Many firms provide training to newly recruited employees in order to improve their productivity. This occurs in spite of the fact that the skills acquired by the workers are valuable in competing establishments, which may make offers to those workers and bid them away. Recent research suggests...

Specialist merchants and traders---agents who mediate the transfer of goods and services between producers and consumers---are central to the economic process, but there are few theoretical models in which the institution of intermediation is an endogenous part of an equilibrium. This paper...

Under the standard competitive model, if a tax change affects a group of workers with highly inelastic labor supply, their earnings will fall by essentially the entire nominal employer share of the tax increase. Allowing the wage to play a motivational role but maintaining the market-clearing...