Documents Kambayashi, Ryo 5 results

"The authors document and contrast changes (or lack thereof) in job stability over the past 25 years between Japan and the United States. Prime-age male workers with at least five years of tenure in Japan continued to enjoy much higher job stability than did their U.S. counterparts. Most remarkably, Japan's “Lost Decade” had little discernible adverse effect on the job stability of this group of Japanese employees. By contrast, job stability for mid-career hires and youth workers deteriorated in Japan. The authors' cross-national regression analysis of job loss confirms the consistently more important role that seniority plays in protecting workers from job loss in Japan than in the United States and reveals that this gap in seniority's influence on job stability between the two countries widened. Overall, it is the U.S. economy with the longest economic expansion, not the Japanese economy with the longest economic stagnation, that experienced deteriorating job stability, pointing to the absence of convergence of the Japanese and U.S. systems."

"This paper examines changes in the Japanese labor market experienced by full-time workers in intermediate age groups (ages 35?50) during the two decades since the collapse of the bubble economy. The results suggest that the opportunity cost of job transfers is lower than it used to be, and that the fluidity of the labor market is also spreading among intermediate-age workers to a certain extent. Moreover, internal competition for promotion to managerial positions may have become more intense at the same time. Specifically, a panel dataset for business establishments was created for this study by linking microdata from the “Basic Survey on Wage Structure” and the “Survey on Employment Trends.” The relationship between rewards for promotion to management and turnover ratios was empirically studied, with the result that a generally positive correlation was found between the two. These changes are consistent with the rank-order-tournament theory, and in that sense, even intermediate age groups, the core of Japanese employment practices, are not entirely unaffected by changes in the structure of the labor market. However, this paper also finds that experience of changes in the labor market is diverse in intermediate age groups, depending on the stage of career advancement and age, that changes in competition for promotion have not spread universally among them, and that it is difficult to explain the whole consistently by using a simple model."

"In many OECD countries, low productivity growth has coincided with rising inequality. Widening wage and productivity gaps between firms may have contributed to both developments. This paper uses a new harmonised cross-country linked employer-employee dataset for 14 OECD countries to analyse the role of firms in wage inequality. The main finding is that, on average across countries, changes in the dispersion of average wages between firms explain about half of the changes in overall wage inequality. Two thirds of these changes in between-firm wage inequality are accounted for by changes in productivity-related premia that firms pay their workers above common market wages. The remaining third can be attributed to changes in workforce composition, including the sorting of high-skilled workers into high-paying firms."

"Differences in average wages across firms – which account for around one-half of overall wage inequality – are mainly explained by differences in firm wage premia (the part of wages that depends exclusively on characteristics of firms) rather than workforce composition. Using a new cross-country dataset of linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the role of cross-firm dispersion in productivity in explaining dispersion in firm wage premia, as well as the factors shaping the link between productivity and wages at the firm level. The results suggest that around 15% of cross-firm differences in productivity are passed on to differences in firm wage premia. The degree of pass-through is systematically larger in countries and industries with more limited job mobility, where low-productivity firms can afford to pay lower wage premia relative to high-productivity ones without a substantial fraction of workers quitting their jobs. Stronger product market competition raises pass-through while more centralised bargaining and higher minimum wages constrain firm-level wage setting at any given level of productivity dispersion. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that the key priority should be to promote job mobility, which would reduce wage differences between firms while easing the efficient reallocation of workers across them."