Applicants for any given job are more or less suited to fill it, and the firm will select the best among them. Increasing the wage offer attracts more applicants and makes it possible to raise the hiring standard and improve the productivity of the staff. Wages that optimize on the trade-off...

This paper reports on a two-task principal-agent experiment in which only one task is contractible. The principal can either offer a piece-rate contract or a (voluntary) bonus to the agent. Bonus contracts strongly outperform piece rate contracts. Many principals reward high efforts on both...

When a young entrepreneurial firm matures, it is often necessary to replace the founding entrepreneur by a professional manager. This replacement decision can be affected by the private benefits of control enjoyed by the entrepreneur which gives rise to a conflict of interest between the...

This note generalizes Feldstein’s (1976) criticism of Barro’s(1974) analysis for the case that the interest rate exceeds the growth rate. This is done by considering an economy in steady state where all agents hold “Barro expectations”: they believe that government debt must necessarily...

Bei der Festsetzung des Lohnsatzes für eine bestimmte Tätigkeit wird die Unternehmung den Lohnsatz weder unnötig hoch wählen noch so gering , dass es unwahrscheinlich wird, eine geeignete Arbeitskraft zu finden. So werden die Lohnsätze unter Berücksichtigung ihres Einflusses auf die...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These “high-performance work systems” are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

Although it is not possible, in general, to give a macro description of a micro model over the entire state space of the micro model, it is possible to aggregate exactly over a subspace. The set of micro states where aggregation is possible forms the aggregation set. The paper considers the...

Marshall's notion of the representative firm can be read as a macro notion with some resemblance to Keynes' aggregative concepts. Keynes' notions of aggregate demand and aggregate supply are fashioned after Marshall's definitions of demand and supply. Keynes starts with the Marshallian...