We show that a framework that integrates job assignment, human-capital acquisition, and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms, including the following. First, real-wage decreases are not rare but demotions are. Second, wage increases are...

Relational contracts-informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships-are prevalent within and between firms. We develop repeatedgame models showing why and how relational contracts within firms (vertical integration) differ from those between (nonintegration). We show that...

Incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures. This paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures in (respectively) implicit and explicit incentive contracts. The...

The authors develop a dynamic model of learning about worker ability in a competitive labor market. The model produces three testable implications regarding wage dynamics: (1) although the role of schooling in the labor market's inference process declines as performance observations accumulate,...

We analyze a rational-expectations model of price formation in an intermediate-good market under uncertainty. There is a continuum of firms, each consisting of a party who can reduce production cost and a party who can discover information about demand. Both parties can make specific investments...

Suppose that the government was to announce that the economy will be booming in six months and that this announcement is based on false data. What effect would such an announcement have on future aggregate activity? This paper employs revisions of the series of leading economic indicators to...

A familiar result in the economic theory of the family is Becker's rotten-kid theorem. This theorem states that altruism by a family member will lead other selfish members to act efficiently from the family viewpoint. The authors extend Becker's one-period model to two periods and show that...

This paper considers the implications of heterogeneity in information-processing abilities for macroeconomic models that exhibit "strategic complements." The latter is the same concept that has received much attention in the recent macro literature under the headings "Keynesian coordination...

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this, we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms....