Urban Wage Behaviour and Food Price Inflation in Ethiopia
利用埃塞俄比亚111个城市市场的月度面板数据，检验食品价格上涨是否通过提高非熟练劳动力需求来增加城市贫困人口的工资，发现长期调整缓慢，短期福利影响负面。
Theoretically, increases in food prices could benefit the poor by increasing the demand for unskilled labour, and hence their wages. This paper tests this hypothesis in urban Ethiopia. We exploit a unique panel of monthly price and wage data from 111 urban markets to first construct welfare-relevant measures of real wages, before employing various panel estimators to formally test wage-food price integration. We find moderate rates of long-run adjustment to increases in food prices, but that adjustment is very slow. This implies highly adverse short-run welfare impacts of higher food prices on the urban poor.