Under symmetric information, a job protection law which says that a principal who has hired an agent today must also employ him tomorrow can only reduce the two parties' total surplus. The law restricts the principal's possibilities to maximize her profit, which equals the total surplus, because...

Under symmetric information, a job protection law which says that a principal who has hired an agent today must also employ him tomorrow can only reduce the two parties' total surplus. The law restricts the principal's possibilities to maximize her profit, which equals the total surplus, because...

This paper analyzes a labor market, where firms offer workers incentive contracts and make decisions about irreversible capital investments. The state authority regulates the institutional framework by choosing the level of unemployment benefits and the workers' bargaining power. Our results...

Employment scholarship focuses too much on laws and not enough on norms. Yet norms capture the complete terms of employment more accurately than most legal contracts. Virtually every aspect of the employment relation that falls outside the realm of contract lawyers - corporate culture, office...

The purpose of this paper is to show that the common law governing the employment of labor makes the distinction not only between employee and independent contractor but also between managerial control and agency. The idea is that common law precedents govern workers who are employed and...

Under the doctrine of vicarious liability, a deep-pocket principal is often held responsible for a third-party harm caused by a judgment-proof agent's negligence. We analyze the incentive contract used by the principal to control the agent's behavior when a court can make an error in determining...

We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...

This paper examines the optimal compensation scheme, job design, and severance policy for a team using a model of repeated moral hazard. In the optimal contract, the agent may be paid to quit after a poor performance. We show that a generous severance policy facilitates the adoption of team...