产业结构和经济稳定外文翻译.docx

1、产业结构和经济稳定外文翻译产业结构和经济稳定外文翻译 本科毕业论文外文翻译外文题目: Industrial structure and economic stability出 处: Applied economic letters 作 者: Sherrill Shaffer 原文: Motivated by prior results predicting contrasting linkages between industrial structure and economic stability, we present exploratory empirical evidence on t

2、his important issue. Consistent with the turnover hypothesis, we find that employment grew more steadily where business establishments in all sectors were larger, suggesting an offsetting benefit to the first-moment costs of establishment size identified by previous research. Consistent with the job

3、-matching hypothesis, we find that employment grew more steadily where more establishments per capita operated in all sectors. Similar but less consistent results were also found regarding the stability of income growth. Introduction and Background The fundamental importance of economic performance

4、has spawned an extensive literature on the empirical determinants of economic growth see Rajan and Zingales, 1998; Levine et al., 2000 for prominent examples. One recent discovery is that communities or local regions tend to experience more rapid growth of income or employment where businesses are s

5、maller Shaffer, 2002, 2006a, b. A separate strand of research, meanwhile, has demonstrated the importance of studying the volatility of growth rates rather than merely their means Ramey and Ramey, 1995; Kurz, 2004; Ismihan, 2005; Bekaert et al., 2006. It is relevant in this regard that several studi

6、es Davis and Haltiwanger, 1992; Rob, 1995; Davis et al., 1996 have found that jobs at smaller firms tend to be less permanent than at larger firms; while Ilmakunnas et al. 2005 have suggested that such turnover may actually be one reason for faster productivity growth, an unexplored implication is t

7、hat the volatility of employment and income may be higher where businesses are smaller the turnover hypothesis. Conversely, heterogeneity among decision-makers due to human fallibility can result in greater variability of economic performance in more centralized decision processes Sah, 1991; Sah and

8、 Stiglitz, 1991; Almeida and Ferreira, 2002, possibly suggesting that a local economy may exhibit greater stability where the average firms are smaller or more numerous. A similar outcome is predicted to the extent that a centralized decision processes are less successful at managing conflict and b

9、distributional conflicts impair efficient adjustments to exogenous shocks Rodrik, 1999; Almeida and Ferreira, 2002. In view of these contrasting considerations, an important empirical question is whether establishment size and other measures of industrial structure may be systematically associated w

10、ith second moment measures of economic performance. This article accordingly presents preliminary evidence of linkages between selected measures of industrial structure and the volatility of local income and employment growth rates. We use three measures of industrial structure, each distinguished b

11、y broad sector. As in Shaffer 2002, we measure average establishment size by number of employees and, alternatively, by dollars of value added, shipments or receipts. We also look at establishments per capita, motivated by two opposing considerations. Finding a new job should be easier in a market w

12、ith more employers in a given sector, leading to more stable levels or growth rates of income and employment the job-matching hypothesis. But, ceteris paribus, smaller firms will tend to permit the coexistence of larger numbers of firms, in which case the documented employment turnover at smaller fi

13、rms discussed above will tend to offset the stabilizing benefit of more numerous firms. Each of our measures of industrial structure is compiled separately for the manufacturing, wholesale, retail and service sectors. We relate these measures of structure to two second-moment measures of economic pe

14、rformance, the SD of annual real per capita income growth rates and the SD of the annual growth rate of total establishment employment. The results contribute to two separate strands of the literature, on empirical covariates with growth volatility and on macroeconomic effects of establishment size

15、and other measures of industrial structure. We find for all sectors that larger establishments and more establishments per capita are associated with more stable employment growth rates, consistent with the turnover and job-matching hypotheses. The same linkages are found for some but not all of the

16、 sectors with regard to the volatility of growth rates in real per capita income. The next section introduces the empirical model and the sample. Section III presents the results, while Section IV concludes. The Model and Sample We embed our key variables in a standard linear empirical growth equati

