Many firms adjust employment in a "lumpy" manner -- infrequently and in large bursts. In this paper, I show that lumpy adjustments can arise from concerns about the incentives of remaining workers. Specifically, I develop a model in which a firm's productivity depends on its workers' effort and...

This paper addresses the puzzle how employers that invest in general human capital can gain an information advantage with respect to the ability of their employees when training is certified by credible external institutions. We apply an established model from the employer-learning literature...

This paper jointly analyses the consequences of adverse selection and signalling on entry wages of skilled employees. It uses German linked employer employee panel data (LIAB) and introduces a measure for relative productivity of skilled job applicants based on apprenticeship wages. It shows...

This paper studies optimal taxation of income and education when employers cannot observe workers' productivity and workers signal their productivity to firms by choosing both quantity and quality of education. We characterize constrained efficient allocations and derive conditions under which...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

In this paper, we examine the consequences of imperfect information on the pattern of transfers from parents to children. Drawing on the theory of mechanism design, we consider a model of family contract with two levels of effort. We prove that equal transfers among children are expected under...