Labour Market Policy and Employment Growth in Sweden

ABSTRACT: In this paper, the author outlines the Swedish employment situation and traces the history of the labour market policy it generated, from its earliest development at the turn of the century, through to the Rehn-Meidner model, and then examines the various reactions and criticisms against it. It goes on to look at the trends and developments of the labour market in the‘80s, and concludes by making a speculative analysis on if and how the labour market policy has had an effect on the participation of various sectors of the population in the labour force, and if it has influenced unemployment in the Swedish labour market.     

中国入世以来经济增长、外贸及FDI对就业的影响

文章建立了关于就业的线性计量模型,并通过中国30个省2002-2006年的面板数据,主要检验了中国入世以来经济增长、外贸、FDI等对于就业的作用。经济增长仍显著促进了就业增加;FDI促进了就业增加,但拉动作用较小,东部与西部的FDI并未显著促进就业;总体上,出口拉动了就业增加,但其作用也不是很大,仅东部的出口显著促进了就业增长;进口显著抑制了国内就业。并在上述分析基础上,提出了相应的政策见解。     

打工与回乡:就业转变和农村发展——关于部分进城民工回乡创业的研究

“民工潮”之后出现的“创业潮”受到社会的普遍关注。如何认识这种现象的产生和发展及其理论意义,对城乡就业和农村发展产生了什么样的影响,以及政府应采取什么样的态度和对策,是本文研究的主题。民工回乡创业作为外出打工的一种派生现象,对拓展农村就业,发展县域经济有着重要的积极意义;对促进农村城镇化发展有积极的影响。如何认识和对待民工回乡创业现象,在学术界存在着不同看法,本文讨论了与其相关的认识和实践问题,对民工回乡创业作了客观的评价,并从分析影响民工回乡创业的因素入手,提出了适应民工回乡创业的政策调整意见。     

Ambiguity in the Small and in the Large

This paper considers local and global multiple‐prior representations of ambiguity for preferences that are (i) monotonic, (ii) Bernoullian, that is, admit an affine utility representation when restricted to constant acts, and (iii) locally Lipschitz continuous. We do not require either certainty independence or uncertainty aversion. We show that the set of priors identified by Ghirardato, Maccheroni, and Marinacci's (2004) “unambiguous preference” relation can be characterized as a union of Clarke differentials. We then introduce a behavioral notion of “locally better deviation” at an act and show that it characterizes the Clarke differential of the preference representation at that act. These results suggest that the priors identified by these preference statements are directly related to (local) optimizing behavior.     

Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour,Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

This paper presents in‐depth qualitative research on three small professional service firms whose owner‐managers sought to introduce greater degrees of formality in their firms’ working practices and employment relationships. We focus on humour as an ambiguous medium of informality, yet viewed by owner‐managers as a tool at their disposal. However, while early studies of humour in small and medium‐sized enterprises support such a functionalist view, our findings indicate its significant limitations. We argue that humour obscures but does not resolve disjunctive interests and it remains stubbornly ambiguous and resistant to attempts to functionalize it. Our findings contribute to studies of humour in small and medium‐sized enterprises by challenging its utility as a means of managerial control or employee resistance. They also contribute to studies of employment relationships by exploring humour's potentially disruptive influence within the formality–informality span, especially as small and medium‐sized enterprises seek greater degrees of formalization, with implications for how those relationships are conducted and (re)negotiated on an ongoing basis.     

人工智能、技术进步与低技能就业——基于中国制造业企业的实证研究

人工智能重塑中国制造业核心竞争力的同时,也加剧了行业内低技能型劳动力被取代的危机。本文以技术进步影响劳动力技能结构的理论机制为分析框架,聚焦人工智能与制造业的融合对低技能就业比重的因果效应。基于2011-2017年制造业企业的面板数据,首先将人工智能与制造业的融合定义为"AI产业化"和"产业AI化",基于定义、逐家判断人工智能企业名单并定位人工智能的初始时间,再采用双重差分法围绕人工智能对低技能就业比重的因果效应及效应的传导机制展开实证分析。实证结果表明:(1)制造业企业融合人工智能显著降低了低技能的就业比重,即在一定程度上制造业内低技能潜在的就业机会被人工智能所挤出;(2)人工智能对低技能就业比重的负向效应具有动态异质性,即企业融合人工智能的时间越长,低技能就业比重下降的越多;(3)人工智能虽然通过刺激当期资本积累和收入扩张补偿了部分低技能就业比重的减少,但同时降低了低技能劳动力的相对边际产出,促使企业最终减少低技能员工的就业比重。     

Structural Change and the Kaldor Facts in a Growth Model With Relative Price Effects and Non‐Gorman Preferences

U.S. data reveal three facts: (1) the share of goods in total expenditure declines at a constant rate over time, (2) the price of goods relative to services declines at a constant rate over time, and (3) poor households spend a larger fraction of their budget on goods than do rich households. I provide a macroeconomic model with non‐Gorman preferences that rationalizes these facts, along with the aggregate Kaldor facts. The model is parsimonious and admits an analytical solution. Its functional form allows a decomposition of U.S. structural change into an income and substitution effect. Estimates from micro data show each of these effects to be of roughly equal importance.     

