For both empirical and theoretical reasons, the mechanism by which existing efficiency-wage models link job rationing with turnover costs is unsatisfactory. This paper extends the standard turnover-efficiency-wage model by formally examining the determination of wages as the outcome of a...

Medium-run macroeconomics refers to aggregate economic phenomena that manifest over periods of 10 to 25 years. This area of research has emerged over the last decade as a new and distinct field of enquiry. In this paper, I overview a set of personal attempts aimed at understanding certain...

Over the last few decades, countries have experienced quite different patterns of productivity growth. In this paper, we emphasize the role of country level demographics in explaining these differences. In particular, looking over the period 1960-2002, we show that cross-country data support the...

This paper is motivated by a set of cross-country observations on labor productivity growth among industrial countries over the period 1960-1997. In particular, we show that over this period, the speed of convergence among industrialized countries has decreased substantially while the negative...

This paper proposes a new and unified explanation for the following trends observed over the last 25 years: (1) the increased returns to education, (2) the slow measured growth in TFP in an economy undergoing massive changes in its methods of production, and (3) the poor wage performance,...

We examine why different renegotiation processes can lead to opposite results regarding the commitment value of third-party contracts in the presence of asymmetric information. Our main result is that a contract loses all strategic value if renegotiation is allowed during the production stage...

In this paper, the authors address the question of whether wages are affected by labor-market conditions in a manner more consistent with a contract approach than with a standard spot market model. From a simple implicit contract model, they derive implications about the links between wages and...

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? This paper sheds light on this issue by providing a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output per worker across countries over the period 1960-1998. We find that most of the change in shape of the world...