Consider a labour market with heterogeneous workers. Firms recruit workers by fixing a hiring standard and a wage offer simultaneously. A more demanding hiring standard necessitates a better wage offer in order to attract enough qualified applicants. As a result, an efficiency wage effect is...

Efficiency wage theory predicts that the wage per unit of effort will be lower in intensively monitored sectors. This wage differential will increase in effort. Using employer-employee matched data from Ghana we provide evidence supporting this hypothesis.

By relaxing the common efficiency wage assumption of exogenous shirking detection probabilities, we demonstrate how standards and efficiency wages are related. In a more general setting where the probability of detection depends upon the equilibrium effort level of non-shirkers, we show that the...

Whilst existing efficiency wage literature assumes detection probabilities of shirkers are exogenous, this paper finds them positively and endogenously dependent on non-shirkers' effort. It shares the result with the endogenous monitoring models where, in some regions, workers reduce effort in...

The increasing wage inequality in many countries is usually seen as brought about by economic forces that drive for economic efficiency within a changing technological and social environment. Ethical evaluations of these developments diverge, yet the view that free labor markets drive to...

This paper studies how altruism between managers and employees affects relational incentive contracts. To this end we develop a simple dynamic principal-agent model where both players may have feelings of altruism or spite toward each other. The con- tract may contain two types of incentives for...

Although the Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the culmination of a process of commercialisation, the precise nature of such a link remains unclear. This paper models and analyzes such link: the role of commercialisation in raising efficiency wages as impersonal and anonymous...

This paper studies the cyclical dynamics of Mortensen and Pissarides' (1994) model of job creation and destruction when workers' effort is not perfectly observable, as in Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984). An occasionally-binding no-shirking constraint truncates the real wage distribution from below,...

We study employment, employee effort, wages and profit sharing when firms face stochastic revenue shocks and when base wages and profit shares are determined through negotiations. The negotiated profit share depends positively on the relative bargaining power of the trade union and it has...

Within an efficiency wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reforms that change the progressivity of the labour tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both the wage tax and tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labour taxation towards the...