Traditionally, the labor market is seen as a mechanism for pairing people with jobs in which matching cannot take place instantl

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问题     Traditionally, the labor market is seen as a mechanism for pairing people with jobs in which matching cannot take place instantly. This way of thinking about the jobs market owes an intellectual debt to research on markets with search frictions carried out by Peter Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics. On October 11th they were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics for their work.     The economists’ approach was a sharp break from the norm in the early 1970s, when standard economic models mostly treated labor as a commodity which had the worker’s wage as its price. There could be no unemployment in the simplest versions of these models, because wages would fall instantly to eliminate it. True, few economists took these simple models literally: lots of research was done to modify their assumptions and generate more realistic results, often by making it harder for wages to fall. But even the modified models took little note of data on how people flowed into and out of employment. The stretches of unemployment, the job hunts, the moves from job to job, the rate at which workers were fired or hired: all this was absent. Mr. Mortensen argued that this needed to change. Investigating the way people actually went about finding jobs in an uncertain environment, he believed, should be a central concern of the analysis of labor markets.
    The three economists built upon earlier work by George Stigler, who had studied the process by which people acquired information, and who won the Nobel prize himself in 1982. Pointing out that getting information costs time and effort, Mr. Stigler argued that people would do so only as long as the additional benefits of having more information exceeded the additional costs of acquiring it. Mr. Mortensen saw this framework as a useful way of thinking about labor markets, because finding employment in a decentralized labor market typically involves gathering and evaluating information on vacancies and wages.
    Mr. Diamond modeled this job-search process in a series of seminal papers written between 1979 and 1982. One was based on the premise that not all jobs are equally suitable for all workers. The first person offered a job might not be as good a match for it as the second or third person. So if every unemployed person grabbed the first job that came his way, the match between workers and jobs that resulted would not be optimal. By making it possible for workers to be more selective about the jobs they accepted, Mr. Diamond showed, unemployment insurance would improve the efficiency of the labor market.  
Traditional economic models found it hard to explain the phenomenon of .

选项 A、search frictions
B、unemployment
C、labor as commodity
D、wage falls

答案B

解析 细节题。关于传统经济模式的内容主要在文章前两段,根据第二段所述,由于将劳动力视为商品,而商品的价格会随着市场供需调整市场,因此,按照这种模式看,失业应该是不存在的。可见传统经济模式在解释失业的存在和扩展方面是有困难的。故[B]为答案。四个选项中最易排除[C],传统经济模式就是将劳动力视为商品这一理论作为其理论基础的,因此,[C]错误。[A]search frictions是指在找工作的过程中出现的问题,这是传统经济模式没有注意到的一点,而不是它不能解释的现象,因此[A]不符合题意。[D]“工资下降”,这个现象用“劳动力是商品”的原理就很好解释,故不是传统经济模式的难题,可见[D]也是错误的。
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