Higher wages increase labor costs but improve the productivity of the labor force through several channels. If firms take this into account and set their wages accordingly, the resulting wages may fail to adjust demand and supply but may engender phenomena like over-education, discrimination,...

Consider a labour market with heterogeneous workers. Firms recruit workers by fixing a hiring standard and a wage offer simultaneously. A more demanding hiring standard necessitates a better wage offer in order to attract enough qualified applicants. As a result, an efficiency wage effect is...

Conventional theory predicts that productivity gains lead to pay hikes. Pay increases, however, can influence labor productivity. But what about in a corporatist economy? Focusing on Germany, we use an innovative technique developed by Geweke to disentangle the relationship between pay and...

Efficiency wage theory predicts that the wage per unit of effort will be lower in intensively monitored sectors. This wage differential will increase in effort. Using employer-employee matched data from Ghana we provide evidence supporting this hypothesis.

Although the Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the culmination of a process of commercialisation, the precise nature of such a link remains unclear. This paper provides an analysis of one such link: the role of commercialisation in raising wages as impersonal labour market...

Higher wages increase labor costs but also improve the productivity of the labor force in several ways. If firms take this into account and set their wages accordingly, the resulting wages could fail to adjust demand and supply but may induce phenomena like over-education, discrimination,...

This paper considers the optimal level of firm-specific training by taking into account the positive effect of training on the expected duration of workers current employment. In the framework of an efficiency wage model, a short expected job tenure represents a disamenity that reduces the...

The presented paper proves that working time arrangements, which include hours flexibility and enable hours deposits, are appealing under product market uncertainty. The model integrates efficiency wage arguments into an implicit insurance-contract environment, thus extending the existing...

This paper shows that the existence and persistence of overeducation can be explained by an extension of the efficiency wage model. When calibrated to fit the amounts of overeducation found in most empirical studies, the model implies that both the relative wage and the relative employment rate...

New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been 'power-biased': they have allowed firms to monitor low-skill workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that 'power-biased technical change' in this sense may generate rising...