سرمایه انسانی خاص شرکت و بیکاری در یک اقتصاد در حال رشد

This study analyzes how the intensive use of firm specific human capital in firms affects the unemployment rate. For this purpose, I introduce into an equilibrium search model the possibility that workers quit their jobs. A worker changes his job when a firm that newly enters into the market offers a higher wage than his current wage. If firm specific human capital is important, it is difficult for a worker to quit his job, and, in consequence, the number of workers who quit their jobs is small. Thus, the unemployment rate is low. If the speed of technology obsolescence is high, the unemployment rate is high.

Until the end of the 1990s, the unemployment rate in Japan was significantly lower than that in the United States.1 This study intends to explain the low unemployment rate in terms of the intensive use of firm specific human capital in Japanese firms. In the existing literature, these two phenomena have been related to each other only indirectly. Many studies have explained the low unemployment rate by various institutional features such as lifetime employment, the seniority wage system, and the dual structure of the labor market.2 Other studies relate these institutional features to the intensive use of firm specific human capital.3 In this study, I construct an equilibrium search model that demonstrates a direct channel through which the unemployment rate can be related to the use of firm specific human capital. This study extends the search model with economic growth developed by Aghion and Howitt (1994), who study how economic growth that causes technology obsolescence affects unemployment, in two directions.4 The first extension is that workers quit their jobs. Workers who are employed by existing firms quit their jobs if they are offered higher wage by firms that enter into the market. The second extension is that workers accumulate firm specific human capital. If firm specific human capital is important in the firm, the wage becomes low when a worker quits the job, and it is difficult for workers to quit their jobs. By extending the model of Aghion and Howitt (1994) in these two directions, this study demonstrates that the unemployment rate is related to firm specific human capital. The more important firm specific human capital is in the production process of the firm, the smaller the incentive for the worker to quit the job, and, in consequence, the lower the unemployment rate. This paper considers the possibility of job-to-job quitting, which has seldom been considered in the equilibrium search theory developed by Diamond (1982), Mortensen (1982) and Pissarides (1990).5 The exception is Pissarides (1994),6 in whose equilibrium model a firm can choose two types of jobs: good job or bad job. Because the wage of a good job is higher than that of a bad job, only workers who are assigned to a bad job quit the job. In contrast to Pissarides’s model, in this study workers quit their jobs because of wage differentials caused by economic growth with technology obsolescence.