This paper considers a real business cycle model with labor search frictions where two types of incentive pay are explicitly introduced following the insights from the micro literature on performance pay (e.g. Lazear, 1986). While in both schemes workers and firms negotiate ahead of time-t...

This paper studies the role of match quality for contractual arrangements, wage dynamics and workers' retention. We develop a model in which profit maximizing firms offer a performance-based pay arrangement to retain workers with relatively high match-specific productivity. The key implications...

To explain potential sources of wage rigidity this article analyzes a model of reciprocalkindness applied to a repeated ultimatum game with changing and nonzeroconflict payoffs. The model is also tested in a laboratory experiment. The resultsare compatible with the rentsharingapproach to wage...

In general, empirical studies having evaluated with firm individual data the effects of structural labour market reforms in European countries do not reach unambiguous conclusions. In particular, they find that reforms increasing incentives to lower the number of temporary labour contracts do...

We show that, in settings where meetings can be multilateral, the allocation rule proposed by Mortensen (1982) can be relatively straightforward to implement: as a local auction conducted by sellers. The implications of using this mechanism in a simple model of the labor market are then...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

Over the past decade, the share of jobs not controlled by the state has increased considerably, whilst employment in agriculture has declined, against the backdrop of ongoing urbanisation. Over 200 million people have been drawn into urban areas through official or unofficial migration, despite...

This paper analyses the emergence of the informal economy in the environment characterised by non-competitive labour markets with wage bargaining. We develop a simple extension of the standard search model à la Pissarides (2000) with formal and informal sectors to show how a government's...

The excessive compensation packages of CEOs of U.S. corporations in recent years have brought the issue of fairness to the foreground in economics. The conventional wisdom is that the free market for labor, which determines the pay packages, cares only about efficiency and not fairness. We...