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The importance of time invariant, but unobserved characteristics of workers and their employers in the determination of wages is well known. This suggests that models of (un)employment featuring permanent worker and firm types are crucial for our understanding of labor markets. While such models are numerous, it was thought that even very simple ones were fundamentally not identifiable with wage data alone. Hence, the empirical content of these models were largely a mystery. With that, our understanding of permanent unobserved heterogeneity has been restricted to statistical models with limited economic interpretation. In the first chapter of my dissertation (joint with Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii Manovskii), I overcome this fundamental problem. I assess the empirical content of equilibrium models of labor market sorting based on unobserved (to economists) characteristics. Specifically, I develop quantitative tools to identify and estimate a wide class of models of labor market sorting. I not only find that many models are likely completely identifiable but that reliable estimates of key model primitives can be obtained using routinely available matched employer-employee datasets. In the second chapter of my dissertation (with Kory Kantenga), I apply the framework developed in the first chapter to study the role of worker and employer heterogeneity in driving German wage inequality between 1993 and 2007. The model I earlier developed fits overall wage variance, the wage function, search frictions, unemployment levels and the degree of sorting between workers and firms. The fit of the model is comparable to non-structural approaches which utilize many more degrees of freedom. In decomposing the rise in German wage inequality, I find that changes in the non-parametrically estimated production function and the sorting between worker and firm types that it induces accounts for most of the increase in German wage inequality. Finally, by testing whether log wage differences between employees who are coworkers at two distinct firms are constant, I show that the commonly assumed log additive separability approximation of log wages is rejected. Finally, the estimated model is capable of reproducing the degree of non additive separability in the data.
Whilst there is widespread agreement about the goals of economic policy, consensus about how best to achieve them can be harder to achieve. No issues are more contentious than employment and income distribution. In recent years full employment and a just distribution of incomes have been downgraded as policy objectives, as greater priority has been given to price stability and balance of payments objectives. This emphasis has been supported by a mainstream economic theory which has an unswerving belief in the ability of market forces to achieve a satisfactory regulation of employment and income distribution Other economists have remained more sceptical, and none more so than Kurt Rothschild. This new volume collects together his twenty two most important essays in the area, many of which are appearing in English for the first time. Throughout pure theory is linked to relevant practical investigations.
In this dissertation I examine changes in wage inequality in two chapters. In the first chapter, I examine the slowdown in the relative demand for college-educated labor in the U.S. since the early 1980s. A large literature suggests that this puzzling slowdown is primarily the result of non-monotone changes in the demand for skill, particularly since the mid-1990s, induced by the introduction of computers to the labor market. In these two essays, I develop a complementary result: I show that roughly 10-60% of the gap in the annual growth rates of the relative demand for college-educated workers between the 1963-1982 and 1982-2008 periods can be closed by adjusting for shifts in supply and demand within schooling groups; however, a slowdown in relative demand growth beginning in 1993, well-documented in the literature and potentially-related to recent technological changes, remains pronounced across all specifications.
(Cont.) The government's capacity to insure workers is limited by the market wage setting, which gives workers a share in the employment surplus. When the government provides higher unemployment benefits, the bargained wages increase, and unemployment rises. These equilibrium responses have a negative effect on workers' welfare if workers' bargaining power is above a certain point, which is lower than the matching elasticity. As risk aversion increases, workers' share in the wage bargain is smaller, and thus the equilibrium effects are attenuated. The constrained optimal provision of unemployment benefits is a modification of the Hosios condition for efficient unemployment insurance and highlights the roles of bargaining and risk aversion. The optimal level of insurance increases with risk aversion, with the costs of creating a vacancy and with workers' higher bargaining power.
This book presents a comprehensive analysis of contemporary issues in international trade and economic development. Emphasising the significance of economic development within policymaking, the book covers important issues like the provisioning of public goods, its implication in a liberalised regime, crime and corruption, skilled-unskilled wage inequality, income distribution and unemployment, environmental regulation and role of educational capital and informal sector. The volume deals with the impact that different aspects of international trade and investment are likely to have on the above-mentioned areas. The essays, written to honour the memory of Professor Sarbajit Chaudhuri, also examine topics that focus on public policy related to immigration of skilled workforce, political resistance and political compulsions that a democratic government might face in keeping with its commitment to tariff reforms, gender wage gap and issues related to globalisation, income distribution and unemployment. The book will be of invaluable interest to postgraduate students, scholars and researchers of development economics, international economics and labour economics and to those working on theoretical research on applications of general equilibrium trade models in developing countries.
In this volume more than 40 leading economists pay tribute to, and critically evaluate, Geoff Harcourt's work. Contributors include Tony Atkinson, Tony Lawson, Edward Nell and Ian Steedman.