Why U.S. Wage and Employment Behavior Differs from that in Britain and Japan
Why U.S. Wage and Employment Behavior Differs from that in Britain and Japan
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为什么美国的工资和就业行为与英国和日本不同
DOI：
10.2307/2232253
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发表时间：
1981
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Robert J. Gordon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Robert J. Gordon
本文认为，刚性工资不能提供普遍有效的商业周期理论的基础，仅仅是因为工资不是普遍刚性的。几种不同的统计技术表明，英国的工资率。在战后时期，日本的灵活性是美国的3到15倍。这两个国家的工资弹性更大，在经济周期中的就业行为也更稳定。从世纪末到1940年的历史数据来看，美国的工资行为似乎与英国和日本更为相似。战前数据和战后数据之间的对比（美国是一个明确的异常值）表明，1948年发明的三年期错开工资合同可能是美国战后工资动态低迷的关键因素。理论部分试图从最近的文献中提炼出经济理论认为最优的劳动力市场制度的特征。日本的制度比美国和英国的制度更接近这一理论范式。经济理论预测，长期合同，如战后美国的长期合同，当重新谈判的感知成本很高时，更有可能出现冲突，但我们必须诉诸历史和文化差异来解释为什么冲突避免在日本劳动力市场制度的发展中发挥着比美国更突出的作用。在这种比较中，英国是个例外，它有着广为人知的工业冲突，以及较短的合同期限。我呼吁历史、不同的法律的传统以及英国工会本身的性质来解释为什么三年期合同在美国成立，而在英国却没有。
This paper argues that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings of a universally valid theory of the business cycle, simply because wages are not universally rigid. Several different statistical techniques suggest that wage rates in the U.K. and Japan are between three and 15 times more flexible than in the U.S. during the postwar period. Corresponding to greater flexibility in wages, these two countries also exhibit more stable employment behavior over the business cycle. In historical data covering the period between the late-nineteenth-century and 1940, U.S. wage behavior appears to be much more similar to that in Britain and Japan. The contrast between the prewar data and the postwar data, where the U.S. is a definite outlier, suggests that the 1948 invention of the three-year staggered U.S. wage contract may be the crucial factor underlying sluggish U.S. postwar wage dynamics. A theoretical section attempts to distill from recent literature those features of labor market institutions that are regarded as optimal by economic theory. Japanese institutions exhibit more similarity to this theoretical paradigm than those in the U.S. or U.K. Economic theory predicts that long-duration contracts, like those in the postwar U.S., are more likely to emerge when the perceived cost of renegotiation is high, but we must appeal to history and cultural differences to explain why conflict avoidance plays a more prominent role in the development of Japanese labor market institutions than in the American case. In this comparison Britain is the odd-man-out, with well-publicized industrial strife, together with short contract durations. I appeal to history, the different legal tradition, and the nature of the British unions themselves to explain why the three-year contract became established in America but not in Britain.