Growth Models with Exogenous Saving Rates, Unemployment and Wage Inertia

[cat] El propòsit d'aquest article és introduir una mercat de treball no competitiu i atur en el model de creixement amb taxes d'estalvi exògenes que es pot trobar en els llibres de text de creixement (Sala‐i‐Martín, 2000; Barro and Sala‐i‐Martín, 2003; Romer, 2006). Primer, derivem un marc general amb una funció de producció neoclàssica per analitzar la relació entre creixement i ocupació. Utilitzem aquest marc per estudiar les dinàmiques conjuntes del creixement i l'ocupació sota diferents regles de fixació salarial.

Growth Models with Exogenous Saving Rates, Unemployment and Wage Inertia

[cat] El propòsit d'aquest article és introduir una mercat de treball no competitiu i atur en el model de creixement amb taxes d'estalvi exògenes que es pot trobar en els llibres de text de creixement (Sala‐i‐Martín, 2000; Barro and Sala‐i‐Martín, 2003; Romer, 2006). Primer, derivem un marc general amb una funció de producció neoclàssica per analitzar la relació entre creixement i ocupació. Utilitzem aquest marc per estudiar les dinàmiques conjuntes del creixement i l'ocupació sota diferents regles de fixació salarial.

The inequality trap. A comparative analysis of social spending between 1880 and 1933

[spa] Utilizando dos indicadores alternativos de redistribución –las transferencias sociales y el gasto social- durante el periodo de tiempo comprendido entre 1880 y 1933, y utilizando dos indicadores alternativos de desigualdad –el porcentaje de explotaciones agrarias no familiares y los top income shares-, este papel muestra que, al contrario de lo que muchos estudios sobre los origines del Estado del Bienestar suelen sugerir, la desigualdad no favoreció el desarrollo de la política social ni siquiera en sus etapas iniciales. Ello significa que la política social se desarrolló más rápidamente en los países que previamente ya eran más igualitarios, lo que sugiere que los países con más desigualdad se encontraban en una especie de trampa de la desigualdad, donde la desigualdad en si misma fue uno de los obstáculos a la redistribución.

The inequality trap. A comparative analysis of social spending between 1880 and 1933

[spa] Utilizando dos indicadores alternativos de redistribución –las transferencias sociales y el gasto social- durante el periodo de tiempo comprendido entre 1880 y 1933, y utilizando dos indicadores alternativos de desigualdad –el porcentaje de explotaciones agrarias no familiares y los top income shares-, este papel muestra que, al contrario de lo que muchos estudios sobre los origines del Estado del Bienestar suelen sugerir, la desigualdad no favoreció el desarrollo de la política social ni siquiera en sus etapas iniciales. Ello significa que la política social se desarrolló más rápidamente en los países que previamente ya eran más igualitarios, lo que sugiere que los países con más desigualdad se encontraban en una especie de trampa de la desigualdad, donde la desigualdad en si misma fue uno de los obstáculos a la redistribución.

Wage differentials between native and immigrant women in Spain: accounting for differences in support

Purpose: The objective of the study is to quantify the wage gap between native and immigrant women in Spain, taking into account differences in their characteristics and the need to control for common support. If immigrant women are segregated in occupations with few native women, it is important to take this into account to analyse wage differentials between both collectives. Methodology: We use microdata from the Continuous Sample of Working Histories (Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales) on wages and other personal characteristics such as gender, country of origin, and age to apply the matching procedure and the decomposition of the wage gap along the lines of Ñopo (2008) for the analysis of wage differentials between native and immigrant women. The advantage of this procedure is that we can simultaneously estimate the common support and the mean counterfactual wage for the women on the common support (i.e., comparing native and immigrant women with similar observable characteristics). In addition, we can describe differences not only at the mean but also along the entire wage distribution. Findings: The results obtained indicate that, on average, immigrant women earn less than native women in the Spanish labour market. This wage gap is bigger when we consider immigrant women from developing countries, but our main finding is that an important part of this wage gap is related to differences in common support (i.e., immigrant women are segregated in certain jobs with low wages different from those occupied by native women). If the need to control for common support is neglected, estimates of the wage gap will be biased. Originality: Studying the case of Spain is particularly interesting because it is a country with abundant and recent immigration. Immigrant women account for more than half of the total immigrants in Spain, and unlike other host countries, they come from a highly varied range of countries, with origins as diverse as Latin America, the Maghreb and Eastern Europe. To our knowledge, no other study has explicitly focused on the analysis of the wage differential of immigrant women in the Spanish labour market by taking into account the need to control for common support. Moreover, published papers illustrating the potentiality of Ñopo"s (2008) methodology are also very scarce.

