[OPE-L:3049] Re: Marxian empirical research revisited

Iwao Kitamura (ikita@st.rim.or.jp)
Wed, 18 Sep 1996 09:39:27 -0700 (PDT)

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Andrew T, a welcome from a lurker on this list.
Could I make a question on followings?

Andrew Trigg [3046]F

>1)How do I use micro data? Some of you will be familiar with this work,
>but the basic idea is that a micro data set such as the UK Family
>Expenditure Survey contains information whichi is potentially useful
>for Marxian purposes. In particular the hours of work information for
>each worker in a micro sample can be used to estimate quantity of hours;
>and the individual wage data, together with other individual characteristics
>such as education, age, sex, occupation etc. can be used to estimate a
>microeconometric wage equation. The proposal is that this can be used
>to estimate the quality of labour time - at least it might improve on
>previous studies which assume that all the wage instead of part of it
>is correlated with labour quality.

What is your definition of "labour quality" or "quality of labour time"? Does
it simply mean mutiplier of labour time to simple labour of a segment (by
education, age, sex, occupation,...)?

I tend to think wage rates for individual workers or for segments are not
proportional to hourly value created. For example, we saw that wage rates for
high-educated office workers had increased much relative to those for
factory workers in '80 in Japan. I don't believe this is the result from
more value added by the former. Rather I would say this proves the change
of management policy regarding change of labour-capital relation and/or
change of other social backgrounds.

I won't criticize any attempt to overcome the limitation of datas in order
to develope empirical study. Just a question.

in OPE solidarity,

Iwao