Nearly 75 years ago, John Hicks introduced and formalized the concept of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour and its relation to derived demand. The resulting formula has proven very useful in understanding the derived demand for productive factors, the distribution of...

Based on the author's previous paper entitled “A Reconsideration of the Theory of Perfect Competition”, which demonstrates the monopolistic nature that even purely theoretically perfect competition has, this paper identifies the factors that determine the equilibrium in the labor market as...

Over the past thirty years, the income gap between capital and labour has widened, a shift accompanied by an increase in dominant firms’ market power. To understand the underlying causes, our study integrates imperfect competition in both product and labour markets, revealing how different...

Standard monopsony theory, old and new, lacks a realistic criterion to distinguish between monopsony and competitive prices. Consequently, prominent Austrian critics have by and large dismissed it. However, the idea that human action occurs in discrete steps, and consequently that the elasticity...

Understanding whether technical change is beneficial or detrimental for employment is at the center of the policy debate, especially in phases of economic recession. So far, the effects of innovation - in its manifold declinations and intrinsic complexity - on labour demand have proven to be not...

A neoclassical factor demand model for structures, equipment and labour is analyzed. It incorporates a variety of dynamic specifications, such as a multi-period time-to-build for structures, internal adjustment costs for each production factor, and external investment adjustment costs....

The paper explains how a country can fall into a quot;low-skill, bad-job trap,quot; in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms...

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze bargaining between a firm and a finite set of workers. In particular employment choice and the payoffs in equilibrium are studied. In the model, the firm first selects the workers it wants to hire. The selected workers then decide whether they want to...

During transition, maintaining employment and providing a social safety net to the unemployed are important to social stability, which in turn is crucial for the productivity of the whole economy. Because independent institutions for social safety are lacking and firms with strong profit...