"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

This article argues that a systematic integration of gender into labor economics courses based on standard textbooks is both beneficial and straightforward. An undergraduate course in labor economics presents an ideal opportunity to introduce students to the importance of gender differences in...

We develop a theory of labor markets in a monetary economy with four realistic features: search frictions, worker productivity shocks, wage rigidity, and two-sided lack of commitment. Due to the non-Coasean nature of labor contracts, inefficient job separations occur in the form of endogenous...

We study how tax policies that lower the cost of capital impact investment and labor demand. Difference-in-differences estimates using confidential Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that tax policies increased both investment and employment, but did not stimulate wage or...

High-tenure workers who lose their jobs experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with heterogeneous firms, on-the-job search and...

This paper examines how collective bargaining through unions and workplace codetermination through works councils shape labour market imperfections and how labour market imperfections matter for employer wage premia. Based on representative German plant data for the years 1999–2016, we...

We propose a novel framework that integrates the "task approach" for a more precise production modeling into the search-and-matching model with low- and high-skilled workers, and wage setting by labor unions. We establish the relationship between task reallocation and changes in wage pressure,...

When unemployment rates reached double-digit levels in many OECD countries at the beginning of the 1990s, fighting unemployment became the prime target of economic policy-making and a major focus of economic research1. The OECD (1994) launched a major study - the OECD Jobs Study - which...

I propose a new search-and-matching model in which wage rigidity and volatile unemployment endogenously arise. The Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model is generalized by incorporating job-ladder and vacancy-chain effects arising from on-the-job search and replacement hiring into a long-lived jobs...

This article was aimed at determining the extent to which leakages in Nigeria’s productivity was attributable to uncertainties of leakages from sources other than strikes. It was predicated on the premise that unless the magnitude of leakages from these alternative sources was determined and...

A.A. Walters derived a traffic flow function, and advocated toll to cure congestion. He wanted to save lives and monies, time is money, in congestion. NYC and Hong Kong have been practicing his policy for years, but surviving drivers are still tortured by congestion. Walters’ intention is...

What are the long-run consequences of business cycle fluctuations for the skill distribution in the labor force? How is the sorting between firms and workers altered by aggregate fluctuations at different stages of the working life? And finally, what are the aggregate effects of changes in...

The facility layout problem (FLP) is the problem of determining non-overlapping positions of departments on the shop floor to minimize material handling costs. Traditional methods for solving FLPs consider pairwise (from-to) flows to optimize layouts. This paper shows that these traditional...

In the most widely analyzed type of efficiency wage model of involuntary unemployment, firms pay wages in excess of market clearing to give workers an incentive not to shirk. Such payments in excess of market clearing and the resultant equilibrium unemployment act as a worker discipline device....

Supervisory and monitoring costs are explored to understand aspects of occupational segregation by sex. Around the turn of this century 47 percent of all female manufacturing operatives were paid by the piece, but only 13 percent of the males were. There were very few males and females employed...

High-tenure workers losing their job experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with (i) on-the-job search, (ii) general human...

We examine the equilibrium wage and employment outcomes in a labor market model comprised of informationally constrained workers and employers whose labor market interactions have a non-zero impact on wages. The model endogenizes employment interactions between workers and employers in terms of...

This paper summarizes the results of nearly a dozen new papers presented at the Sundance Conference on Monopsony in Labor Markets held in October 2018. These papers, to be published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Resources, study various aspects of monopsony and failures of...

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of working hours and wages in a model economy where a firm and its workforce are linked to each other by an implicit contract. Specifically, we develop a deterministic and a stochastic framework in which the firm sets its level of labour utilization by...

This paper provides an extension of the model of industry employment and wage effects of trade policy in Riker (2021). The model assumes that U.S. labor is immobile between states, at least in the short run, and this allows for significant differences in wage and industry employment changes in...

We develop a measure of labour market opportunities for heterogenous types of worker, exploiting information on their suitability different jobs encoded in historical patterns of worker mobility. We provide a theoretical foundation for our measure, which features naturally in a general random...

Der Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften geht 2021 an David Card für seine empirischen Beiträge zur Arbeitsökonomik sowie an Joshua Angrist und Guido Imbens für ihre methodischen Beiträge zur Analyse kausaler Zusammenhänge. Die Analyse kausaler Zusammenhänge in der empirischen...

This paper show analytically that introducing diminishing returns to labor at the firm level into the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, followed by recalibration, does not change aggregate dynamics of unemployment and vacancies. This invariance result holds for several standard calibration...

Firms' inability to monitor their employees' search effort forces a tradeoff between risk-bearing and incentive considerations when designing employment-related insurance. Since the provision of insurance against firm-specific shocks adversely affects workers' incentives to find better jobs, the...

The paper proposed setting up of a National Labor Exchange along the lines of National Stock Exchange, Bombay Stock Exchange and Commodity Exchanges Worldwide in order to promote efficiency in the labor market, full employment and generating wealth and positive contributions to GDP. The paper...

This paper builds a simple model where there is a link between employees' perception of the fairness of employers and the actual distribution of income. Wages are based in part on employers' assessments of the productivity of individual employees. I show that the equilibrium distribution of...

This paper evaluates a class of endogenous job destruction models based on how well they explain the observed experiences of displaced workers. We show that pure reallocation models in which relationship-specific productivity drifts downward over time are difficult to reconcile with the evidence...

We study positive and normative aspects of steady-state equilibrium in a market where firms of endogenous size experience idiosyncratic shocks and undergo a costly search process to hire their workers. The stylized model we propose highlights interactions between job-security provisions and...

I study unemployment insurance (UI) in general equilibrium with incomplete markets, search frictions, and nominal rigidities. An increase in generosity raises the aggregate demand for consumption if the unemployed have a higher marginal propensity to consume (MPC) than the employed or if agents...