Knowledge that Transforms

The prevalence in Japan of flexible wages in the form of bonus payments is explained by a high profitability of investment in specific human capital together with the low costs of transactions facing the employer and the worker in assessing fluctuations in productivities. A model of on-the-job training is developed to analyze the determination of the amounts and the sharing of investment in specific human capital. The model predicts that increased profitability of investment leads to an increased bonus-earnings ratio. Evidence indicates that education and firm size, which are often said to be positively associated with the profitability of on-the-job training in Japan, as well as years of experience in the current firm, have significant positive associations with the bonus-earnings ratio. An observed positive association between the cyclical sensitivities in a production index and in the bonus-earnings ratio also supports the theory.

The relationship between education and unemployment incidence, although theoretically clear-cut, has rarely been quantified. Some estimates of this relationship are obtained for Britain, and these are split into the impact of schooling and qualifications on the probability of entering unemployment and on the expected duration of spells within that state. Finally, estimates of the rate of return to schooling are adjusted to take account of unemployment incidence.

[This paper analyzes a simple mean-variance model of an imperfect capital market in which trade in assets involves costs. Fixed transactions costs, which result in investors only partially diversifying their portfolios, are shown to imply equilibrium asset prices substantially different from the Sharpe-Lintner prices. An improvement in the markets, in the form of lowering the trading costs, is shown to result in an increase in the number of assets held by each investor, in lowering equilibrium risk premia, and also in increasing the number of active investors.]

The theory of inequality and intergenerational mobility presented in this essay assumes that each family maximizes a utility function spanning several generations. Utility depends on the consumption of parents and on the quantity and quality of their children. The income of children is raised when they receive more human and nonhuman capital from their parents. Their income is also raised by their "endowment" of genetically determined race, ability, and other characteristics, family reputation and "connections," and knowledge, skills, and goals provided by their family environment. The fortunes of children are linked to their parents not only through investments but also through these endowments acquired from parents (and other family members). The equilibrium income of children is determined by their market and endowed luck, the own income and endowment of parents, and the two parameters, the degree of inheritability and the propensity to invest in children. If these parameters are both less than unity, the distribution of income between families approaches a stationary distribution. The stationary coefficient of variation is greater, the larger the degree of in-heritability and the smaller the propensity to invest in children. Intergenerational mobility measures the effect of a family on the well-being of its children. We show that the family is more important when the degree of inheritability and the propensity to invest are larger. If both these parameters are less than unity, an increase in family income in one generation has negligible effects on the incomes of much later descendants. However, the incomes of children, grandchildren, and other early descendants could significantly increase; indeed, if the sum of these parameters exceeds unity, the changes in income rise for several generations before falling, and the maximum increase in income could exceed the initial increase.

This paper offers an explanation of the use of mandatory-retirement clauses in labor contracts. It argues that the date of mandatory retirement is chosen to correspond to the date of voluntary retirement, but the nature of the optimal wage profile results in a discrepancy between spot wage and spot VMP (value of the worker's marginal product). This is because it is preferable to pay workers less than VMP when young and more than VMP when old. By doing so the "agency" problem is solved, so the contract with mandatory retirement is Pareto efficient. A theory of agency is presented and empirical evidence which supports the hypothesis is provided.

Labor allocation and wage-scale formation are studied in the context of competitive hierarchic firms. We show that (1) the wage per effective laborer and his quality increase with the hierarchical position of the employee, and (2) up to a point, the imposition of a minimum wage for production labor increases the quality and quantity of production workers and reduces the wage, quality, and number of supervisors. These results help to explain the skewness of income distribution, and the wage differentials across layers which are inexplicable in terms of differences in labor quality and difficulty of tasks.