Less work, more workers?

      I am currently attending the Fourth Lindau Meeting in Economic Sciences, the programme for which can be found here. It's a pretty cool gathering, featuring many of the living winners of the Nobel Prize for economics. Today would seem to be labor market day, and we're hearing from two of the most recent winners of the prize, Peter Diamond and Chris Pissarides.

     Mr. Diamond spoke first today, and discussed one important aspect of his work: the nature of matching between workers and jobs. His reading of theory and data lead him to believe that there are structural issues pushing up the unemployment rate, but there is every reason to believe that a shortfall in aggregate demand is the main cause of lingering joblessness. Mr Diamond, readers may know, was for a time an Obama nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, whose nomination was stymied by Republicans until it was withdrawn. Whatever that might suggest, Mr. Diamond is not in favor of aggressive Fed easing, though he thinks more could be done. Rather, he thinks that fiscal policy needs to do the heavy lifting.

      He did tell me in an interview yesterday that he didn't think there was any problem with a temporary period of above-normal inflation. His view, strikingly, was that the Fed can't create additional inflation, but can only signal what levels of inflation it is prepared to tolerate. I disagree (with the second part), but he's the one with the Nobel.

     Chris Pissarides (who taught me macro once upon a time) gave an interesting presentation on work in Europe. He touched on a number of issues, but one thought in particular struck me. He displayed a chart of the change in hours worked and the change in employment across OECD countries, from 2000 to 2007, which showed a pretty clear negative relationship between the two. In other words, the more hours worked in an economy rose, the less employment rose. So the layabout Greeks have an employment rate of only 54%, compared to a 75% employment rate for the Dutch. But the typical Greek worker puts in 1,135 hours of work per year, to only 1,066 for the typical Dutch worker. On its face, this looks like a violation of the lump-of-labor fallacy. That is, we'd expect that workers working harder would earn more and create demand for additional employment.

      Mr Pissarides seemed to solve the apparent problem by noting that in many countries, it's difficult to add a fractional worker. Because regulations in Greece make it harder to work part time, the Greek economy handles marginal work by adding hours for current workers while the Dutch economy adds additional workers. The implication is that the Dutch system is more efficient, leading to greater wealth if not necessarily more work.

     The period he examined obviously pre-dated the crisis period. Yet the impact of Germany's kurzarbeit programme suggests that done right, supply-side labor market reforms can be an important means to keep labor markets reasonably healthy during down economic periods.

ps:第一次发帖，内容可能有点简单，大家就轻松点看吧，O(∩_∩)O~。自己选帖时才能体会这种感觉，感觉有好多东西想一起分享，但是只能选择其一。本来想选个日本新首相的，编辑好了后觉得内容太简单，于是乎虽然还是选了个简单的，但是觉得这种日志式的表达还不错，希望能给大家点收获。