Introduction -- Dramatis personae -- The Potemkin market -- The Sisyphus savings system -- La Grande illusion -- A kind of magic -- The economy's helminths -- Collateral damage -- On value and values -- A financial renaissance? -- Epilogue: twilight of the gods of finance

We analyze the impact on a firm's profits and optimal wage rates, and on the distribution of workers' earnings, when workers compare their earnings with those of co-workers. We consider a low-productivity worker who receives lower wage earnings than a high-productivity worker. When the...

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences. In the underlying theoretical framework, such preferences lead to a link between a firm's operating profits on the one hand and wages of workers employed by this firm on the...