This paper compares employment with spot trade of labor, formalizing arguments by Coase, Simon, and Williamson. With spot trade, an entrepreneur and a wealth-constrained worker bargain over different actions, and without agreement there is no trade. Employment is a relational contract that gives...

In March of 2017, when we were blissfully ignorant of what was to come in that same month a few years later, an associate professor of political science named Robert Kelly was being interviewed on BBC from his home office in South Korea. About a minute into the interview, his four year old...