Severance Payment: Incentive or Lethargy Effect?

The aim of the paper is to determine the impact of severance payment on the motivation of the worker to make an effort, when there is a risk for him to be dismissed once his effort was made. We highlight through a two‐stage model the various factors which influence the dismissal decision by the firm and the worker's effort, such as the initial wage, the litigation costs and the relative bargaining powers of the parties when the relationship ends or goes on. In this context, we show that the impact of the severance payment paid ex post in case of dismissal on the level of effort chosen by the worker ex ante may depend on such characteristics.     

How amenities affect job and wage choices over the life cycle

Job amenities are explicitly included in a model of job choice over the life cycle. The amenities are characterized by an indivisibility—a worker must be present at a job to enjoy its amenities. This characterization has implications on initial job choice, a worker's wage profile and whether they move to a higher or lower paying job.     

Career concerns and firm – sponsored general training

This article studies the provision of firm-sponsored general training in the presence of workers' career concerns. The model builds on the argument that the provision of general training reduces the employer's monopsony power. In this context, it is shown that the worker's implicit incentives to provide effort increase with the level of acquired general skills. The employer takes this reciprocal effect into account and becomes more willing to invest in general human capital. When the positive effect of training on worker's effort incentives is strong enough, the equilibrium outcome may involve overinvestment relative to the first-best. It is also shown that a sharper increase in worker's power associated with additional training may either strengthen or weaken the employer's investment incentives and can have either beneficial or detrimental effects on welfare.     

New implications of Lazear's skill-weights approach

A new approach to the theory of specific human capital, proposed by Lazear (2009), assumes that all skills are general but that firms use them with different weights attached. In Lazear's analysis, the decision to invest in the worker's acquisition of various skills is assumed to maximize the expected net joint surplus of the worker and the employer. This paper explores new implications of the skill-weights approach when the worker and the firm independently and non-cooperatively invest in the worker's skills.     

Unobservable persistent productivity and long term contracts

We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the persistent productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker's productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects over time. We provide a characterization of the optimal dynamic compensation scheme that attracts only high productivity workers: consumption—regardless of time period—is ranked according to likelihood ratios of output histories, and the inverse of the marginal utility of consumption satisfies the martingale property derived in [Rogerson, William P., 1985. Repeated moral hazard. Econometrica 53 (1) 69–76]. However, in the case of i.i.d. output and square root utility we show that, contrary to the features of the optimal contract for a repeated moral hazard problem, the level and the variance of consumption are negatively correlated, due to the influence of early luck into future compensation. Moreover, in this example long-term inequality is lower under persistent private information.     

Job satisfaction and co-worker pay in Canadian firms

One reason to be concerned about income inequality is the idea that people care about not only their own absolute income but also their income relative to various reference groups (co-workers, friends, neighbours, relatives, etc.). We use Canadian linked employer–employee data to estimate the casual effect of co-worker pay on a worker's reported job and pay satisfaction. Since worker satisfaction can affect the worker's productivity, organizational commitment, turnover, creativity and innovation as well as the firm's productivity and profitability, this is an issue that requires more attention and careful examination. In models that control for a rich set of workplace characteristics, we find that co-worker pay has a large positive and significant effect on both pay and job satisfaction. In our preferred models with establishment-level fixed effects, the effect of co-worker pay on pay satisfaction is half as large and the effect on job satisfaction completely disappears, suggesting that part (all) of what previous studies attribute to the effect of co-worker pay on worker pay (job) satisfaction is driven by unobserved heterogeneity across firms or establishments. Our results also suggest that the effect of co-worker pay on worker satisfaction is much stronger for workers who leave their job during the following year. Finally, we find that while co-worker pay has a positive effect on pay satisfaction among Canadian-born whites, it has a negative effect among immigrants and Canadian-born visible minorities.     

