This paper analyzes the effects of the minimum wage on wage inequality, relative employment and over-education. We show that over-education can be generated endogenously and that an increase in the minimum wage can raise both total and low-skill employment, and produce a fall in inequality....

This paper accounts for work sharing and unemployment in an efficiency wage model.The Solow condition holds when working hours are exogenous. Under the assumption of endogeneity and using general forms for the effort and cost functions, we prove that work sharing may have a reducing impact on...

The importance of high salaries to circumvent bureaucratic corruption has been widely recognized in the policy debate. Yet, there appears to be much reluctance when it comes to the implementation. In this paper, we argue that deterring corruption through wage incentives may become prohibitively...

We consider a dual labor markets model in which the primary sector requires the presence of efficiency wage, while the secondary sector is competitive. We show that the Solow condition does not hold in a Stackelberg equilibrium where the primary sector acts as a leader and the secondary one as a...

When employers can incur losses from the labor relationship in a gift exchange game, they offer lower wages on average than in a no-loss relationship. Taking employers’ risk of losing money into account, employees exert more effort per wage unit.

I analyze the effects of introducing fixed-term contracts, leaving existing labor market regulations unchanged, on unemployment and labor market segmentation. I use an efficiency wage model in which the firm's choice of contracts and the renewal rate of fixed-term contracts into permanent ones...

This paper investigates the efficiency wage hypothesis and derives a tractable expression for the profit loss incurred by deviations from the efficiency wage. The extent of the wage deviation can be inferred from production function parameters. The resulting profit loss shown to depend upon the...

Standard economic wisdom generally stresses the benefits of increased competition on the product market. This paper proposes a model of monopolistic competition with an endogenous determination of workers flows in and out of unemployment, where wages are determined according to an efficiency...

This paper proposes a model of efficiency wage with endogenous workers flows in interaction with imperfect competition on the product markets. Subject to economy-wide shocks, firms hire and fire workers thus generating a certain turnover. We show that the intensity of this turnover negatively...

The employment relationship is to a large extent characterized by incomplete contracts, in which workers have a considerable degree of discretion over the choice of their work effort. This discretion at work kicks in the potential importance of “gift exchange” or reciprocity between workers...