inter industry wage differentials evidence from sweden and a comparison with the united states inter industry wage differentials evidence from sweden and a comparison with the united states

an empirical analysis of wage dispersion and efficiency wages the main purpose of this study is to examine inter industry wage differentials in sweden after controlling for individual and job characteristics the results indicate that these differentials are substantial the ranking of the differentials was stable over time while the dispersion of wage premiums fell by 50 per cent during the period 1968 81 a period of strong efforts to reduce wage dispersion in sweden the relation between industry wage premiums and a number of industry characteristics is also examined along with new evidence which is in line with the shirking model hypothesis on the relation between wages and worker control

from the classical economists to empiricists a review of the terms of trade controversy contrary to the classical position the works of prebisch and singer in the middle of the last century launched the controversial hypothesis of a long term decline in the terms of trade of primary products vis a vis manufactured goods and a corresponding decline in the terms of trade of developing countries vis a vis advanced ones the present study traces the origin and evolution of the hypothesis and reviews the related statistical debate it also reviews the theoretical support for the prebisch singer hypothesis it is an exercise in the history of economic thought to trace how the controversies surrounding the terms of trade have evolved over time specifically noting that with the development of the field of econometrics the central thesis of the argument got lost somewhere in the realm of hi tech statistical debates

trends cycles and asymmetries in the terms of trade of primary commodities from developed and less developed countries abstract the paper examines the prebisch hypothesis that primary product prices relative to the price of manufacturers fall during cyclical downturns by more than they rise during cyclical upturns and that this is an independent explanation of the secular tendency of the net barter terms of trade to move against primary commodities an important distinction is made between primary products exported by less developed countries and those exported by developed countries the greater cyclicality of primary product prices and the long run deterioration in their terms of trade since 1954 are confirmed but there is little support for the prebisch thesis that primary product prices relative to manufacturers are move sensitive on the downswing than the upswing

manufactured exports from developing countries and their terms of trade a reexamination of the sarkar singer results abstract sarkar and singer 1991 argue that the terms of trade for exports of manufactures from developing countries dcs like that for their primary commodity exports have manifested a long term trend favoring the importing developed countries we contend here that the authors have not paid adequate attention to appropriately adjusting the data and that they have misinterpreted the results when these limitations are taken into account a sound basis exists for the conclusion that through rapid expansion of manufactured exports dcs as a group have achieved significant gains in import purchasing power without generating adverse impact on the net barter terms of trade

wage dispersion and productive efficiency evidence for sweden the swedish record of enormous compression of relative wages under centralized solidarity bargaining followed by substantial decompression of wages after central bargaining broke down supplies observations well suited to empirical evaluation of arguments about the response of productive efficiency to shifts in wage distribution we obtain no results supporting fairness morale and cohesiveness theories implying that wage leveling within workplaces and industries may enhance productivity reduction of interindustry wage differentials evidently did however contribute positively to aggregate output and productivity growth most likely for the structural reasons first emphasized by swedish trade union economists almost a half century ago

collective bargaining and the interindustry wage structure international evidence this paper studies collective bargaining and industry wage levels using microdata and quantile regression techniques for the united states britain west germany austria sweden and norway for the 1980s the united states has higher industry wage differentials and union wage effects than other countries with particularly large impacts at the bottom of the distribution european wage structures are more compressed at the bottom for both nonunion and union workers relative to the united states with larger differences for nonunion workers these findings suggest more coordination contract extension and spillover to nonunion workers and more binding industry wage floors outside the united states

manufactured exports and terms of trade of developing countries evidence from sri lanka terms of trade implications of diversification into manufactured exports in a traditional primary exporting country are examined in the light of the sri lankan experience over the past two decades the empirical analysis focuses on trends in both commodity and income terms of trade employing a methodology which takes care of the spurious regression problem the results suggest that contrary to the new terms of trade pessimism export diversification has brought about significant terms of trade gains for the sri lankan economy overall the study casts doubt on the robustness of results coming from analyses of price trends in aggregate manufactured exports and calls for systematic time profile analyses of the countries which have achieved significant export diversification in order to inform the policy debate

efficiency wages and industry wage differentials a comparison across methods of pay efficiency wage considerations should be less important for piece rate pay than for time wages therefore if industry wage differentials reflect efficiency wage factors then these pay differences should be less sizable and have less explanatory power for piecework than for timework we test this proposition using wage data for male production workers employed in the swedish metalworking industries in 1985 the data are partitioned into two groups of workers in our preferred sub sample of workers who received pay under both piece rates and time wages our results are uniformly consistent with efficiency wage implications for industry wage differentials for the subsample of workers who received pay under either piece rates or time wages industry wage differentials are of equal importance under either pay scheme these latter results however may also be influenced by unaccounted for sorting of workers and employers across methods of pay overall our examination of industry wage differentials across m

