Policy debates over proposed legislative labor policy changes include contentions that business investment will negatively respond to labor laws that favor labor. Research on labor policy, however, often assumes that investment is fixed. We present a sequential bargaining model in which labor...

Product demand, supply and internal coordination are all explicitly specified in a model to study how they jointly determine the division of labor (job span). A larger job span means fewer workers are used to cover a production process, which is helpful in coordination and product quality, but...

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A large literature has documented impressive productivity growth in China's state enterprises during the reform. The evidence has been used to support the view that China's enterprise reform has been successful. We cast doubt on this view by arguing that productivity is not a reliable measure of...

An equilibrium model of labor contracts under asymmetric information is developed. A profit-maximizing firm offers a wage but retains the right to lay off the worker based on its private observation of the worker's productivity ex post. The worker invests in specific human capital, unobservable...

To better understand the relationship between different types of firm ownership and management turnover, this study classifies ownership along two dimensions: the type of owner and the concentration of ownership. Within this framework, a unique data set is used to study the impact of management...