Distribución espacial y desigualdad de la renta salarial en el área metropolitana de Barcelona

Las diferencias geográficas en los niveles de ingresos son importantes para elaborar e implementar políticas en las ciudades. Con el objetivo de estimar el nivel de ingresos y analizar su distribución espacial se presenta un método alternativo e innovador que enlaza estimaciones de salarios provenientes de la Encuesta de Estructura Salarial (EES) con datos del padrón de habitantes (1996) y del Censo (2001) desagregados por secciones censales. Los resultados tienen un nivel de detalle espacial significativamente mejor que los disponibles. Se obtiene el valor de la Renta Salarial Media para cada una de las 2500 secciones censales de los 36 municipios pertenecientes a la AMB y para dos periodos. La Renta Salarial presenta una elevada autocorrelación espacial positiva; zonas con niveles similares se concentran espacialmente. La desigualdad en el AMB ha aumentado en el periodo analizado. Este aumento se debe principalmente al componente intra-municipal, es decir, las diferencias en el interior de cada municipio.

Growth, unemployment and wage inertia

We introduce wage setting via efficiency wages in the neoclassical one-sector growth model to study the growth effects of wage inertia. We compare the dynamic equilibrium of an economy with wage inertia with the equilibrium of an economy without it. We show that wage inertia affects the long run employment rate and that the transitional dynamics of the main economic variables will be different because wages are a state variable when wage inertia is introduced. In particular, we show that the model with wage inertia can explain some growth patterns that cannot be explained when wages are flexible. We also study the growth effects of permanent technological and fiscal policy shocks in these two economies.

The Bonenblust-Hille inequality for homogeneous polynomials is hypercontractive

The Bohnenblust-Hille inequality says that the $\ell^{\frac{2m}{m+1}}$ -norm of the coefficients of an $m$-homogeneous polynomial $P$ on $\Bbb{C}^n$ is bounded by $\| P \|_\infty$ times a constant independent of $n$, where $\|\cdot \|_\infty$ denotes the supremum norm on the polydisc $\mathbb{D}^n$. The main result of this paper is that this inequality is hypercontractive, i.e., the constant can be taken to be $C^m$ for some $C>1$. Combining this improved version of the Bohnenblust-Hille inequality with other results, we obtain the following: The Bohr radius for the polydisc $\mathbb{D}^n$ behaves asymptotically as $\sqrt{(\log n)/n}$ modulo a factor bounded away from 0 and infinity, and the Sidon constant for the set of frequencies $\bigl\{ \log n: n \text{a positive integer} \le N\bigr\}$ is $\sqrt{N}\exp\{(-1/\sqrt{2}+o(1))\sqrt{\log N\log\log N}\}$.

Décision de baisser les salaires ou non: Le rôle de l'empathie face à une recommandation d'un supérieur hiérarchique (The role of Empathy in wage cut decisions).

En entreprise, les supérieurs hiérarchiques ont une influence non négligeable sur la prise de décision de leurs subordonnés. Ces derniers tendent à se conformer à l'avis de leur supérieur pour prendre leurs décisions. Toutefois, cette conformité des subordonnés à l'avis de leur supérieur peut devenir un problème lorsque l'avis reçu est questionnable d'un point de vue éthique. Les études antérieures menées à ce sujet ont démontré que le contenu n'a pas d'impact, c'est-à-dire que du moment qu'un avis est donné par un supérieur hiérarchique, les subordonnés tendent à se conformer à cet avis quelque soit son contenu. Dans la présente expérience, nous nous sommes intéressés à ce phénomène de conformité dans une prise de décision ayant des conséquences sur des personnes. En particulier, nous avons étudié le rôle de l'empathie, définit comme l'habilité de ressentir les émotions des autres ou de se mettre à leur place. Notre première hypothèse concerne l'effet principal de l'avis du supérieur : les participants tiennent compte de l'avis de leur supérieur dans leur prise de décision. Notre seconde hypothèse concerne le rôle modérateur de l'empathie: les participants haut en empathie sont moins sensibles à l'avis de leur supérieur que les participants bas en empathie étant donné qu'ils anticipent les conséquences de leur décision vis-à-vis des personnes concernées. Cent-douze étudiants ont participé à un exercice de mise en situation. Dans la peau d'un chef de Département d'une entreprise, ils devaient entre autres réfléchir au problème du niveau des salaires du personnel peu qualifié et en particulier au fait que cette catégorie de salariés était surpayée par rapport à ce qui se pratiquait sur le marché du travail. Cette expérience était composée de deux conditions, où l'avis du supérieur était manipulé. Dans la condition 1, l'avis du supérieur était de baisser les salaires, alors que dans la condition 2 l'avis était de garder les salaires constants. Les résultats ont confirmé nos hypothèses. Les participants recevant l'avis de leur supérieur de baisser les salaires ont effectivement pris la décision de baisser les salaires. Il a aussi été démontré que le niveau d'empathie modère cette relation. Les participants haut en empathie ont eu tendance à ne pas suivre l'avis donné contrairement aux participants bas en empathie. Cela démontre ainsi l'influence que peut avoir le contexte sur les individus et leur prise de décision mais aussi que les caractéristiques personnelles ont une influence non négligeable.

