Factor price

About: Factor price is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2764 publications have been published within this topic receiving 86176 citations.

Shifts in US Relative Wages: The Role of Trade, Technology and Factor Endowments

Abstract: This paper investigates three hypotheses to account for the observed shifts in US relative wages of less educated workers compared to more educated workers from 1967–92: (i) increased import competition; (ii) changes in the relative supplies of labour of different educational levels; and (iii) changes in technology. Our analysis relies on a basic relationship of the standard general equilibrium trade model, that relates changes in product prices to factor price changes and factor shares, together with information about changes in the composition of output, trade, within-industry factor use and factor supplies. We find support for the hypothesis that the relative increase in the supply of well-educated labour was the dominant economic force that narrowed the wage gap in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Our results also indicate that technical progress rather than increased import competition was the dominant force in the widening of the wage gap among the major education groups after 1980.

Services outsourcing and innovation: an empirical investigation

Abstract: We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits and innovation using plant level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing of services, but the magnitude is smaller. This makes intuitive sense, as international outsourcing allows more scope for exploiting international factor price differentials, therefore giving the establishment higher profits and more scope to restructure production activities towards innovation. We also find that international outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability, as predicted by theory, while this is not true for domestic sourcing. The results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis.

Pricing, Production, and Persistence

Abstract: Though built with increasingly precise microfoundations, modern optimizing sticky price models have displayed a chronic inability to generate large and persistent real responses to monetary shocks, as recently stressed by Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan [2000]. This is an ironic finding, since Taylor [1980] and other researchers were motivated to study sticky price models in part by the objective of generating large and persistent business fluctuations. We trace this lack of persistence to a standard view of the cyclical behavior of real marginal cost built into current sticky price macro models. Using a fully articulated general equilibrium model, we show how an alternative view of real marginal cost can lead to substantial persistence. This alternative view is based on three features of the “supply side” of the economy that we believe are realistic: an important role for produced inputs, variable capacity utilization, and labor supply variability through changes in employment. Importantly, these “real flexibilities” work together to dramatically reduce the elasticity of marginal cost with respect to output, from levels much larger than unity in CKM to values much smaller than unity in our analysis. These “real flexibilities” consequently reduce the extent of price adjustments by firms in time-dependent pricing economies and the incentives for paying fixed costs of adjustment in state-dependent pricing economies. The structural features also lead the sticky price model to display volatility and comovement of factor inputs and factor prices that are more closely in line with conventional wisdom about business cycles and various empirical studies of the dynamic effects of monetary shocks. ∗ Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; ** Boston University, NBER and FRB Richmond. This paper builds on earlier joint work with Alexander L. Wolman on this topic We wish to thank Brian Boike for providing excellent research assistance and also to thank the referees and the editor for making numerous useful suggestions. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, or the Federal Reserve System.