Imposing liability on a company for sexual harassment by supervisors cannot be justified as promoting equality between the sexes, protection of workers, or protection of the owners of the company. Such liability might be justified to prevent breach of contract or behavior offensive to the...

In this paper we explain the prevalence of explicit contracts of employment, particularly those that embody high- rather than low-powered incentives and clauses that supersede the common law defaults. Our analysis is based on an understanding of two fundamental problems that arise when agency...

The purpose of this paper is to show that the common law governing the employment of labor makes the distinction not only between employee and independent contractor but also between managerial control and agency. The idea is that common law precedents govern workers who are employed and...

In this paper we consider a standard policy game between the Government and a union. In such a framework, we first investigate the effects of corporatism on macroeconomic performance vis-à-vis different kinds of non-co-operative equilibria. Afterwards, we introduce in the literature the issue...

An obvious answer to this question is the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis originally proposed by Zwi Griliches (1969). But the relatively poor performance of this hypothesis suggests that other explanations are needed. Here we consider the labour union behaviour in the wage bargaining...

In this paper we study the implications of the unemployment insurance (UI) financing system on wage levels and employment when labour markets are unionised and the revenues of the firms are stochastic. We use the basic monopoly union approach of wage and employment determination and assume that...

In this paper we propose straightforward extensions of multi-union, monopolistic competition models appearing in the recent literature on the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy. We extend these models from the Stackelberg equilibrium to the Nash equilibrium under variations in labor market...

The standard Real Business Cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the US institutional framework. Differences between the US and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate to study European business cycles....

If distortions in the labour market lead to inefficiently high unemployment, and policy makers cannot enter into a binding policy commitment before nominal wages are set, excessive inflation may result due to a credibility problem. This is the famous Kydland&Prescott- Barro&Gordon inflationary...

This paper investigates the effects of cooperation (corporatism) on macroeconomic performance by considering a rather standard policy game between the government and a monopoly union. We stress the shortcomings of the traditional way used to model cooperation in policy games (the maximization of...