17、on, 1 Where Y is a measure of economic performance as discussed above, is an estimated intercept term, s is a measure of industrial structure as discussed above, x is a vector of control variables discussed below,andare estimated coefficients and is a stochastic error term. As in Bekaert et al. 2006

18、, our SDs of economic growth rates are measured over a 5-year period. As in prior studies of economic growth, the control vector includes the natural logarithm of population, the density of population per square mile of land area, a measure of education and initial median household income. Populatio

19、n is a measure of market size as in Cetorelli and Gambera 2001. It is also similar to the total labor force variable used in Ohuallachain and Satterthwaite 1992 and can be interpreted as measuring urbanization economies. If job-matching occurs more quickly or efficiently in more populous areas, then

20、 the estimated coefficient on this variable should be negative another implication of the job-matching hypothesis introduced above. Population density has been found significantly related to several first-moment measures of economic performance, possibly due to scale effects or to superior matching

21、between firms and workers in denser markets Ciccone and Hall, 1996; Andersson et al., 2004; Carlino et al., 2007; Strumsky et al., 2005. If these benefits influence economic stability, as one might expect, then the estimated coefficient on population density should be negative in our model. Educatio

22、n is measured as the percentage of population aged 25 and over who have completed high school, and reflects the accumulated level of human capital. It is similar to measures used in previous studies of economic growth such as Rajan and Zingales 1998, Levine et al. 2000 and Cetorelli and Gambera 2001

23、, with theoretical linkages to average growth rates explored by Teles 2005. A related measure of education has been used in at least one study of growth volatility Bekaert et al., 2006. In addition, education was found to be positively associated with sectoral employment growth in US metropolitan ar

24、eas by O huallachain and Satterthwaite 1992. If education contributes to economic stability as well, its estimated coefficient in our regressions should be negative. Initial median household income can reflect a convergence effect in first-moment measures of economic performance, as noted by Barro a

25、nd Sala-i-Martin 1992. The same logic would not apply to second-moment measures of economic performance, rendering the sign and significance of the estimated coefficient on this variable an open empirical question. However, a similar variable initial per capita GDP has been used in at least one prio

26、r study of growth volatility Bekaert et al., 2006. Table 1 summarizes the data. Our sample comprises more than 2000 US nonmetropolitan counties, measuring economic performance during 1991?1995 and structure measures as of 1987. Metropolitan areas are excluded because their borders are generally not

27、coterminous with individual counties, confounding measurement problems for variables drawn from county-level data. Though not reported in the table, the pairwise correlation coefficients between average establishment size and establishments per capita ranged between -0.21 and 0.18, and were just -0.

28、07 in the wholesale sector and 0.07 in the manufacturing sector. These small and highly variable correlations indicate that the two categories of structure variables reflect statistically separate dimensions of industrial structure in our sample. The selection of performance data as of several years

29、 following the structure data helps to reduce the likelihood of reverse causality although, common to all empirical growth studies, causality cannot be definitively established. This lag structure also minimizes the potential for endogeneity bias, as the regressors are predetermined. Results Table 2

30、 reports the regression estimates for the SD of real per capita income growth rates, while Table 3 reports estimates for the SD of employment growth rates. As industrial structure is measured in three ways for each of four sectors, each table reports 12 regressions. Due to missing or zero establishm

31、ent data for a few counties in each sector, the various regressions utilize slightly differing numbers of observations, as reported in the tables. The significance levels are computed from SEs corrected for heteroscedasticity. In Table 2, the various structure measures are statistically significant

32、in eight of the 12 regressions. Per capita income is found to grow more steadily where manufacturing, retail and wholesale establishments employ more workers, or where wholesale establishments are larger as measured by value of annual shipments. These findings are consistent with the turnover hypoth

33、esis discussed above. Conversely, steadier growth is seen where wholesale establishments employ fewer workers or in counties with fewer wholesale establishments per capita or more manufacturing establishments per capita. The contrasting estimates for the wholesale sector may reflect nonlinearities in the underlying r