Over the past decade, productivity-adjusted wages have grown at a slower pace in Japan than in other rich countries. This paper suggests that Japan's dualities between regular and "nonregular" labor market contracts and the relatively inefficient services sector have exacerbated the negative...

The allocation of intellectual property rights between firms and employed researchers causes a principal-agent problem between the two parties. We investigate the working contracts of inventors employed by German chemical, pharmaceutical, and electrical engineering firms at the turn of the 20th...

A growing number of American workers are no longer employed in ‘jobs’ with a long-term connection with a company but are hired for ‘gigs’ under ‘flexible’ arrangements as ‘independent contractors’ or ‘consultants,’ working only to...

Incentive contracts must typically be based on performance measures that do not exactly match agents’ true contribution to principals’ objectives. Such misalignment may impose difficulties for effective incentive design. We analyze to what extent implicit dynamic incentives such as career...

The paper constructs an asymmetric information model to investigate the efficiency and equity cases for government mandated benefits. A mandate can improve workers' insurance, and may also redistribute in favour of more "deserving" workers. The risk is that it may also reduce output. The more...

Does the labor market place wage premia on jobs that involve physical strain, job, insecurity or bad regulation of hours? This paper derives bounds on the monetary returns to these job disamenities in the West German labor market. We show that in a market with dispersion in both job...