By linking product market factors to job design, this paper provides an explanation to the puzzling question of why firms under rather similar labor market conditions sometimes adopt homogeneous, but other times heterogeneous, job designs. Compared to broadly defined jobs (BDJs), narrowly...

Policy debates over proposed legislative labor policy changes include contentions that business investment will negatively respond to labor laws that favor labor. Research on labor policy, however, often assumes that investment is fixed. We present a sequential bargaining model in which labor...

Product demand, supply and internal coordination are all explicitly specified in a model to study how they jointly determine the division of labor (job span). A larger job span means fewer workers are used to cover a production process, which is helpful in coordination and product quality, but...