The purpose of this paper is to show that the common law governing the employment of labor makes the distinction not only between employee and independent contractor but also between managerial control and agency. The idea is that common law precedents govern workers who are employed and...

According to New Home Economics, valuations of household production based on opportunity cost and market price methods should produce similar estimates. Data from the National Survey of Family and Households are used to assess the extent to which the opportunity cost and market price methods of...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on happiness research by examining whether happiness affects the ethical decisions of individuals. First, a recursive model of ethical decision making is developed in which an agent's utility is assumed to be a function of money, ethical...

This paper test the hypothesis that capital market imperfections constrained the growth of British firms during the Industrial Revolution. Using data on the cost structure of a representative British cotton manufacturer during the 1798 to 1827 period, this paper shows that the scale of operation...

Voting on unidimensional issues will produce equilibrium outcomes if voter preferences are single peaked. While the equilibrium outcomes would not necessarily be Pareto optimal, they would be stable. This paper shows that voting on multidimensional issues can produce stable equilibria if the...

This paper distinguishes between governance structure and contractual form. The basic premise is that researchers often confuse these two concepts when they develop or empirically test models within the transaction cost framework. In the paper I utilize a simple principal- agent model to show...

The evidence presented by Haas and Stack (1983) suggests that a parabolic relationship exists between a nation's level of industrialization and the strike activity among its labor force. Their model is tested using data from a different time period. Criticisms of the original model, including...

Teaching economics has been shown to encourage students to defect in a prisoner's dilemma game. However, can ethics training reverse that effect and promote cooperation? We conducted an experiment to answer this question. We found that students who had the ethics module had higher rates of...

This paper examines the effects of married women's employment on their fertility behavior in the United States. Data from the National Survey of Family and Households are used in a hazard model to determine whether a woman's employment status affected the rate at which she had a second, third or...

According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort choices of workers. This article presents a simple model illustrating how the introduction of monetary incentives causes a discontinuous reduction in worker effort as well as a...