We show in a theoretical efficiency wage model where firms differ in monitoring intensity or in the effort intensity of their technologies that the impact of monitoring intensity on wages is ambiguous, a result that mirrors evidence from the empirical literature. We argue that to correctly...

We show in a monopsony model that a minimum wage may raise hours which are already too high but has ambiguous effects on the number of employees and utility. Employment subsidies, in contrast, unambiguously improve worker utility and bring the market equilibrium closer to the efficient outcome

We develop a model where formal sector firms pay tax and informal ones do not, but informal firms risk incurring the penalty associated with non-compliance. Workers may enter self-employment or search for jobs as employees. Workers with higher managerial skills will run larger firms while...

We model a competitive labour market where firms choose combinations of workers and hours per worker to produce output. If one assumes that the scale of production has no impact on hours per worker, then the change in the number of workers and hours per worker resulting from a minimum wage are...

We develop a model where workers may enter self-employment or search for jobs as employees and where there is heterogeneity across workers’ managerial ability. Workers with higher skills will manage larger firms while workers with low managerial ability will run smaller firms and will be in...

In a competitive model we ease the assumption that efficiency units of labour are the product of hours and workers. We show that a minimum wage may either increase or decrease hours per worker and the change will have the opposite sign to the slope of the equilibrium hours hourly wage locus....