low wage manufacturing and global commodity chains a model in the unequal exchange tradition the institutional setting of subcontracted manufacturing has a profound impact on how the benefits of trade are distributed this paper develops a model that combines insights from unequal exchange theorists and global commodity chain analysis to clarify the distributive dynamics of production networks in which subcontracting and branding are defining features in this framework the ability of productivity growth to increase income from exports is constrained and depends on how the benefits of productivity improvements are captured as lower consumer prices or higher rents for brand name multinationals increasing consumption in affluent consumer markets raises export earnings however developing countries acting alone are constrained in their ability to affect the demand side of global commodity chains instead supply side policies to support industrial upgrading represent a more viable option for raising incomes copyright 2006 oxford university press

inter industry wage differentials in eu countries what do cross country time varying data add to the picture this paper documents the existence and main patterns of inter industry wage differentials across a large number of industries for 8 eu countries belgium germany greece hungary ireland italy netherlands and spain at two points in time in general 1995 and 2002 and explores possible explanations for these patterns the analysis uses the european structure of earnings survey ses an internationally harmonised matched employer employee dataset to estimate inter industry wage differentials conditional on a rich set of employee employer and job characteristics after investigating the possibility that unobservable employee characteristics lie behind the conditional wage differentials a hypothesis which cannot be accepted the paper investigates the role of institutional industry structure and industry performance characteristics in explaining inter industry wage differentials the results suggest that inter industry wage differentials are consistent with rent sharing mechanisms and that rent sharing is more likely in industries with firm level collective agreements and with higher collective agreement coverage jel classification j31 j41 j51

panel estimates of the canadian rural urban women s wage gap this article analyzes the female rural urban wage gap in canada using longitudinal data from the survey of labour and income dynamics 1993 96 we estimate a two step wage equation accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and sample selection the results indicate that a statistically and economically significant rural urban wage gap remains after controlling for observed and unobserved characteristics further the results suggest this rural urban wage difference is not simply induced by immobility between rural and urban markets rather consistent with the effect of thinner rural labor markets the evidence indicates that rural urban differences in the impact of a number of explanatory variables are significant

rent sharing and collective bargaining coverage evidence from linked employer employee data using a linked employer employee data set this paper analyses the relationship between firm profitability and wages particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the sensitivity of wages to firm specific rents varies with collective bargaining coverage to address this issue we distinguish sector specific wage agreements firm specific wage agreements and wage determination without any bargaining coverage our findings indicate that individual wages are positively related to firm specific rents in the non union sector and under firm specific contracts industry wide wage contracts however seem to suppress firm level rent sharing while pooled ols estimates yield a positive correlation between wages and quasi rents under centralised contracts estimates accounting for unobserved individual and establishment heterogeneity point to a coefficient of zero differenced gmm estimates accounting for the endogeneity of our profitability measure even point to a negative relationship under centralised contracts

emission policies and their analysis for the design of hybrid and dedicated closed loop supply chains abstract government legislation and consumer awareness on carbon emissions have required industries to seek alternative ways to reorganize their supply chains therefore industries have to consider not only the activities in the forward supply chain but also in the reverse supply chain an integrated supply chain that combines the activities of both the forward and reverse supply chains is referred to as the closed loop supply chain clsc there are two main types of clsc structures hybrid and dedicated in this research we analyze the effect of carbon emissions consideration on the design of both hybrid and dedicated clscs in particular we develop a set of integrated mixed integer linear programming milp models to quantify and compare both of the environmental and economic impacts of carbon emissions policies carbon cap carbon tax and carbon cap and trade and market factors scale effect product return rate and the customer demand on the design of clscs with respect to both clsc structures our analysis shows that when market conditions are considered total cost and total emissions are more sensitive to customer demand than to the scale effect and the product return rate when an industry faces fluctuation on the quantity of the returned products adopting a dedicated clsc would lead to a lower total cost under cap and trade policy dedicated clsc can produce less total emissions we also observe that dedicated clsc is more cost efficient under carbon cap policy and hybrid clsc is more emissions efficient when the carbon tax is introduced

