We show that business cycles reduce welfare through a decrease in the average level of employ- ment in a labor market search model with learning on-the-job and skill loss during unemployment. A negative correlation between unemployment and vacancies implies, via the concavity of the matching...

This paper extends the equilibrium business cycle framework to incorporate ex ante skill heterogeneity among workers. Consistent with the empirical evidence, skilled and unskilled workers in the model face the same degree of cyclical variation in real wages although unskilled workers are subject...

If agents in workhorse business cycle models with financial frictions are allowed to index contracts to observable aggregates, they share aggregate financial risk (almost) perfectly. Thus, the borrowing-constrained capital holders' wealth share does not collapse following adverse shocks and the...

This article employs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework to examine asymmetric information and limited contract enforcement in financial markets, where firms have access to both internal and external sources of finance. It considers limited enforcement of financial contract in the...

This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard, private information and risk-averse agents. Two vertically differentiated firms compete for agents by offering contracts with fixed and variable...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

This article develops a new rationale for the emergence of pay-for-performance contracts where the labor market is competitive, workers are risk averse, and firms are risk neutral and unaware of workers' productivities. The article shows that the prevalence of pay for performance rises and the...

We analyze the impact of social comparison on optimal contract design under imperfect labor market competition for managerial talent. Adding a disutility of social comparison as induced by a ranking of verifiable efforts to the multi-task model by Bénabou and Tirole (2016), we demonstrate that...

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are “coercive,” in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We...