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Ken Yamada

Publications and source records attributed to Ken Yamada.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Decomposing Wage Stagnation: Employment Reallocation, Wage Structure,and Demographics

Average wages in Japan rose until the mid-1990s but stagnated thereafter. This paper studies Japan's long-run wage stagnation by decomposing changes in average log real hourly wages from 1980 to 2024 into four components: demographic change across worker types, changes in relative employment shares across job types, changes in relative wages across job types, and wage growth within job types. The framework combines a shift-share decomposition across worker types with an extension of the Olley-Pakes decomposition that separates employment reallocation from changes in relative wages across job types. Wage growth within job types contributes positively over the full sample period, but demographic change and employment reallocation partly offset it. Between 1996 and 2014, all four components are negative. The negative contribution from employment reallocation is not limited to the expansion of part-time employment, but reflects broader shifts across job types defined by employment type, establishment size, and industry.

econ.GN

Measuring Energy-saving Technological Change: International Trends and Differences

Technological change is essential to balance economic growth and environmental sustainability. This study documents energy-saving technological change to understand the trends and differences therein in OECD countries. We estimate sector-level production functions with factor-augmenting technologies using cross-country and cross-industry panel data and shift-share instruments, thereby measuring energy-saving technological change for each country and sector. Our results show how the levels and growth rates of energy-saving technology vary across countries, sectors, and time. In addition, we evaluate the extent to which factor-augmenting technologies contribute to economic growth and how this contribution differs across countries and sectors.

econ.GN

ICT Capital-Skill Complementarity and Wage Inequality: Evidence from OECD Countries

Although wage inequality has evolved in advanced countries over recent decades, it remains unknown the extent to which changes in wage inequality and their differences across countries are attributable to specific capital and labor quantities. We examine this issue by estimating a sector-level production function extended to allow for capital-skill complementarity and factor-biased technological change using cross-country and cross-industry panel data. Our results indicate that most of the changes in the skill premium are attributable to the relative quantities of ICT equipment, skilled labor, and unskilled labor in the goods and service sectors of the majority of advanced countries.

econ.GN

The Race between Technology and Woman: Changes in Relative Wages and Labor Shares in OECD Countries

The era of technological change entails complex patterns of changes in wages and employment. We develop a unified framework to evaluate the effects of capital-embodied technological change on, as well as the contributions of factor inputs to, the relative wages and income shares of different types of labor. We obtain the aggregate elasticities of substitution among different types of capital and labor by estimating and aggregating sectoral production function parameters with cross-country cross-industry panel data from OECD countries. We show that advances in information, communication, and computation technologies contribute significantly to narrowing the gender wage gap, widening the skill wage gap, and declining labor shares.

econ.GN

Heterogeneous Impact of the Minimum Wage: Implications for Changes in Between- and Within-group Inequality

Workers who earn at or below the minimum wage in the United States are mostly either less educated, young, or female. Little is known, however, concerning the extent to which the minimum wage influences wage differentials among workers with different observed characteristics and among workers with the same observed characteristics. This paper shows that changes in the real value of the minimum wage over recent decades have affected the relationship of hourly wages with education, experience, and gender. The results suggest that changes in the real value of the minimum wage account in part for the patterns of changes in education, experience, and gender wage differentials and mostly for the patterns of changes in within-group wage differentials among female workers with lower levels of experience.

econ.GN