辞职和劳工更换率：微观经济的证据及宏观经济的后果

wpsac)(4 POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2068 Quitting and Labor To prevent trained workers from quitting to open their Turnover own businesses, firms pay higher than market "efficiency Microeconomic Evidence and wages" to reduce turnover. What is the impact of Macroeconomic Consequences macroeconomic shocks and policy innovations, such as Tom Krebs labor market reform, in ani William F. Malo*ey economy where this is of central importance? The World Bank Latin America and Caribbean Region Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit U February 1999  l POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2068 Summary findings Combining microeconomic evidence with They use panel data from Mexican labor surveys to macroeconomic theory, Krebs and Maloney present an estimate the quit function derived from the model and integrated approach to wage and employment the results support their view that transitions from determination in an economy where firms pay above formal salaried work to informal self-employtnent are market "efficiency wages" to prevent trained workers quits rather than fires. (Quitting is positively related to from quitting. the mean self-employment income and the probability of The model offers predictions about the behavior of being rehired and negatively related to the mean formal formal employment, labor turnover, and segmentation in salaried wage.) They then use the parameters estimated response to formal sector productivity shocks (including from the quit function to calibrate the model economy economic growth and tax reductions), changes in the and simulate the impacts of economic shocks and policy desirability of self-employment (formal sector tax rates), innovations and find the impact on employment, and the cost of training a new worker. turnover, and segmentation to be substantial. This paper - a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit, Latin America and Caribbean Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to understand the functioning of developing country labor markets. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Tania Gomez, room 18-102, telephone 202-473-2127, fax 202-522-2119, Internet address tgomez@worldbank.org. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/htmVdec/Publications/WVorkpapers/ home.html. The authors may be contacted at tkrebs@uiuc.edu or wmaloney@worldbank.org. February 1999. (39 pages) The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers canry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Produced by the Policy Research Dissemination Center  Quitting and Labor Turnover: Microeconomic Evidence and Macroeconomic Consequences* Tom Krebs** Department of Economics University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign William F. Maloney*** The World Bank Keywords: Efficiency Wages, Employment, Labor Turnover, Macroeconomic Policy, Self-Employment.. JEL Classification Numbers: E24, E60, J41, J63. We would like to thank Omar Arias, Patricio Aroca, Roger Koenker, Pravin Krishna, Guillermo Perry and seminar participants at the University of Illinois for helpful comments. We also thank the Mexican National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Information (INEGI) for the use of the data. INEGI is in no way responsible for the incorrect manipulation of the data or erroneous conclusions drawn from it. Currently visiting Brown University, Department of Economics, Brown University, Robinson Hall 302- D, 64 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912, tkrebs@uiuc.edu. Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Division, Latin America and the Caribbean, The World Bank,1818 H St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20433, wmaloney@worldbank.org.  1. Introduction Recent work on efficiency wage models has produced an internally consistent macro-theory of involuntary unemployment (underemployment)' whose basic assumptions and implications have largely been corroborated by empirical micro-studies.2 Although the microeconometric work was motivated by macroeconomic theory, it has never been fully integrated into a macroeconomic framework.3 In this paper we offer one version of such an integrated approach. More precisely, we first develop an efficiency wage model with labor turnover (Phelps 1968, Stiglitz 1974, Salop 1979, Hoon and Phelps 1992) and show that the worker's decision problem gives rise to a quit-rate function. We then use microeconomic data to estimate this quit-rate function and to test the specification suggested by economic theory. Finally, microeconomic evidence and macroeconomic model are combined to evaluate the quantitative effects of changes in economic policy and other macroeconomic shocks on the wage rate, the turnover rate, and employment in the long-run (steady state analysis). The efficiency wage model with labor turnover we employ is in principle applicable to any type of movement of labor across sectors in any country (Bulow and Summers 1986). However, the original literature on this type of efficiency wage model has mainly focused attention on unemployment in developed countries (Phelps 1968, Salop 1979, Phelps and Hoon 1992). We, on the other hand, test and calibrate our model using panel data on the movement of Mexican workers between the formal salaried and the informal self-employed sector. Our choice of the data set was motivated by the following two considerations. 'See Katz (1986) and Woodford (1994) for surveys. 2See Katz (1986) and Layard, Nickell, and Jackman (1991) for surveys. 3The quantitative papers by Danthine and Donaldson (1990,1995) and Kimball (1994) on efficiency wage models with shirking (Shapiro and Stiglitz 1984) consider microeconomic evidence when calibrating the macroeconomic model, but do not incorporate a microeconomic estimation equation into the macroeconomic model as we do. In this sense, we feel that we have come closer to a full integration of the two fields of labor economics and macroeconomics. See also Blanchard and Katz (1997) for a statement in favor of such an integrated approach.  