Public-private sector wage differentials by type of contract: evidence from Spain

The article examines public-private sector wage differentials in Spain using microdata from the Structure of Earnings Survey (Encuesta de Estructura Salarial). When applying various decomposition techniques, we find that it is important to distinguish by gender and type of contract. Our results also highlight the presence of a positive wage premium for public sector workers that can be partially explained by their better endowment of characteristics, in particular by the characteristics of the establishment where they work. The wage premium is greater for female and fixed-term employees and falls across the wage distribution, being negative for more highly skilled workers.

Overeducation, skills and wage penalty: Evidence for Spain using PIAAC data

The literature on educational mismatches finds that overeducated workers suffer a wage penalty compared with properly educated workers with the same level of education. Recent literature also suggests that individuals’ skill heterogeneity could explain wage differences between overeducated and properly matched workers. The hypothesis is that overeducated workers earn less due to their lower competences and skills in relative terms. However, that hypothesis has been rarely tested due to data limitations on individuals’ skills. The aim of this paper is to test the individuals’ skill heterogeneity theory in Spain using microdata from PIAAC, because it is one of the developed countries supporting the highest overeducation rates and where its adult population holds the lowest level of skills among a set of developed countries. Our hypothesis is that the wage penalty of overeducation in Spain is explained by the lower skill level of overeducated workers. The obtained evidence confirms this hypothesis but only to a certain extent as skills only explain partially the wage penalty of overeducation.

Is the wage curve formal or informal? Evidence for Colombia

Using microdata from the 2002-2006 Colombian Continuous Household Survey, we find an elasticity of individual wages to local unemployment rates of -0.07. However, the elasticity for informal workers is significantly higher, a result which is consistent with efficiency wage theoretical models and relevant for regional labour markets analysis in developing countries.

Labor Market Signaling and Self-Confidence: Wage Compression and the Gender Pay Gap

I extend Spence's signaling model by assuming that some workers are overconfident-they underestimate their marginal cost of acquiring education-and some are underconfident. Firms cannot observe workers' productive abilities and beliefs but know the fractions of high-ability, overconfident, and underconfident workers. I find that biased beliefs lower the wage spread and compress the wages of unbiased workers. I show that gender differences in self-confidence can contribute to the gender pay gap. If education raises productivity, men are overconfident, and women underconfident, then women will, on average, earn less than men. Finally, I show that biased beliefs can improve welfare.

Sticky income inequality in the Spanish transition (1973-1990)

This paper investigates the evolution of income inequality in Spain during its transition to democracy, suggesting a method for the correction of under-reporting of earnings and profits in the Household Budget Surveys’ data. The contribution is twofold: the methodological proposal, based on income expenditure discrepancy and scaling-up to National Accounts, improves on previous work, and can be convenient for similar historical sources in other countries. Secondly, its application results in an alternative history of the distribution of income in this case, changing the levels and also the observed trend. Previous literature asserted a substantial equalization, related to the democratization process, while after the adjustment inequality in disposable income is shown to have been quite persistent.

Regional heterogeneity in wage distributions. Evidence from Spain.

Regional differences in real wages have been shown to be both large and persistent in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in the economies of other countries. Empirical evidence suggests that wage differentials adjusted for the cost of living cannot only be explained by the unequal spatial distribution of characteristics determining earnings. Rather, average wage gap decomposition reveals the important contribution made by regional heterogeneity in the price assigned to these characteristics. This paper proposes a method for assessing regional disparities in the entire wage distribution and for decomposing the effect of differences across regions in the endowments and prices of the characteristics. The hypothesis forwarded is that the results from previous studies obtained by comparing average regional wages may be partial and nonrobust. Empirical evidence from a matched employer-employee dataset for Spain confirms marked differences in wage distributions between regions, which do not result from worker and firm characteristics but from the increasing role of regional differences in the return to human capital.