In market economies, identical workers receive very different wages, violating the Walrasian 'law of one price'. We argue that in the absence of a Walrasian auctioneer to coordinate trade, wage dispersion among identical workers is an equilibriu m phenomenon. Moreover, wage dispersion is...

In this paper we extend a job search-matching model with firm-specific investments in training developed by Mortensen (1998) to allow for different offer arrival rates in employment and unemployment. The model by Mortensen changes the original wage posting model (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) in...

The wage posting approach to search equilibrium is incorporated into the equilibrium unemployment approach in the paper. The unique equilibrium to the wage posting game analysed is a distribution of wage offers of the same functional form as that originally derived by Burdett and Mortensen...

The level of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay responds asymmetrically to good and bad news about the CEO's ability. The average CEO captures approximately half of the surpluses from good news, implying CEOs and shareholders have roughly equal bargaining power. In contrast, the average CEO bears...

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets' potential to assume functions typically performed by networks of personal connections, first among them the transmission of information. This paper begins from a model of labor markets where social ties are stronger between similar individuals...

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets’ potential to take over functions typically performed by networks of personal connections. First among them is the reliable transmission of information. In this paper we begin from a model of labour markets where social ties are stronger...

We propose a search equilibrium model in which homogenous firms post wages along with a vacancy to attract job-seekers, while homogenous unemployed workers invest in costly search. The key innovation relies on the organization of the search market and the search behavior of the job-seekers. The...

In market economies, identical workers appear to receive very different wages, violating the "law of one price" of Walrasian markets. We argue in this paper that in the absence of a Walrasian autioneers to coordinate trade": (i) wage dispersion among identical workers is very often an...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...