has been dominated by the changing structure of the occupation post‐deregulation and largely immune to the factors that increased inequality for the aggregate labor market.     

国际油价、美国经济不确定性和中国股市的波动溢出效应研究

2008年金融危机以来的全球股市震荡,油价波动剧烈和经济的不确定性使得研究不同市场间的风险传导效应具有重要的意义。在综合评价现有研究的缺陷和既有改进方法的情况后,本文借鉴Diebold and Yilmaz （2012）的研究方法探索国际原油价格、美国经济不确定性和中国股市的波动溢出效应。本文选取1986年1月到2016年12月原油价格、美国经济不确定性指数和中国股票价格的月度数据,分别研究了静态波动溢出指数,动态波动溢出指数并做出了非线性检验。实证结果表明：变量国际油价解释了大部分的波动。方向性溢出指数是双向的和非对称的。在整个样本阶段系统的波动主要来自其他变量的冲击,变量国际油价的溢出效应占比重较大。变量国际油价、美国经济不确定性和中国股价对其他变量的波动溢出都存在非线性效应,前两者的正向变量的溢出效应较大,负向变量的溢出效应较小;后者的正向变量的溢出效应较小,负向变量的溢出效应较大。     

OIL AND THE MACROECONOMY: A QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

We model an open economy where macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to oil supply shocks, as well as aggregate demand and supply shocks generated domestically and abroad. We use several robust predictions of the model to identify five fundamental shocks underlying the fluctuations of the (real) oil price, the US activity and the global business cycle. The estimates show that supply shocks generated in the global economy explain the largest fraction of the oil price fluctuations, about four times more than canonical oil supply shocks. The correlation between oil prices and the US activity varies with the type of shock.