Cumulatively Large Benefits of Incrementally Small Intervention Effects

Abstract

Metacontingencies are relations among practices within an organizational culture and their molar environmental consequences for the culture. They can be summarized by the ratio of all revenues from operations (or budgets received) to all expenses paid for operations. Rates of attendance/absenteeism have consequences in terms of effects on a culture's ratio of revenues received (budgets funded) to expense payments that appear as profits (losses) or budget surpluses (deficits) over some time interval. For a host of reasons OBM researchers place a premium on identifying and adopting practices that result in large immediate effects on behavior and performance in the short run. However, some practices created by OBM interventions can have small short-term effects and appreciably larger cumulative effects on revenue to expense and budget to budget expenditure ratios in the longer run. The importance of estimating cumulative benefits and/or costs of OBM interventions when intervention effects are small is demonstrated in this article using data from an operant based intervention that produced an immediate small increase in attendance.     

Investigating Institutional,Economic and Social Determinants of European Regions for Firm Growth Through Employment Generation

This paper examines the influence of the institutional, economic and social characteristics of a region on firm growth through employment generation across 14 European countries for the time period 2010–2013. Theoretically, we utilize the resource‐based view alongside insights from institutional theory to develop a conceptual framework that captures the influence of regional characteristics on firm employment growth. Based on this framework, our empirical results indicate that not only does firm growth depend on the firm‐specific characteristics found in the literature, but regional attributes also significantly impact firm growth in a heterogeneous way for different firm types. In line with the heterogeneous nature of firm growth, our results point to significant differences in the influence of institutional, economic and social characteristics on firm growth in different‐sized groups and across different rates of growth distribution. The implications of our study suggest the importance of managers and policy‐makers realizing which firms are mostly expected to benefit from the external environment, and which in turn can be planned via tailored policy reform by regional governments and firm‐level strategy‐making by managers.     

Technology,Employment and Wages

This paper provides a critical review of the impact of technical change on the structure of relative wages and employment, and considers some alternative explanations for the immiseration of low skilled workers. In the absence of any clear and distinguishing policy blueprint, the paper also seeks to clarify the major issues raised by our discussion for employment policy.     

中小企业生存与发展的理论基础

中小企业不是规模小的大企业,中小企业政策及其研究工作需要体现小企业的本质特点,理解中小企业生存与发展的理论基础。本文在大量经典文献资料的基础上,对一些相关理论观点进行了归纳、整理,目的在于识别影响和决定中小企业成长的关键因素,理解和把握中小企业的生存发展规律,进而给从事创业的企业家和中小企业经营管理者提供支持,为政府制订面向中小企业的支援体系建设提供理论依据,为在我国开展实证研究提供理论框架。     

Globalization, Social Identities and Employment

On the basis of social identity theory, we predict various outcomes of current reactions against globalization which have important implications for the management of employees. Globalization and its associated developments have added impetus to two social trends: increases in inequality and in individualism. Inequalities have increased both between and within nations, whilst individualism is increasingly apparent in social life in general, and in organizational life in particular. It is argued that individualism has led to a preference for personal identities over social identities, but that these are not always satisfying because they are often based upon consumerist values. Moreover, inequalities have resulted in feelings of injustice. Consequently certain social movements have increased in popularity. The most important of these are religious fundamentalism, nationalism and single–issue politics.
Increasing numbers of employees have at least one of these social identities central to their selves. Social identity and self–categorization theory suggest certain hypotheses about the likely implications for employment. First, to the extent that these social identities are salient for employees in the work situation, they will maintain the beliefs, values and norms associated with their identity at the expense of organizational beliefs, values or norms which are incompatible. Second, they will further the interests of their own category at the expense of other social categories of employee. Third, they will fail to differentiate between individuals within their own category, and between individuals within other categories. The implications of these hypotheses, if supported, for organizations are then explored. Finally, certain preventative strategies, also based upon social identity theory, are described.     

