We generalize the Diamond–Mirrlees production efficiency theorem, that there should be no taxes on sectors producing pure intermediate goods, to an environment with political economy constraints. In our economy, allocations and taxation are decided by self-interested politicians without the power to commit to future policies. The Diamond–Mirrlees production efficiency result holds even when pol...

From microbes to humans, the success of many organisms is achieved by dividing tasks among specialized group members. The evolution of such division of labor strategies is an important aspect of the major transitions in evolution. As such, identifying specific evolutionary pressures that give rise to group-level division of labor has become a topic of major interest among biologists. To overcom...

Why some species become invasive while others do not is a central research request in biological invasions. Clonality has been suggested as an attribute that could contribute to plant invasiveness. Division of labor is an important advantage of clonal growth, and it seems reasonable to anticipate that clonal plants may intensify this clonal attribute in an invaded range because of positive sele...

Division of labor is one of the most basic and widely studied aspects of colony behavior in social insects. Studies of division of labor are concerned with the integration of individual worker behavior into colony level task organization and with the question of how regulation of division of labor may contribute to colony efficiency. Here we describe and critique the current models concerned wi...

This paper proposes an explanation of the backward-bending labor supply curve that is not based on the premise that the income effect dominates the substitution effect. Unlike the classical labor supply theory that treats working hours and work effort as being synonymous, this paper treats them as distinct variables in an efficiency wage model. A wage rate increase is shown to give rise to two ...

Temporary workers make up a sizeable part of the labor force in many countries and typically receive wages that are significantly lower than their permanent counterparts. This paper uses an efficiency wage model to explain the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers. High-performing temporary workers may gain promotion to permanent status, and a high wage to permanent workers therefore...

This paper evaluates the impact of some key labor market reforms on rural-urban inequality and income distribution, using a household-disaggregated, recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of China. We also explore how these factor market reforms interact with product market reforms currently underway as part of China's WTO accession process. The simulation results show tha...

This paper shows that the existence and persistence of ‘overeducation’ can be explained by an extension of the efficiency wage model. When calibrated to fit the amounts of overeducation found in most empirical studies, the model implies that both the relative wage and the relative employment rate of high-skill workers depend inversely on aggregate economic activity. Keeping aggregate employment...

MOST STUDIES OF the economic impact of immigration are motivated by the desire to understand how immigrants affect various dimensions of economic status in the population of the host country. This motivation explains the persistent interest in determining whether immigrants “take jobs away” from native workers, as well as the attention paid to measuring the fiscal impact that immigration inevit...

I consider the labor-market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group. The efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group-specific wages. I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the rel...