Performance Pay,Productivity and Morale*

This paper incorporates the notion of worker morale into an economic model of pay and performance, and examines its implications for the efficacy and design of performance-based pay schemes. A worker's morale is determined by his relative pay status. A contract that rewards only individual performance can therefore undermine the morale of the least skilled workers in a firm and thereby adversely affect their productivity. On the other hand, competition for relative pay status tends to boost the productivity of highly skilled workers in the firm. The net effect on productivity depends on the composition of the firm's workforce. If the workforce is sufficiently heterogeneous then the inclusion of a profit-sharing component in the pay contract, which reduces the pay differential across workers, can sufficiently boost the morale of the least skilled workers as to improve overall productivity and profitability.     

Team production,endogenous learning about abilities and career concerns

This paper studies career concerns in teams where the support a worker receives depends on fellow team members׳ efforts and abilities. In this setting, by exerting effort and providing support, a worker can influence her own and her teammates׳ project outputs in order to bias the learning process in her favor. To manipulate the market׳s assessment, we argue that in equilibrium, a worker has incentives to help or even sabotage her colleagues in order to signal that she is of higher ability. In a multiperiod stationary framework, we show that the stationary level of work effort is above and help effort is below their efficient levels.     

Who do we tip and why? An empirical investigation

An important question about social norms is whether they are created to increase welfare. This is addressed by examining the characteristics of tipped and non-tipped occupations. Tipping prevalence is negatively correlated with worker's income and consumer's monitoring ability and positively with consumer's income and closeness between the worker and the consumer. The results refute a common belief that tipping exists to improve economic efficiency by lowering monitoring costs. Tipping, however, is more prevalent when consumers feel empathy and compassion for workers and want to show gratitude for good service, suggesting that tipping might increase welfare if welfare includes psychological utility.     

Towards a More Complete Efficiency Wage Theory

The efficiency wage is an important topic in the theory of employment. In a traditional efficiency wage model, only the representative firm is optimizing against an assumed S‐shaped effort supply function. This S‐shaped supply curve is critical for the model and the absence of a derivation of the curve in the literature means that it is an incomplete theory. In the present paper, we extend the model by specifying a worker's representative utility function so that the corresponding argmax function will be the S‐shaped effort supply curve. This will make the worker's decision process endogenous and will produce a more complete model. The importance of this extension is clear. The characterization of the utility function will make explicit the necessary conditions and crucial assumptions of the traditional model. More importantly, the extension will allow researchers to introduce employment compensation factors into the worker's utility function for analysis. This has important bearings on future development in employment theory. For example, a worker's satisfaction from shirking (net of dismissal risks), or his or her willingness to search for jobs (net of search cost), can now be included in his or her utility function to form an optimal work or search strategy. Incorporating the worker's optimization behaviour into the model will also enable researchers to study policy directed not just towards firms but also towards the worker's decision process. Furthermore, this approach provides a framework for researchers to generate comparative statics. These comparative statics can lead to interesting topics for econometric models or to further research within this field.     

ADVERSE SELECTION,LEARNING, AND COMPETITIVE SEARCH

I develop a model that allows for an analysis of the effects of time on adverse selection in the presence of search frictions. I find that, as a firm takes longer to adjust a worker's contract in response to learning about his type, inefficient overwork during the time before wage adjustment (probation) decreases. This provides a rationale for an optimal (minimum) probation period of about one month in the baseline scenario. Optimal probation duration varies with the degree of search frictions, the cost of effort, the relative productivity of different types of workers, and minimum wage regulations.     

公平偏好在劳动契约中的作用探讨

劳动契约是典型的不完全契约,一般认为自利的工人仅仅只会做出最低程度的努力水平,而近年来的实验与行为经济学发现工人的选择并不完全符合自利的假设,工人的努力程度还会受到其公平偏好的影响,由于工人的选择直接影响到企业的获利状况,故企业在制定工资水平时应该考虑工人对公平的诉求。     

After You Sir. Hold-Up,Direct Externalities,and Sequential Investment

We propose a solution to the hold-up problem: the parties in a contract can avoid the inefficiencies caused by the possibility of opportunistic behaviour and implement the first best level of investment if they make their investment decision sequentially, one party observing the choice made by the other party before making his own choice. Unlike the existing literature, the proposed solution leads to the efficient choice of investment even when there are two-sided direct externalities.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D23, D82.     

