The employment contract with externalised costs: the avatars of Marxian exploitation

Abstract

The paper pursues two aims. The first is to argue that the foundation of Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation is to be found, not in the labour theory of value, but rather in the contract of employment, the legal frame of the capital-labour relation. The second is to suggest that the partial externalisation of the reproduction cost of labour power has been an important source of relative surplus value, along with the productivity increase, emphasised by Marx, in the industries supplying wage goods.     

Regulation effects on resource allocation of a utility-maximizing firm

The literature on the effects of rate of return regulation on the allocation of resources was mostly devoted to the classical case of a profit-maximizing monopolist. An attempt is made in this paper to extend the analysis to a firm who maximizes a utility function with profits and revenue as arguments. We prove that a meaningful presentation of the regulation effects implies the formulation of two constraints. Whether the firm over-or undercapitalizes depends on whether the constraint is imposed as an upper or a lower limit. The higher the profit motive the higher the capital-labor ratio and the marginal rate of substitution between labor and capital.     

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.     

国际工程项目管理中的人力资源管理

国际工程承包在我国是自改革开放以来逐步发展起来的,是我国国际经济合作的重要组成部分。经过几十年的发展,在多变的国际经济政治环境中,众多参与国际工程承包项目的企业在风浪中历经种种磨难,饱尝酸甜苦辣,终于在国际工程承包领域赢得了一席之地,许多企业的业绩也已跻身国际大承包商的行列。加入WTO后,我国国际承包事业面临着新的机遇,各国取消了或正逐步取消在市场准入方面对中国公司的限制。因此,越来越开放的国际工程承包市场为国内大型建筑企业参与国际工程承包业务提供了更好的发展机遇。目前国际工程承包市场潜力巨大,仍然有很大…     

Fairness and the employment contract: North American regions versus Germany

Substantial evidence shows that North Americans are generallymore accepting of the market than Europeans and attribute marketoutcomes to a larger degree to effort or skill. Thus, NorthAmericans might be more accepting of layoffs and pay cuts thanGermans, and Germans might be more sensitive to the proceduresand conditions under which pay cuts and layoffs occur. The empiricalresults from our quasi-experiment are largely in line with thesehypotheses. The results may help to explain and be explainedby the different labour market institutions in the differentregions.     

Monitoring cost,disutility of effort and the forcing employment contract

If the state of nature is not observable, ex post, but work effort is, contracts between the risk neutral firm and the risk averse workers will stipulate the level of effort which will be monitored to ensure its delivery. In this paper it will be shown that when effort is stipulated and monitored, workers will be paid solely by a fixed wage payment independent of output. The size of the wage payment will depend on the level of effort stipulated, the marginal rate of substitution of effort for income and the cost of monitoring, provided that the cost is not prohibitively high.     

Exclusive contracts when the incumbent can establish a direct retailer

This paper constructs a model of anticompetitive exclusive dealings with potential downstream competition. Unlike in previous studies, the incumbent can establish a direct retailer with some fixed payment and can offer an exclusive contract to a downstream buyer twice. We show that the existence of these two options helps the incumbent deter socially efficient entry and earn almost monopoly profits even in the absence of scale economies and downstream competition.     

Equilibrium unemployment as a discipline device when finding employment is costly

Abstract In this paper, we study a model that incorporates costly job search into an efficiency wage model. We show that the relationship between wages and detection rates is ambiguous in this framework. The model can generate a positive relationship, consistent with empirically reasonable values for unemployment rates, job finding rates, and employment duration.     

新劳动合同法的实施对人力资源管理的若干影响

劳动合同法的实施对我国人力资源管理和开发带来了巨大的冲击。劳动合同法的施行对我国人力资源管理提出了更高的要求,原有人力资源管理和开发的方式、手段必然需要进行调整,来适应劳动合同法的规则。从对劳动合同法的解读中,分析其对人力资源管理和开发的要求,组织的人力资源管理需要从多角度、多层次进行转变,以适应劳动合同法的规定,满足组织的自身发展。     

Privatization when the public firm is as efficient as private firms

The literature on mixed oligopoly shows that when production costs are quadratic the public firm is privatized if the competition in the product market is high enough. Similarly, when the public firm is less efficient than private firms and the marginal costs of production are constant, the government privatizes the public firm if its efficiency is low enough. In this paper we analyze this issue assuming that the public firm maximizes the weighted sum of consumer surplus, private profit and the profit of the public firm. If all firms have the same marginal cost of production we obtain that for some value of parameters the government does not privatize the public firm regardless of how many private firms are competing in the product market. We also obtain that the consumer surplus can be lower in the mixed oligopoly than in the private oligopoly.     

