We formulate an efficiency wage model with on-the-job search where wages depend on turnover and employers may use information on whether the searching worker is employed or unemployed as a hiring criterion. We show theoretically that ranking of job applicants by employment status affects both...

How are wages set in an open economy? What role is played by demand pressure, international competition, and structural factors in the labour market? How important is nominal wage rigidity and exchange rate policy for the medium term evolution of real wages and competitiveness? To answer these...

Recent studies of wage bargaining and unemployment have emphasized the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and that unions act in the interest of insiders. Yet it is typically assumed that insiders and recently hired outsiders are paid the same wage. We consider a model where the...

The basic idea is that employed and unemployed workers have diverging interest s and that wage decisions tend to favor the interest of those employe d. This is shown to imply that unemployment, once created, tends to p ersist after wage contracts have been negotiated anew. The reason is that the...

A contract between a risk-neutral firm and its risk-averse workers is considered under uncertainty about product demand. The authors show that profit sharing can be used to attain the efficient level of employment and, at the same time, preserve optimal risk sharing between the parties. Optimal...

While the consequences of nominal wage contracts have been rather thoroughly analyzed, there is no generally accepted theory of why such contracts prevail. In this paper, the author argues that the distinction between insiders and outsiders is important for understanding nominal wage contracts....