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The paper studies the fall in manufacturing real wages that took place in Mexico after the China shock of 2001. It shows, first, that the wage reductions reflected a significant transmission of the China shock, plus a weak link between labor-productivity and real-wage growth; and second, that the weight of these two factors was conditioned by the skill level of workers and the trade and capital intensity of industries in Mexico. Thus, while the China shock hit harder medium and high-skilled workers in capital-intensive industries, the weak link between productivity and wage growth affected more the low-skilled in trade-intensive industries. Results come from the estimation of wage equations by skill level for an annual panel of 20 manufacturing industries at NAICS three-digit level, for different periods but focusing on 1996–2017 (the NAFTA period) and 2003–2017 (the post-China shock period).

Environmental pollution destroys the sustainable development of industries worldwide, and its effect on structural changes is the focus of discussion. This paper constructs a model of the structural change of environmental pollution impacts and then, empirically estimates using panel data of Chinese cities from 2003 to 2020. The paper found that the more manufacturing pollutants are discharged, the more serious the manufacturing cost disease(MCD). Compared with low-productivity manufacturing, environmental pollution in high-productivity industries increases sector costs more. Then, this paper verifies that MCD and real wages are two key channels through which pollution emissions affect the share of the manufacturing sector.

I consider an economy growing along the balanced growth path that is hit by an adverse shock to its capital accumulation process. The model integrates efficiency wages due to imperfect monitoring of the quality of labor in a search and matching framework with methods of dynamic general equilibrium analysis. I show that, depending on the firms' abilities to assess workers' performance, the discipline device role of unemployment may account for sharp declines in employment and jobless recoveries driven by exceptional increases in the work effort of employees. The model also explains why rigid real wages may prevail in equilibrium: the large movements in unemployment are indeed associated with real wage rigidity, which is generated endogenously by efficiency wages.

The focus of this article is the recurring tension between mainstream macroeconomics and observed facts in connection with the difficult task of providing explanations of the business cycle consistent both with the traditional theory of income distribution and with the empirical evidence concerning the co-movements of real wages and employment over the cycle. The attempts to reconcile facts and theory have led to the continuous introduction of specific and arguably ad hoc hypotheses, in contrast with the search for greater theoretical rigour claimed by the various streams of macroeconomic modelling subsequent to the neo-classical synthesis. In addition, the specific assumptions introduced in the models, or their implications, are in turn often contradicted or, at best, not confirmed by subsequent empirical research. It is suggested in the conclusions that the difficulty of keeping together in a simple and consistent framework theory and facts reflects the flawed theoretical foundations of mainstream theory.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of real exchange rate (RER) on employment and real wage using quarterly disaggregated data (ISIC Rev 4 classification) composed of 19 industries in Turkey from 2010 to 2017. This study employed the Fixed Effect Model, where industry-specific effects are used to control heterogeneity within the industry. The results reflect that currency appreciation negatively affects employment, though insignificant, whereas it has a remarkably positive impact on real wage. Although the terms of trade have no visible impact on employment and real wages, the study uniquely finds that the effects of the larger industries on employment are distinctly adverse. Nevertheless, the interaction between currency appreciation and the top 25 per cent larger industries indicates a moderate increase in employment. The findings reflect that the appreciation of the domestic currency causes employment to decrease at the industry level. The originality of this paper includes the effects of the terms of trade and interaction with currency appreciation in larger industries using the Fixed Effect Model approach.

We investigate the cyclicality of real wages and income using individual data for the UK over the 1991-2008 period. By paying special attention to the heterogeneity among different earnings and income groups, we document that individuals at the top of the distribution are more cyclical than lower ones. Moreover, the estimated cyclicality is considerably higher in recessions than in expansions for top-incomes. We also show that real wages and income are roughly acyclical for low wage and income workers. Instead, their adjustment to the cycle takes place through transitions to and from unemployment.

Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a “Natural Resource Curse”, perhaps as the crowd-out of manufacturing productivity spillovers reduces long-term growth? We combine new data on oil and gas endowments with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas booms affect local economies in the U.S. Local wages rise during oil and gas booms, but manufacturing is not crowded out—in fact, the sector grows overall, driven by upstream and locally-traded subsectors. Tradable manufacturing subsectors do contract during resource booms, but their productivity is unaffected, so there is no evidence of foregone local learning-by-doing effects. Over the full 1969–2014 sample, a county with one standard deviation additional oil and gas endowment averaged about 1% higher real wages. Overall, the results provide evidence against a Natural Resource Curse within the U.S.

The results of the review do not disappoint. The authors identified more than 120 cash transfer programs that were implemented between 2000 and mid-2009 in Sub-Saharan Africa. These programs have varying objectives, targeting, scale, conditions, technologies, and more. A sizable number of these programs conducted robust impact evaluations that provide important information, presented here, on the merits of cash transfer programs and their specific design features in the African context. The authors present summary information on programs, often in useful graphs, and provide detailed reference material in the appendixes. They highlight how many of the cash transfer programs in Africa that had not yet begun implementation at the time of writing will continue to provide important evaluation results that will guide the design of cash transfer programs in the region. In addition to presenting data and analysis on the mechanics of the programs, the authors discuss issues related to political economy. They highlight the importance of addressing key tradeoffs in cash transfers, political will, and buy-in, and they emphasize the need to build evidence-based debates on cash transfer programs. Useful anecdotes and discussion illustrate how some programs have dealt with these issues with varying degrees of success. This text will serve as a useful reference for years to come for those interested in large- and small-scale issues of cash transfer implementation, both in Africa and beyond. However, the book is not an end in itself. It also raises important questions that must be addressed and knowledge gaps that must be filled. Therefore, it is useful both in the information it provides and in the issues and questions it raises.

The present article aims to analyse wage-labour productivity causalities in Croatia and Slovenia using cointegration methods based on monthly time series data of variables for labour productivity and real gross wages in tourism industry during the period December 1999-January 2020. The data vector is integrated by chain indices with the constant base January 2000 = 100. A stochastic trend and shocks are covered in the analysis. Shocks are linked to the European Union accession, and economic crisis following with overwhelmed tourist arrivals. The contribution of the research is two-fold. First, the equations for at most normal distributed variables of labour productivity and real wages in tourism are exposed. Three spatial cointegration relations confirm labour productivity integrity of the regional tourism market. Second, pair-wise causalities indicate one cointegrated vector for labour productivity, which drives real gross wages in tourism sub-industries. These results suggest that for a higher non-seasonal assessment of real gross wage, the labour productivity should rise, i.e. less workers, more robotization or more tourist arrivals with better quality solutions. These findings are at most important to be implemented after the COVID-19 infection crisis with expected restructurings and digital transformation in the tourism industry.

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with 50 or more employees. Using population data on firms between 1995 and 2007, we structurally estimate the key parameters of our model to construct counterfactual size, productivity, and welfare distributions. We find that the cost of these regulations is equivalent to that of a 2.3 percent variable tax on labor. In our baseline case with French levels of partial real wage inflexibility, welfare costs of the regulations are 3.4 percent of GDP (falling to 1.3 percent if real wages were perfectly flexible downward). The main losers from the regulation are workers—and to a lesser extent, large firms—and the main winners are small firms.