노동시장구조와 고용탄력성: 경제성장과 고용

Abstract

Recently, job creation problem is one of most challenging tasks in both developing and developed countries. It is often argued that job creation by economic growth is not so large as in the past. To understand this issues, so far, many papers looked at data of GDP and employment growth to estimate the so called “employment elasticity” or “employment intensity” of growth, which is defined as growth rate of employment divided by growth rate of GDP. They find indeed that the measured value of elasticity has decreased in most countries. While there have been many empirical studies about that issue, no study has identified the structural determinants of employment elasticity. That is, while most studies estimate the empirical elasticity, they did not look upon the question of what determines the employment elasticity. This paper aims to address the question. This paper’s goal is to employ an equilibrium labor market model and to find the structural determinants of employment elasticity. This paper shows theoretically that employment elasticity is determined by the structure of technology and preference, thus, the labor demand and supply. The theoretically derived formula of employment elasticity allows us to identify its determinants. In testing and applying the theoretical result, first, some calibrated values of parameters and estimated values of labor supply structure found in other studies are applied to the theoretically derived formula to calculate the employment elasticity. And we compare the empirically estimated elasticities and theoretically calculated ones. Secondly, we try to identify which determinant has contributed to change (allegedly, decrease in most empirical studies) in the employment elasticity.