The authors examine changes in the wages, employment, and effort of nurses in California hospitals following takeovers by large chains using 1990s data. The market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony, so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with...

In this paper the set of bilateral wage contracts in a dynamic model with observable effort is characterized. Our first result demonstrates that bond payments and severance pay do not increase the size of the set of incentive compatible contracts. Second, we show that unobservable effort can...

This paper studies the effect that a labour market for older workers will have on the ratchet effect. Even though we assume that the information on worker type that a firm obtains will not be transmitted to the other firms, the presence of the ex post labour market eliminates the ratchet effect....

Economics students need to be taught that opportunity costs are important for optimal decision making but that sunk costs are not. Why should this be? Presumably these students have been making optimal decisions all their lives, and the concepts should be easy for them. We show that caring about...

This paper reviews a recent literature that extends the Rubinstein/Stahl bargaining model to the case of contract bargaining. Theoretical issues, such as the appropriate game form, existence, and uniqueness of equilibria, are discussed. The paper finishes with a brief overview of some...

The authors examine changes in the wages, employment, and effort of nurses in California hospitals following takeovers by large chains in the 1990s. The market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony, so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with...

We begin with two uncontroversial hypotheses - firm productivity is expensive to measure and employment entails relationship-specific investments. These assumptions imply that firms would optimally choose fixed-wage contracts, and complement these with bonus pay when measuring employee...