First, the efficiency wage model with labor tumover captures well a number of features of LDC labor markets, and in particular the Mexican case we consider. The literature suggests that the self-employed informal sector comprises both workers rationed out of formal salaried jobs as well as a relatively prosperous "upper tier" that may prefer self-employment.4 In other words, the literature is consistent with one of the central ideas of the efficiency wage model with labor turnover, namely that at each point in time workers are voluntarily leaving their formal-sector job for self-employment and simultaneously self-employed workers are unsuccessfully trying to reenter the formal sector. Moreover, neither minimum wages nor unions are credible explanations for the observed segmentation.5 Finally, Constitutional proscriptions against firing suggest quittiing as the dominant mode ofjob separation. Second, our data set has an important time dimension which allows us to estimate the quitting response of individual workers to changes in macroeconomic conditions. Given our final goal of quantitative macroeconomic analysis, this feature ofthe data set seems essential. In addition, the data on self-employed workers offer a measure of the benefits (payoffs) to not being employed in the formal sector that displays substantial variations over time. These variations in self- employment benefits are important since they provide us with an additional test of the "quitting theory" which predicts that labor turnover is positively correlated with expected benefits to self- employment and that the quit-rate function is symmetric: the benefits-elasticity of quitting, is equal to the negative ofthe wage-elasticity of quitting. Moreover, if the symmetry property ofthe quit-rate function is supported by the data on self-employed workers, we may use it as a working hypothesis (until refuting evidence is forthcoming) and apply it to unemployment. This opens the door for an assessment of the quantitative macroeconomic effects of changes in unemployment benefits without 4 Harris and Todaro (1970) offer the canonical statement of the dualistic (rationing) viewv and Fields (1990) discusses the "two-tier" view of the informal sector. 5Bell(1996) finds no evidence that minimum wages are binding. Maloney and Ribeiro (1998) find evidence of union influence on employment, but none on wage setting. 2  directly estimating the elasticity of quitting with respect to unemployment benefits, usually an impossible task given the lack of temporal variations in these benefits. Our empirical estimates of the determinants of labor flows from the salaried to the self- employed sector strongly support the specification suggested by the quitting theory: the individual probability ofjob separation is decreasing in the formal-sector wage (the expected payoffto staying) and increasing in benefits to self-employment and the probability of finding a formal-sectorjob (the expected payoff to leaving). Moreover, the above mentioned symmetry property of the quit-rate function cannot be rejected. When the microeconomic estimates are used to calibrate the macroeconomic model, we find the long-run effects of macroeconomic shocks on wages, labor turnover, and (formal-sector) employment to be substantial. The strong employment response found here stands in stark contrast to the disappointingly small unemployment effects reported by Danthine and Donaldson (1990,1995) and Kimball (1994) who calibrate an efficiency wage model with shirking (Shapiro and Stiglitz 1984) to US unemployment data.6 This paper can be interpreted as providing a two-stage "test" of the real world relevance of efficiency wage models with labor turnover. In the first stage, microeconomic data are used to estimate and test what we believe to lie at the heart of this type of efficiency wage model, namely the quit-rate function. If the coefficients are found to be significant and of the correct sign, in a second stage the estimated quit-rate function is incorporated into the macroeconomic model and the calibrated model economy is used to assess the quantitative importance of efficiency wages. This second-stage check is important since there seems to be little value in having a macroeconomic theory of unemployment (underemployment) which is supported by microeconomic data but implies an almost constant unemployment (underemployment) rate. In this paper we present one fully worked out example of this two-stage procedure in the hope that it will spur interest in further 6Danthine and Donaldson (1990, 1995) explicitly consider aggregate uncertainty by solving a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model. Kimball (1994) studies the dynamic and steady state effects of macroeconomic shocks in a deterministic model, but his quantitative result on employment variations is obtained by comparing steady state equilibria. 3  applications to different countries and different sectors. Such work is likely to add an important dimension to the existing empirical literature which has either completely focused on the micro-level or solely relied on cross-country regressions.! The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 develops the model. Almost all derivations, and in particular the discussion of the worker's decision problem, is relegated to the Appendix. Section 3 presents the empirical analysis of the panel data on Mexican workers and some additional information on the Mexican labor market. The specification for the estimated quit-rate function is dictated by the theory developed in Section 2. In Section 4 the macroeconomic model is calibrated and the simulation results are presented. Section 5 concludes. 2. The Model The model is a discrete-time, neoclassical growth model with a labor market characterized by labor turnover, employment-adjustment costs (hiring and training costs), and wage-setting by firms. The analysis will be confined to equilibria in which a number of economic variables grow at a constant rate equal to the exogenous rate of technological progress (balanced growth path). a) Workers There is a large number of ex-ante identical, infinitely-lived workers. Workers' preferences over random consumption sequences allow for a time-additive expected utility representation. Workers do not participate in financial markets and therefore do not save or dissave. Hence, each worker's 7See, for example, Phelps (1994), Nickell (1997), and Phelps and Zoega (1998) for empirical work using cross-country regressions. Blanchard and Jimeno (1995) conduct an interesting case study comparing two countries, Spain and Portugal. The method outlined in this paper provides a fonnal procedure for quantifying the importance of efficiency wages in explaining the different macroeconomic experiences of two countries. 4  consumption level is equal to his current disposable income.8 In each period a worker devotes a fixed amount oftime to one of the following two activities: working in the formal sector or working in the informal sector of the economy. Our informal-sector data in the empirical section are taken from the self employed and we will therefore call a person working in the informal sector a self-employed worker. In each period, a worker, regardless of his current employment status, receives an idiosyncratic shock determining the relative attractiveness of employment versus self-employment ("taste-shock", change in expected payoff to self- employment). After observing the shock realization, an employed worker makes a quit/stay decision and a self-employed worker makes a search/no-search decision. Whereas an employed worker automatically becomes self-employed when deciding to quit a job, a self-employed worker who decides to search for formal-sector employment receives ajob offer only with probability less than one. The Appendix Al discusses the Bellman equation associated with the worker's decision problem and analyzes the resulting optimal decision rule. The optimal decision rule gives rise to a quit-ratefunction, q. = q(w,,w,p;T,b),where q, standsforthequitrateexperiencedbyfirm i, w1 for the (growth-adjusted) wage paid by finn i, w the average (growth-adjusted) wage, p for the probability of finding (formal sector) employment when not employed, X for the tax rate on formal- sector labor income, and b for the average (growth-adjusted) pecuniary benefits from self employment. Let q(w,p;t,b) i q(w,w,p ; T,b) _be the economy-wide quit-rate fimction when all 8ln a sense, this assumption renders the model classical rather than neoclassical. It is mainly made for tractability reasons since it trivially deterrnines the wealth distribution of workers (no wealth). Without this assumption the wealth distribution is in general non-trivial and has to be computed as part of the equilibrium, except when there is complete consumption insurance. The assumption of restricted capital market participation is also made in Danthine and Donaldson (1990,1995) for the same tractability reason. Kimball (1994) does not treat capital accumulation and therefore does not deal with wealth effects. Phelps (1994) emphasizes wealth effects, but nowhere develops a complete general equilibrium model with endogenize wealth distribution. We hope to dispense with this assumption in future work. 5  firms pay the same wage. Clearly, this function is identical to the quit-rate function in an economy with only one representative firm. The function 4(.), however, is the function entering into the profit maximization problem of an individual firm (see Appendix A2) in a many-firm economy. In Appendix Al we show that the individual quit-rate function, q (.), satisfies aq O; a , , as4 aq,O aq ;(l -< 0. qeq> 0 a .0; 1 aw,. a w ap ab al and that the economy-wide quit-rate function, q(.), satisfies .aq <O , aq >,o aw ap (2) aq - laq l aq> o ar bab -wew The empirical analysis conducted in Section 3 tests the sign and symmetry restrictions (2) and finds strong evidence in favor of them. Our panel data on worker transition provide no information about the quit-rate function of an individual firm in a many-firm economy, q(.). Appendix Al, however, shows that the two marginal quit-rate functions (approximately) satisfy a q (w 'Wwp;,rB) Iw =W - (w,p;,r,B) aq (w,p;,r,B) 3 1 - 3bw(l -q(w,p;'r,b)) (1 -p) =(, b - 1 - 3 (1 -q(wp,;T,b)) where 1w is the discount factor of workers. Expression (3) enables us to make quantitative predictions about the impact of economic policy knowing only the economy-wide quit-rate :function q(.). The parameter pt measures the difference between the reduction in the quit-rate when an individual firm raises its own wage and the reduction in the quit-rate when all firms raise their wages simultaneously. 6  b) Capitalists (Firms) There are i = 1, ... ,N infinitely-lived capitalist with identical preferences who each own one firm with identical production technology. There is one good which can be used for consumption and investment purposes. Firm i combines capital and labor to produce output. Adjusting the amount of labor employed is costly since there are hiring and training costs. We assume that adjustment costs are fully paid by firms.' Taking the economy-wide wage as given, each firm i chooses a sequence of consumption (of owner i ), capital, investment, employment, hiring, and own-wage which maximize the capitalist' life-time utility subject to the relevant constraints. The decision problem faced by firm (capitalist) i is fully spelled out in Appendix A2. The resulting Euler equations for the growth-adjusted variables are 131gP x ai( F -+-(k111 1,1+ t =c (,t+l ak( 1''