The Impact of Growth,Labour Cost and Working Time on Employment: Lessons from the French Experience

Abstract. In order to account for the evolution of employment at the macro‐economic level, we have developed a model wherein employment is explained by added value, working time and real labour cost. Estimations using quarterly French macro‐economic data are carried out in a multivariate framework for three sets of sectors. We obtain a relationship in which employment rises when there is growth and falls when labour cost or working time rises, in both industrial and non‐industrial sectors. This model then allows retrospective measurement of the contributions of each of the variables with respect to employment inflections since the mid‐1980s.     

Economic Growth,Employment and Labour Force Development in Western Europe: Trends and Prospects to the Year 2000

ABSTRACT: One of the most disquieting features of the situation prevailing in many European market-economy countries over the last fifteen years has been the persistence of high levels of unemployment. Employment and labour force prospects were recently examined by the experts of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe as part of the process for the preparation of an Overall Economic Perspective to the Year 2000. The purpose of this paper is to briefly present some of the scenarios which were prepared for this project and to examine some of their main implications, particularly with respect to the overall labour demand and supply balance in western Europe. Particular attention is paid in the paper to the process of working time reduction, the emergence of new patterns of work and their possible impact on employment prospects.     

具有结构变化的资产定价模型的贝叶斯自回归条件异方差检验

在现代资产定价理论中,一个基本的假定是证券资产风险溢价满足方差齐性。然而,这样的假设未必是正确的,因此,需要对资产定价模型进行异方差的检验。本文在贝叶斯框架下考察了具有结构变化的资产定价模型,提出了检验该模型的回归条件异方差的贝叶斯检验方法。最后利用两个具体实例论证了所提方法的有效性。     

新中国70年的经济增长:趋势、周期及结构性特征

本文从马克思经济学原理出发,利用剩余产品生产和再生产结构两个范畴构建了一个关于社会化大生产条件下理解经济增长的一般理论框架,并从经验层面讨论了新中国成立70年来经济增长的总量和结构性特征。本文分别测算了这一时期中国经济增长的两种潜在增长率和大道路径,刻画了中国经济剩余的生产分配以及最优增长结构。通过经验分析得出如下结论:第一,由于持续的资本使用—劳动节约型的技术进步,中国存在着一般利润率和潜在增长率的长期下降趋势;第二,社会主义市场经济体制的建立显著降低了中国宏观经济的波动性;第三,20世纪70年代初以前,中国面临着低生产资料投资—低消费的困境,成为制约经济发展的主要结构性问题,这一问题在20世纪70年代以后得到了解决,并代之以高生产资料投资—低消费的模式。结合马克思经济学的分析工具我们能够很好地解释中国经济增长的长期趋势、阶段性及周期性特征。     

Labour Market Regulation,Flexibility and Employment

ABSTRACT: Chronic unemployment and slow employment growth in some countries have led to calls for more labor-market “flexibility”. This paper defines the flexibility issue in terms of legally-mandated “severance”, a generalized employment cost linked to seniority. A mandated severance benefit can stand for a variety of programs including employer-provided employment guarantees, payments which must be made to laid-off workers, and compensation for wrongful discharge. Such a mandated cost can be seen as a payroll tax on the employer, raising the issue of tax incidence. Employers often take the view that labor costs are given and that mandated costs are simply add-ons to pre-existing cost levels. However, the literature on tax incidence suggests that a significant portion of “employer-paid” payroll taxes are shifted to labor in the form of lower wages. Such shifting should reduce the dis-employment effects attributed to severance. A model is provided of a firm upon which a severance mandate is imposed. Even at the micro level, the firm can shift some of the cost of severance to employees by lowering wages — although at the expense of higher turnover costs associated with increased quit rates. At the macro level, to the extent that firms reduce employment, there could be still further downward wage adjustments which would shift the severance burden to labor and mitigate the dis-employment effect. Ultimately, if the natural rate of unemployment is raised by severance mandates, the age-old question is raised of why wages do not fall in the face of labor surpluses. The true inflexibility to be explained, therefore, is in wage determination.     

Union Bargaining,Wage Differentials and Employment

Abstract. Reviewing empirical studies concerning the corporatism-flexibility-performance nexus the paper discusses decentralized and centralized bargaining systems. Revenue pay systems, concession bargaining and two-tier wage systems as means to enhance wage flexibility at the firm level are also considered. Both theoretical and empirical evidence is presented, showing that unions are bargaining for greater employment security for the already employed (the insiders). In return, unions are ready to accept greater wage flexibility and even wage decreases. By contrast, the insider-outsider theory does suggest how unions may accentuate involuntary unemployment, because there may be ways in which a union can help to raise the wages of the insiders without reducing their chances of continued employment.