manufactured exports of developing countries and their terms of trade since 1965 abstract during the last 40 years since the prebisch singer terms of trade deterioration hypothesis was first proposed the commodity composition of exports of developing countries has undergone a major change in the direction of dominance of manufactures in their nonfuel exports with strong growth in the volume of their manufactured exports but this did not allow developing countries to escape unequal exchange relations with the industrial countries their barter terms of trade in manufactures showed signs of weakness rather than improvement and clearly failed to reflect the respective productivity trends leading to deterioration in factoral terms of trade

interindustry wage differentials and efficiency wages some canadian evidence using the 1986 labour market activity survey as their major source of data the authors estimate interindustry wage differentials in canada at the one and two digit levels of industry aggregation for various types of workers the major findings are that substantial interindustry wage differentials exist and are relatively stable over time that the pattern of interindustry wage differentials is very similar for different kinds of workers and that these differentials cannot be explained easily by compensating factors the differentials seem to be consistent with the rent sharing explanations of the labor market such as those based on the notion of efficiency wages

the rise in unemployment a multi country study one of the most remarkable features of recent economic history has been the remorseless rise in unemployment throughout the industrialized countries however while the trend to higher unemployment is universal the experience of individual countries also differs widely the increase is especially marked within the european community where unemployment rates rival those reached in the interwar years by contrast in the scandinavian countries and japan unemployment is lower and has risen very much less experience in the united states lies somewhere between these extremes and in the last few years unemployment there has fallen sharply

energy tax changes and competitiveness the role of adaptive capacity this paper estimates the effect of energy tax and price changes on total factor productivity tfp and net trade at the industry level using a panel of industries from european countries covering the period 1990 2003 we investigate the hypothesis that industries with high adaptive capacity measured by their relative level of labor compensation are able to mitigate the adverse effects of energy tax rises better than others we identify the pro adaptation effect by interacting wage levels a proxy for human capital with energy taxes we find that the negative marginal effect of higher energy taxes on tfp and net trade is significantly reduced for industries with stronger human capital and even turns to an overall positive effect in at least two cases up to three low wage sectors display an overall negative effect this suggests that human capital is key to adaptation to higher energy costs and climate policy in some cases making it a win win

import competition from developed and developing countries separate demand equations for imports from less developed countries ldcs and imports from developed countries dcs were estimated for each of eleven representative product groups imports were found to compete quite readily with domestically produced goods with plausible own price and cross price elasticities whereas the quantity of each type of import was found to be quite responsive to changes in the price of us home goods each appears to be less sensitive to the price of the alternative import an explanation that is consistent with this observation and that finds support from detailed industry information is that dcs and ldcs supply goods that are at different stages in the product or technology cycle whereas us producers compete in all submarkets this suggests that trade creation rather than trade diversion provides the predominant inroad for ldcs into the us market 25 references 3 tables

interindustry wage differentials in dummy variable models abstract normalized interindustry wage differentials a la krueger and summers krueger a b summers l h 1988 efficiency wages and the inter industry wage structure econometrica 56 259 293 derive from a general specification of wage equations with dummy variables which cannot be directly estimated this note illustrates how they can be obtained from the coefficients of a more specific parameterization and how their estimated variances can be transformed accordingly

revisiting the revisited terms of trade will china make a difference in challenging the conventional wisdom at the time singer and prebisch posited a number of explanations for declining terms of trade of developing economies including both country and product specific factors over the past decade we have begun to witness a simultaneous process of price differentiation within commodities with the prices of some commodities increasing and within manufacturing with the price of many manufactures falling these price changes may reverse the decline in the terms of trade of commodity producers the entry of china into the global market has played an important role in this augmenting the demand for many hard commodities its role as an exporter of manufactures coupled with concentration in global buying may undermine the prices of many manufactures

sectoral labour supply choice restrictions and functional form this is the authors submitted article version which is the pre peer reviewed version of the article the article changed title in the peer reviewing process from analyzing labor supply behavior with latent job opportunity sets and institutional choice constraints later published as discussion paper no 399 http brage bibsys no ssb handle urn nbn no bibsys brage 21006

a disaggregated analysis of eu imports the implications for the study of patterns of trade and technology this paper examines trends in the unit prices of manufactured imports into the european union eu in the period 1988 2002 this is undertaken at a high level of disaggregation and it is this decomposition which we believe has important implications both for a range of bodies of economic analysis and for policy the analyses undertaken in this paper confirm that disaggregation matters in helping to identify unit price trends we have also shown that unit price trends vary with the type of economy exporting into europe and the type of product being exported and that these results are robust at high levels of disaggregation