ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how trade openness affects wage inequality within and between trading countries under a new framework that incorporates the endogenous technology choice assumption. This assumption implies that as well as making a labor choice, the firms in our model simultaneously choose to adopt different technology compositions, rather than simply utilizing the standard constant technology, as assumed in most previous researches. Theoretically, we find that the endogenous technology choice partially absorbs the negative effect of the unskilled-skilled labor supply ratio on the relative wage within a country. Furthermore, compared with the standard constant technology model, the calibration of the new framework using data from 52 countries yields qualitatively and quantitatively different results for the impacts of transport costs on the relative wage between the two countries. Specifically, there are cases in which this difference generates contradictory interpretations of the effect of a transport cost reduction on wage inequality. For several pairs of countries, the wage differential between two countries becomes more evident in response to trade openness in the standard constant technology model, whereas in the endogenous technology choice model, the gap becomes narrower.

摘要

本文研究了在包含内生技术选择假设的新框架下，贸易开放度如何影响贸易国家内部和国家之间的工资不平等。这个假设暗示着，在做出劳动选择的同时，我们模型中的公司同时选择采用不同的技术组成，而不是像大多数先前的研究那样简单地利用标准不变技术。从理论上讲，我们发现内源性技术选择部分地吸收了非技术工人的劳动力供给比率对一个国家相对工资的负面影响。此外，与标准不变技术模型相比，使用来自52个国家/地区的数据对新框架进行校准，从质量和数量上得出了运输成本对两国相对工资影响的结果。具体来说，在某些情况下，这种差异会导致运输成本降低对工资不平等的影响产生矛盾的解释。对于几对国家来说，在标准不变技术模型中，随着贸易的开放，两国之间的工资差异变得更加明显，而在内生技术选择模型中，差距变得越来越小。