We study incentive-compatible labour contracts in the case where individual productivity, preference for leisure and time preference rate are unobservable by the principal in a two-period model. We first reduce this three-dimensional problem to a standard one-dimensional screening problem....

We study incentive-compatible labor contracts in the case where both individual productivity and subjective discount rate are unobservable by the rm. We rst show that unidimensional manifolds of agents group on the same contract. High , low agents may choose the same contract as low , high...

Using a substitution property of worker’s types (productivity and time preference), we propose an explanation for both fixed-wages and wage differentials. Fixed-wages result in bunching at the optimum. Equally productive workers with different time preference accept different wages.