경험자본-노동 보완성과 노동시장 인구구조 변화가 한국경제 성장과 분배에 미친 효과

초록

We estimate a structural macroeconomic model postulating the complementarity between labor and ‘experience capital,’ human capital formed by the effective work experience during the labor market life cycle, using the Korean Labor & Income Panel Survey (KLIPS). We verify the strong presence of such complementarity and show that the economic growth and inequality are tightly linked during the process of demographic changes of the labor market via the experience capital-labor complementarity. In macroeconomic or microeconomics models where production functions or earnings functions omit this complementarity mechanism, the effects of the demographic changes are reflected in labor productivity and TFP as well as in earnings inequality driven by skill-biased technical changes (SBTC). Thus, we show that the TFP growth and earnings inequality dynamics are in fact driven by a common force of demographic changes rather than the genuine technical changes. We also show the presence of the heterogeniety in the life-cycle age profiles for the effective units of labor and experience capital across gender and education groups. Grounded by these features of experience capital-labor complementarity and the heterogeneous life-cycle age profiles, this paper suggests policy implications for improving the economic growth and inequality of Korea. We find that the experience capital stock relative to labor declined for the 1998-2014 period, which contributed to reducing the aggregate labor income and labor productivity and also to increasing earnings inequality. Our estimation results suggest that low effective units of labor and experience capital of female workers, rigid entry-exit-reentry processes of the labor market, and aging are behind such a decline of the Korean experience capital. These findings suggest that the promotion of the effective units of female labor and experience capital, a balance between employment flexibility and security in the labor market, the reformulation of school curriculum and workplace re-education from the perspective of experience capital formation are not merely labor and education policies but also the macroeconomic growth and distribution policies.

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