Wage hikes affect production costs and hence are usually analysed as supply shocks. There is, however, a long-standing debate about demand effects of wage variations. In this paper, we bring together these two arguments in a Kaldorian model with group specific saving rates and a production technology that allows for redistribution between workers and entrepreneurs following a wage hike. We ther...

Equilibrium Unemployment with Outsourcing and Wage Solidarity Under Labour Market Imperfections We evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market, where wages are determined by a monopoly labour union. We find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion between the high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Wh...

This paper sets up a model to account for differences in total factor productivity due to differences in enforcement of contracts. Vertical specialization generates the need for intra-period credit, because final goods producers cannot pay their intermediate goods suppliers before they produce their final good. The paper shows that if there are enforcement problems, the capital distribution is ...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. In this paper, the IMF’s new Global Economy Model (GEM) is us...

Using a normalized CES function with factor-augmenting technical progress, we estimate a supply-side system of the US economy from 1953 to 1998. Avoiding potential biases that have occurred in earlier estimations and putting a high emphasis on the consistency of the data set, required by the estimated system, we obtain robust results not only for the aggregate elasticity of substitution but als...

The point of this paper is that if output is durable then optimal behavior of a supplier is characterized by production smoothing. Durability of goods (such as capital) has opposite effects on the supply of the goods. Higher durability on the one hand raises the variability of investment demand for the goods by lowering the user’s cost, which tends to raise the variability of supply; on the oth...

I study detailed data from eleven automobile assembly plants. These data display considerable cross-plant heterogeneity in production scheduling. To explain the observed heterogeneity, I solve a dynamic programming model. When desired production is below the plant's minimum e$cient scale, non-convexities induce production bunching; the plant uses less than full capital utilization on average an...

Does International Outsourcing Really Lower Workers’ Income? We analyze the impact of international outsourcing on income, if the domestic labor market is imperfect. We distinguish in our analysis between the case where the parties negotiate over the wage only and where they negotiate over both wage and profit share. We find that in the first case outsourcing will reduce (increase) workers’ inc...

This paper reviews and documents methodology for fitting hidden Markov switching models to New Zealand GDP data. A primary objective is to better understand the utility of these methods for modelling growth and volatility regimes present in the New Zealand data and their interaction. Properties of the models are developed together with a description of the estimation methods, including use of t...