Why do some vacancies offer a posted wage whereas others offer a negotiable wage? The paper endogenizes the choice of wage policy in a search model with heterogeneous workers. In particular, we characterize the circumstances under which there exist an equilibrium where all firms negotiate wages. Generally, we find that a tight labor market favors bargaining over posting, as does large worker he...

Equity and Efficiency in Multi-Worker Firms: Insights from Experimental Economics In this paper, we discuss recent evidence from economic experiments that study the impact of social preferences on workplace behavior. We focus on situations in which a single employer interacts with multiple employees. Traditionally, equity and efficiency have been seen as opposing aims in such work environments:...

We consider two-sided matching markets with couples. First, we extend a result by Klaus and Klijn (2005, Theorem 3.3) and show that for any weakly responsive couples market there always exists a “double stable” matching, i.e., a matching that is stable for the couples market and for any associated singles market. Second, we show that for weakly responsive couples markets the associated stable c...

Migration decision-making in developing economies is addressed from the perspective of status in the labor force (unemployed or unemployed) and traditional concerns with utility maximization are expanded to include the role of assets and access to capital markets. A dynamic model is formulated and the results reveal that the migration mechanism is efficient when workers have access to borrowing...

This study extends a bilateral gift exchange experiment by Clark et al. (2010) who investigate how feedback of information about wages paid in the market affects both employers’ wage setting and workers’ performance. We provide either quantitative or qualitative information on the average wage paid in all worker-employer-relationships, and we also study repeated relationships (fixedmatching). W...

I study managers' risk-taking behavior and how it is affected by equity-based compensation. I find that in response to an exogenous increase in takeover protection in Delaware during the mid-1990s, managers lower firm risk by 5%. I also find that the decrease in firm risk is concentrated among firms with low managerial equity-based incentives. In particular, firms with low CEO portfolio sensiti...

This paper proposes a generalized WS/PS model studying the impact of public spending on employment, in the presence of imperfect competition in labour and product markets. Public spending is shown to a¤ect …rms pro…t margins and …rms labour demand schedules. The model highlights a new channel by which …scal policy can improve employment. By reducing …rms’mark-up, public spending helps counterin...

Conventional wisdom suggests that an increase in monetary incentives should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal might occur: an increase in monetary incentives (either because rewards increase or effort cost...

This paper modifies the standard Mortensen-Pissarides job matching model in order to explain the cyclical behavior of vacancies and unemployment. The modifications include strategic wage bargaining (Hall and Milgrom, 2006) and convex labor adjustment costs. The results reveal that our model replicates the cyclical behavior of both variables remarkably well. First, we show that strategic wage ba...

The impact of a stronger work requirement for welfare recipients in a workfare program is studied in an efficiency wage model where a representative firm chooses its level of monitoring activities. A stricter workfare policy raises employment and monitoring activities. It typically increases profits and reduces the tax rate. The impact on the net wage is ambiguous. Utility levels of employed wo...