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on Heterodox Microeconomics |
| By: | Smith, Jennifer C (University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | Theories of wage rigidity often rely on a positive relationship between pay changes and utility, arising from concern for fairness or gift exchange. Supportive evidence has emerged from laboratory experiments, but the link has not yet been established with ?eld data. This paper contributes a ?rst step, using representative British data. Workers care about the level and the growth of earnings. Below-median wage increases lead to an insult e¤ect except when similar workers have real wage reductions or ?rm production is falling. Nominal pay cuts appear insulting even when the ?rm is doing badly. |
| Keywords: | Pay cuts, Social comparisons, Gift exchange |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:warwcg:129&r=hme |
| By: | Cardoso Machado, Nuno Miguel |
| Abstract: | According to Sohn-Rethel there is a “secret identity” between commodity form and thought form. Commodity exchange is a real abstraction – embodied in money – and constitutes a social a priori which reflects itself in the conceptual abstraction, i.e., in the abstract thought typical of commodity-producing societies: philosophy (in ancient Greece) and modern science (in capitalism). However, the theory of Sohn-Rethel has a fundamental flaw: its exclusive identification of the real abstraction with the sphere of circulation results in the ontologization of labor which, on the contrary, is a capitalist specificity and the original source of the abstraction in this society. |
| Keywords: | Sohn-Rethel, real abstraction, commodity form, thought form |
| JEL: | A11 A12 A13 B24 B31 B41 P1 P10 P51 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:48961&r=hme |
| By: | Telegdy, Álmos (Institute of Economics, Budapest) |
| Abstract: | I identify wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector with the help of a large and sudden public sector wage increase, which raised real compensation by 40 percent in two years, changing the average public wage premium from minus 10 to plus 12 percent. Using a dataset covering about 7 percent of Hungarian workers and their employer, the spillover effect is identified with the variation of the share of public sector employment within groups defined by gender, experience and occupation. The analysis shows that 10 percent higher share of public sector workers within worker-type induces an additional wage growth of 15-20 percent around the wage increase. Controlling for firm (worker spell) fixed effects does not change the results qualitatively and results in a spillover effect of 11-14 (7.5-12) percent. The spillover effect is positively correlated with the public wage premium within worker type, with occupations which are abundant in the public sector, with the availability of public sector jobs and being hired after the wage increase. |
| Keywords: | wage spillover, public sector, Hungary |
| JEL: | J31 J45 |
| Date: | 2013–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7524&r=hme |
| By: | Bartelsman, Eric (VU University Amsterdam); Dobbelaere, Sabien (VU University Amsterdam); Peters, Bettina (ZEW Mannheim) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6,634 enterprises in Germany and 14,586 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period 2000-2008, considering 5 manufacturing and services industries that differ in the level of technological intensity. Industries in the Netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high-skilled employees and industries in Germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity. Except for low-technology manufacturing, average innovation performance is higher in all industries in Germany and the innovation performance distributions are more dispersed in the Netherlands. In both countries, we observe non-linearities in the productivity effects of investing in product innovation in the majority of industries. Frontier firms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas the most negative returns to process innovation are observed in the best-performing enterprises of most industries. In both countries, we find that the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity. Strikingly, a negative complementarity effect between human capital and proximity to the technological frontier is observed in knowledge-intensive services, which is most pronounced for the Netherlands. Suggestive evidence for the latter points to a winner-takes-all interpretation of this finding. |
| Keywords: | human capital, innovation, productivity, quantile regression |
| JEL: | C10 I20 O14 O30 |
| Date: | 2013–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7540&r=hme |
| By: | Jon D. Wisman; Aaron Pacitti |
| Abstract: | Since 2008, the U.S. economy has been mired in the second worst economic crisis in its history. Conceivably, massive government spending could bring the economy out of this slump as massive war spending ultimately ended the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, a far superior strategy exists: Guaranteeing employment accompanied by retraining to enable all unemployed workers to become absorbed into the regular work force. Beyond ending the crisis, the superiority of this strategy is that it would institutionalize a procedure for insuring that, in an increasingly technologically dynamic and open economy, workers would possess the necessary skills for available jobs. Guaranteeing employment would also eliminate the ecological costs associated with the need to seek growth to generate employment at practically any cost. Finally, it would establish a new moral social contract whereby everyone is granted the dignity that accompanies being a productive member of society. Welfare for those able to work could disappear, along with the degradation and humiliation that accompanies it. |
| Keywords: | employer of last result, inequality, unemployment, inadequate demand |
| JEL: | E24 J38 H10 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2013-12&r=hme |