The Quality Distribution of Jobs and the Structure of Wages in Search Equilibrium

When match formation is costly and wage determination is decentralized, privately optimal investments in job and worker quality diverge from socially efficient outcomes. To explore this issue, I consider search equilibrium environments with endogenous quality distributions for jobs and workers. I show that a search equilibrium with decentralized wage setting exhibits excessive relative supplies of inferior jobs and inferior workers. Moreover, there are fundamental tensions between the standard wage-setting condition for an efficient total supply of jobs (and workers) in two-sided search models and the conditions required for efficient mixes of jobs and workers. I also derive the efficient wage structure, contrast its properties to the decentralized wage structure and evaluate the welfare and productivity gains of moving to an efficient wage structure. Numerical exercises show that centralized bargaining between a labor union and an employer confederation over the structure of wages can improve productivity and welfare by compressing job-related wage differentials.

Tax Effects on Work Activity, Industry Mix and Shadow Economy Size: Evidence from Rich-Country Comparisons

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow economy, alter the industry mix of market activity, and twist labor demand in a way that amplifies negative effects on market work and concentrates effects on the less skilled. We also describe conditions whereby cross-country OLS regressions yield unbiased estimates of the total effect of taxes, inclusive of indirect effects that work through government spending responses to tax revenues. Regressions on rich-country samples in the mid 1990s indicate that a unit standard deviation tax rate difference of 12.8 percentage points leads to 122 fewer market work hours per adult per year, a drop of 4.9 percentage points in the employment-population ratio, and a rise in the shadow economy equal to 3.8 percent of GDP. It also leads to 10 to 30 percent lower employment and value added shares in (a) retail trade and repairs, (b) eating, drinking and lodging, and (c) a broader industry group that includes wholesale and motor trade.

Occupation-Level Income Shocks and Asset Returns: Their Covariance and Implications for Portfolio Choice

This paper develops and applies a simple graphical approach to portfolio selection that accounts for covariance between asset returns and an investor's labor income. Our graphical approach easily handles income shocks that are partly hedgable, multiple risky assets, many periods and life cycle considerations. We apply the approach to occupation-level components of individual income innovations estimated from repeated cross sections of the Current Population Survey. We characterize several properties of these innovations, including their covariance with aggregate equity returns, long-term bond returns and returns on several other assets. Aggregate equity returns are uncorrelated with the occupation-level income innovations, but a portfolio formed on firm size is significantly correlated with income innovations for several occupations, and so are selected industry-level equity portfolios. An application of the theory to the empirical results shows (a) large predicted levels of risky asset holdings compared to observed levels, (b) considerable variation in optimal portfolio allocations over the life cycle, and (c) large departures from the two-fund separation principle.

Tax Effects on Work Activity, Industry Mix and Shadow Economy Size: Evidence from Rich-Country Comparisons

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow economy, alter the industry mix of market activity, and twist labor demand in a way that amplifies negative effects on market work and concentrates effects on the less skilled. We also describe conditions whereby cross-country OLS regressions yield unbiased estimates of the total effect of taxes, inclusive of indirect effects that work through government spending responses to tax revenues. Regressions on rich-country samples in the mid 1990s indicate that a unit standard deviation tax rate difference of 12.8 percentage points leads to 122 fewer market work hours per adult per year, a drop of 4.9 percentage points in the employment-population ratio, and a rise in the shadow economy equal to 3.8 percent of GDP. It also leads to 10 to 30 percent lower employment and value added shares in (a) retail trade and repairs, (b) eating, drinking and lodging, and (c) a broader industry group that includes wholesale and motor trade.Taxes and work activity; time allocation; non-market production; industry mix; shadow economy

Relative Wage Movements and the Distribution of Consumption

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption. The analysis integrates the labor economics literature on time variation in the wage structure with the consumption insurance literature. In contrast to previous tests of consumption insurance, we examine the impact of systematic, publicly observable shifts in the hourly wage structure. To circumvent the extreme scarcity of longitudinal data with high quality information on both consumption and labor market outcomes, we draw upon the best available cross-sectional data sources to construct synthetic panel data on consumption, labor supply and wages. We find that low-frequency movements in the cohort-education structure of pre-tax hourly wages drove large changes in the distribution of household consumption. The results constitute a spectacular failure of the consumption insurance hypothesis, and one that is not explained by existing theories of informationally constrained optimal consumption allocations. We also develop a procedure for assessing the welfare consequences of deviations from full consumption insurance and, in particular, from the failure to insulate the consumption distribution from relative wage shifts across cohort-education groups. For a coefficient of relative risk aversion equal to two, fully insulating households from group-specific endowment variation would raise welfare by an amount equivalent to a uniform 2.7% consumption increase.

Economic Performance and Work Activity in Sweden affter the Crisis of the early 1990s

Abstract: Following a severe contraction in the early 1990s, the Swedish economy accumulated a strong record of output growth coupled with a disappointing performance in the labor market. As of 2005, hours worked per person 20–64 years of age are 10.5 percent below the 1990 peak and a mere one percent above the 1993 trough. Employment rates tell a similar story. Our explanation for Sweden’s weak performance with respect to market work activity highlights the role of high tax rates on labor income and consumption expenditures, wage-setting arrangements that compress relative wages, business tax policies that disfavor labor-intensive industries and technologies, and a variety of policies and institutional arrangements that disadvantage younger and smaller businesses. This last category includes tax policies that penalize wealth accumulation in the form of owner-operated businesses, a pension system that steers equity capital and loanable funds to large incumbent corporations, and legally mandated job-security provisions that weigh more heavily on smaller and younger businesses. We describe these features of the Swedish institutional setup and provide evidence of their consequences based largely on international comparisons.Business taxation; Industry structure; Swedish economic performance; Tax effects; Time allocation; Wage-setting institutions; Work activity

Sectoral Job Creation and Destruction Responses to Oil Price Changes

We study the effects of oil price changes and other shocks on the creation and destruction of U.S. manufacturing jobs from 1972 to 1988. We find that oil shocks account for about 20-25 percent of the cyclical variability in employment growth under our identifying assumptions, twice as much as monetary shocks. Employment growth shows a sharply asymmetric response to oil price ups and downs, in contrast to the prediction of standard equilibrium business cycle models. The two-year employment response to an oil price increase rises (in magnitude) with capital intensity, energy intensity, and product durability. Job destruction shows much greater short-run sensitivity to oil and monetary shocks than job creation in every sector with the clear exception of young, small plants. Oil shocks also generate important reallocative effects. For example, we estimate that job reallocation rose by 11 percent of employment over 3-4 years in response to the 1973 oil shock. More than 80 percent of this response reflects greater job reallocation activity within manufacturing.