In this paper, I explore the relationship between wage bargaining and capital accumulation by developing a differential game in which a monopolistic union sets the wage of its members by taking as given the optimal employment strategy of a representative firm and the way in which capital is...

We model and analyze employer cartels that fix wages by committing to a wage ceiling. The setting is a frictional labor market with large employers that compete for workers via posted wages. Wage fixing reduces competition both inside and outside the cartel, leading to market-wide wage...

This chapter reviews the theory of monopsonistic wage setting, its empirical implications, and some puzzles the framework has struggled to explain. We begin by examining the fundamentals of monopsonistic wage determination. The core of the theory is a mapping from the distribution of worker...

We develop a model of a frictional labor market with idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, sticky wages, and two-sided lack of commitment between workers and firms. In this environment, wages are allocative in the sense that inefficient job separations arise when the wage-to-productivity ratio...

We study the time-series properties of firm effects in the two-way fixed effects model popularized by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) (AKM) using two approaches. The first—the rolling AKM approach (R-AKM)—estimates AKM models separately for successive two-year intervals. The second—the...

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....

This paper tests the hypothesis that rising earnings profiles are a mechanism by which individuals engage in forced saving. It does this by examining the cross-sectional relationship between overwithholding on income tax payments--behavior that is consistent with a preference for forced...

A small interview survey was undertaken to see how actual wage-setters would react to the central. ideas of several economic theories of wage stickiness. Wage cuts were surprisingly prevalent in recent years, despite the booming economy. The strongest finding was that managers believe that...

Several efficiency wage theories of wage determination have the property that identical workers are more productive in high wage industries and that the promotion of employment in high wage industries can increase GDP (and some measures of welfare). I argue that while policies to favor high wage...

The paper uses CPS data from 1964 to 1985 to test for the existence of rent-sharing in US tabor markets, Using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector, and random-effects and fixed-effects specifications, the paper finds that changes in wages are explained by movements in lagged levels...

The idea that wages rise relative to alternatives as job seniority accumulates is the foundation of the theory of specific human capital, as well as other widely accepted theories of compensation. The fact that persons with longer job tenures typically earn higher wages tends to support these...

This paper investigates an economy in which there are short-term wage contracts that are re-negotiated under certain conditions. This paper determines the optimal frequency of wage re-negotiation and shows that it depends positively on measures of aggregate variability and Phillips curve slope....

Bargaining models suggest that firm-specific variables play an important role in wage determination. Yet previous empirical studies of wage determination have largely ignored these variables. Our analysis of a large panel data set of U.S. wage contracts suggests that firm-specific variables...

This paper defines a concept, a worker's trust fund, which is useful in analyzing optimal age-earnings profiles. The trust fund represents what a worker loses if dismissed from a job for shirking. In considering whether to work or shirk, a worker weighs the potential loss due to forfeiture of...

U.S. macroeconomic evidence shows a negative relation between the rate of change of wages and unemployment. In contrast, most theories of wage determination imply a negative relation between the level of wages and unemployment. In this paper, we ask whether one can reconcile the empirical...

We present a model of the labor market with asymmetric information in which the equilibrium of the' market generates unemployment and job queues so that wages may serve as an effective screening device. This happens because more productive workers -- within any group of individuals with a given...

The paper is an empirical cross-section study of the retirement decisions of American white men between the ages of 58 and 67. predicated on the theoretical notion that an individual retires when his reservation wage exceeds his market wage. Reservation wages are derived from an explicit utility...

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to a widely-held opinion, the determination of the goals of unions is fully amenable to empirical analysis. A characterization of the wage and employment-setting process in unionized markets is adopted and its qualitative implications examined. The...

We use a unique new data set that combines individual worker data with data on workers' employers to estimate plant-level production functions and wage equations, and thus to compare relative marginal products and relative wages for various groups of workers. The data and empirical framework...

This paper surveys recent developments in the literature on efficiency wage theories of unemployment. Efficiency wage models have in common the property that in equilibrium firms may find it profitable to pay wages in excess of market clearing. High wages can help reduce turnover, elicit worker...

If changes in aggregate demand were an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations, real wages would be countercyclical unless markups of price over marginal cost were themselves countercyclical. We thus examine three theories of markup variation at cyclical frequencies. The first assumes...

The vast literature on human capital and earnings assumes that individuals know in advance that they will complete a particular program of schooling. This paper treats education as a sequential choice that is made under uncertainty. A simple two period structural model is used to explore the...

While modern economic theorists have produced a variety of explanations for the failure of wages to fall in the face of unemployment, Keynes emphasis on relative wages has not been reflected in most contemporary discussions. This short paper suggests that relative wage theories in which workers'...

We investigate the relationship between the slope of the wage-tenure profile and the level of monitoring across two cross sections of matched employer-employee British data. Our theoretical model predicts that increased monitoring leads to a decline in the slope of the wage-tenure profile. Our...

Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. Under certain conditions, the wage premiums for worker characteristics should equal the productivity...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of firm-specificemployment and wage outcomes for mechanics in the domestic airlineindustry. A dynamic contracting model is presented that incorporatesboth costly employment adjustment and potential gaps between contractwage rates and the opportunity...

This paper shows the wage offer distribution can be nonparametrically identified from the gaps between any two wage offers received by a worker for those who received two or more offers in a short period of time. While nonparametric estimation is infeasible in practice because it requires an...

Numerous studies have shown large differences in wages for apparently similar workers across industries. These findings pose a challenge to standard model s of labor market behavior. A problem with past studies of industry wage differences is that they have failed to distinguish between union...

The paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labour market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the...

This paper examines the effect of earnings taxes on the variability of wages over time. We estimate a "hedonic wage locus" which indicates how the market allows individuals to substitute the mean level of the wage for its variability across jobs. Information from this locus is used to estimate...

This paper explores the role of wage fund as the basic source of credit, capital or finance in a dynamic Ricardian model, which consists of three classes of agents: the workers, the capitalist, and the producers of goods. We introduce and develop an elaborate dynamic wage fund model in the...

We adapt the wage contracting structure in Chari (1983) to a dynamic, balanced-growth setting with re-contracting à la Calvo (1983). The resulting wage-rigidity framework delivers a model very similar to that in Jaimovich and Rebelo (2009), with their habit parameter replaced by our probability...

This paper investigates equilibria in a labor market where firms post wage/tenure contracts and risk-averse workers, both employed and unemployed, search for better paid job opportunities. Different firms typically offer different contracts. Workers accumulate general human capital through...

This paper analyzes the impact of workplace characteristics on individual wages based on a unique cross-section matched employer-employee dataset for the Israeli private manufacturing sector in 1995; especially, we examine the effects of the interaction between rent-sharing and wages on the gender...

This paper reviews the literature on the effects of low steady-state inflation on wage formation, focusing on four different effects. First, under low inflation, downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) may prevent real wage cuts that would have happened had inflation been higher. Second, wages...

We analyze a model of directed search in which unemployed job seekers observe all posted wages. We allow for the possibility of multiple applications by workers and ex post competition among vacancies. For any number of applications, there is a unique symmetric equilibrium in which vacancies...