Preference for output price uncertainty by the non-renewable resource extracting firm

We establish a general preference for price uncertainty by the price-taking, risk-neutral, non-renewable resource extracting firm with orthodox convex extraction costs. We prove that the relevant value function for profits over an interval is convex in output price.     

Product innovation and employment growth at the firm level: a quantile regression approach to inter-industry differences

This article demonstrates that the relationship between product innovativeness and employment growth at the firm level depends on (i) market responses to innovations with different degrees of novelty, (ii) the location of firms on the growth distribution and (iii) industry conditions. As a result, research that uses standard regression techniques such as OLS and does not account for innovation characteristics and industry differences fail to properly describe this relationship     

The firm as a subeconomy

This article explores the economic role of the firm in a marketeconomy. The analysis begins with a discussion and critiqueof the property rights approach to the theory of the firm asexposited in the recent work by Hart and Moore ('Property Rightsand the Nature of the Firm'). It is argued that the Hart-Mooremodel, taken literally, can only explain why individuals ownassets, but not why firms own assets. In particular, the logicof the model suggests that each asset should be free standingin order to provide maximal flexibility for the design of individualincentives. These implications run counter to fact. One of thekey features of the modern firm is that it owns essentiallyall the productive assets that it employs. Employees rarelyown any assets; they only contribute human capital. Why is theownership of assets clustered in firms? This article outlinesan answer based on the notion that control over physical assetsgives control over contracting rights to those assets. Metaphorically,the firm is viewed as a miniature economy, an 'island' economy,in which asset ownership conveys the CEO the power to definethe 'rules of the game', that is, the ability to restructurethe incentives of those that accept to do business on (or with)the island. The desire to regulate trade in this fashion stemsfrom contractual externalities characteristic of imperfect informationenvironments. The inability to regulate all trade through asingle firm stems from the value of exit rights as an incentiveinstrument and a tool to discipline the abuse of power.     

Optimal risk shifting vs efficient employment in Illyria: The labor-managed firm under asymmetric information

Using an optimal contract framework, the recent literature showed how labor-managed firms (LMFs) can reach efficient employment, internal risk sharing, and risk shifting to outside investors if all information is public. This paper analyzes the LMF under asymmetric information between members and investors. Sections 2 and 3 explore one-period arrangements in a way which parallels the recent work on optimal wage-employment contracts in capitalist firms. Our main result is that, contrary to the Coase theorem, the two specifications of property rights entail different allocations of risk and employment. Section 4 shows how long-term arrangements ease the conflict between optimal employment and risk shifting.     

The employment effect of reforming a public employment agency

By how much does an increase in operating effectiveness of a public employment agency (PEA) and a reduction of unemployment benefits reduce unemployment? Using a recent labour market reform in Germany as background, we find that an enhanced effectiveness of the PEA explains about 20% of the observed post-reform unemployment decline. The role of unemployment benefit reduction explains just about 5% of the observed decline. Due to disincentive effects resulting from the reform, the reform of the PEA could have had an even higher impact on unemployment reduction if there had been less focus on long-term unemployed workers.     

Financial markets and firm size: The role of employment protection laws and barriers to entrepreneurship

This article provides evidence on the institutional determinants of firm size for the period 1980–1998. Using a comprehensive longitudinal database across 29 industrial sectors in 15 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, we study how labour regulations and barriers to entrepreneurship (BE) affect industrial organization in the presence of capital market frictions. We show that strict employment protection laws (EPL) and high BE negatively affect firm size in sectors that are more dependent on external funds. Our findings demonstrate that the interaction between market regulations and financial market imperfections help to explain some of the differences in firm structure across countries.     

The division of innovative labour: when does customer codevelopment contribute to firm innovation performance?

ABSTRACT

Innovative firms often involve customers in their product development to drive innovation outcomes. However, few have empirically examined how this division of innovative labour affects innovation performance. Drawing on prior studies and the knowledge-based theory of the firm, we theorise conditions under which customer codevelopment benefits innovation performance. By examining panel data from Swiss firms, we provide the first empirical account of the performance effects of customer codevelopment based on a large-scale survey sample. We find that a firm's absorptive capacity reinforces the relationship between customer codevelopment and innovation performance. We elaborate on the implications of these findings for the literatures on customer codevelopment and open innovation.