Negishi-Solow Efficiency Wages, Unemployment Insurance and Dynamic Deterministic Indeterminacy

This paper introduces efficiency wages designed to provide workers withincentives to make appropriate effort levels, and involuntary unemployment,along the pioneering lines of Negishi (1979), Solow (1979), Shapiro andStiglitz (1984), in a dynamic model involving heterogeneous agents and financialconstraints as in Woodford (1986) and Grandmont, Pintus and deVilder (GPV, 1998). Effort varies continuously while there is unemploymentinsurance funded out of taxation of labour incomes. Increasing unemploymentinsurance is beneficial to employment along the deterministic stationarystate, and can even in some cases lead to a Pareto welfare improvementfor all agents, through general equilibrium effects, by generating higher individualreal labour incomes, hence larger consumptions of employed andunemployed workers, and thus a higher production. On the other hand, thelocal (in)determinacy properties of the stationary state are opposite to thoseobtained in the competitive specification of the model (GPV, 1998) : localdeterminacy (indeterminacy) occurs for elasticities of capital-efficient laboursubstitution lower (larger) than a quite small bound. Increasing unemploymentinsurance is more likely to lead to local indeterminacy and thus togenerate dynamic inefficiencies due to the corresponding expectations coordinationfailures.