This study documents a strong inverse relationship between number of pages of labor contracts in effect and the productivity observed in a sample of ten unionized plants. It is argued that this relationship reflects the productivity-inhibiting effects of increases in the number and complexity of...

There is substantial evidence from the literature on individual wage determination that length of service to the firm is an important determinant of earnings and thus of labor productivity, holding constant employee at-tributes such as age, sex, and education. Earnings growth associated with...

We develop a framework that uses price and quantity information on both firms' outputs and inputs to assess the roles, on firm dynamics and welfare, of efficiency, input prices, demand/quality, idiosyncratic markups, and residual wedges. Our strategy nests previous approaches limited by data...

Productivity dispersion across firms is large and persistent, and worker reallocation among firms is an important source of productivity growth. The purpose of the paper is to estimate the structure of an equilibrium model of growth through innovation that explains these facts. The model is a...

In this paper, we first describe the 1990 DEED, the most recently constructed matched employer-employee data set for the United States that contains detailed demographic information on workers (most notably, information on education). We then use the data from manufacturing establishments in the...

This paper argues that a broad class of search models cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies in response to shocks of a plausible magnitude. In the U.S., the vacancy-unemployment ratio is 20 times as volatile as average labor...

We provide a test for statistical discrimination or rational stereotyping in in environments in which agents learn over time. Our application is to the labor market. If profit maximizing firms have limited information about the general productivity of new workers, they may choose to use easily...

The Balassa-Samuelson model, which explains real exchange rate movements in terms of sectoral productivities, rests on two components. First, for a class of technologies including Cobb-Douglas, the model implies that the relative price of nontraded goods in each country should reflect the...

What happens when a firm switches from paying hourly wages to paying piece rates? The theory developed below predicts that average productivity rises, that the firm will attract a more able work force and that the variance in output across individuals at the firm will rise as well. The theory is...