Efficient allocations with moral hazard and hidden borrowing and lending: A recursive formulation

We propose a tractable recursive framework to study the optimal allocation of consumption and effort in a dynamic setting with moral hazard where agents have secret access to the credit market or to storage. The recursive structure is based on a generalized first-order approach, whose validity must be verified ex post. Thanks to the recursive formulation of the optimal contract, the verification procedure turns out to be numerically parsimonious as it can be performed using standard dynamic programming techniques with only one endogenous state variable: The agent's level of assets. We study the performance of our ex post verification test in practice by solving numerically three representative infinite horizon examples.     

努力不足、过度冒险与金融高管薪酬激励

次贷危机后人们普遍将金融高管薪酬激励不当视为引起危机的重要原因之一,并提出了相应的薪酬改革原则和方案,那么如何理解金融高管薪酬激励的特点及这些改革举措呢?本文依据金融中介的基本职能(通过收集信息和积极监督进行资产组合投资)和(投机性)金融资产的泡沫特性,认为金融高管的薪酬激励需要同时考虑诱导努力和风险控制,当面临经理可以同时控制努力水平和资产选择的双重道德风险时,由于资产选择对努力的替代效应,线性激励会导致无关性结果即激励强度与努力水平无关,造成努力不足,而投机性资产的泡沫性进一步强化了这种效应,并诱发经理的过度冒险行为,即使存在良好治理的董事会时也是如此。各种薪酬改革措施和监管政策讨论需要同时解决努力不足和过度冒险这两个基本问题。     

A spillover‐based theory of credentialism

I propose a model in which credentials, such as diplomas, are instrumentally valuable to workers. The model avoids an important criticism of standard job market signalling models by tying a worker's wage to their output. A worker's productivity is influenced by the skills of their co‐workers, where such skills arise from an ability‐augmenting investment that is made prior to matching with co‐workers. Credentials allow workers to demonstrate their investment to the labour market, thereby allowing them to match with high‐skill co‐workers in equilibrium. Despite the positive externality associated with a worker's investment, I show how overinvestment is pervasive in equilibrium.     

Incentives and disutility of effort in a linear piece-rated employment contract

Previous studies on contracts which involve incentives and risk sharing seldom give explicit treatment of the impact of the agent's disutility of effort on the incentive properties of the contract. It is shown that in a linear piece-rated employment contract which pays workers according to both the time worked and output, an increase in the piece rate does not necessarily induces more effort, as generally taken for granted. The incentive effect of the piece rate in fact depends on the extent to which the worker dislikes effort.     

Social comparison and performance: Experimental evidence on the fair wage–effort hypothesis

We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage–effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts while advantageous wage discrimination does not increase efforts on average. Two studies allow us to measure wage comparison effects at the individual level. We observe strongly heterogeneous wage comparison effects. We also find that reactions to wage discrimination can be attributed to the underlying intentions of discrimination rather than to payoff consequences.     

Monitored by your friends,not your foes: Strategic ignorance and the delegation of real authority

In this laboratory experiment we study the use of strategic ignorance to delegate real authority within a firm. A worker can gather information on investment projects, while a manager makes the implementation decision. The manager can monitor the worker. This allows her to exploit any information gathered by the worker, but also reduces the worker's incentives to gather information. Both effects are influenced by the interest alignment between manager and worker. Our data confirm the prediction that optimal monitoring depends non-monotonically on the interest alignment between managers and workers. Managers also show some preferences for control that seem to be driven by loss aversion. We also find mild evidence for hidden benefits and costs of control. However, behavioral biases have only limited effects on organizational outcomes.     

WHY IS JAPANESE WORKING TIME SO LONG?: WAGE-WORKING TIME CONTRACT MODELS*

Wage-working time contract models are used to analyse factors which can account for the long working hours of Japanese males. Although there are many factors which affect working time, our simulation shows that the clear gender division of labour in Japanese households is the most important. The simulation also shows that the wage gap and working time gap between large and small companies are explained mainly by the difference in the company's monopoly power, the worker's ability and the union's bargaining power. Moreover, if working time is not a bargaining issue and is determined by employers, it is longer than the case where it is a bargaining issue.