This paper studies the value of firms and their hiring and firing decisions in an environment where the productivity of the workers depends on how well they match with their co-workers and the firm acts as a coordinating device. Match quality derives from a production technology whereby workers...

Local network externalities are present when the network externalities associated with entering a certain network depends not only on the total number of agents in the network, but on the identity of the agents in the network. We explore the consequences of local network externalities within a...

We examine the origins and outcome of entrepreneurship on the basis of exceptionally comprehensive Norwegian matched worker-firm-owner data. In contrast to most existing studies, our notion of entrepreneurship not only comprises self-employment, but also employment in partly self-owned limited...

We study equilibrium wage contracts in a labour market with adverse selection and moral hazard. Firms offer incentive contracts to their employees to motivate them to exert effort. Providing incentives comes, however, at a cost, as it leads to misallocation of effort across tasks. With ex ante...

Partner selection is a vital feature of human behavior with important consequences for individuals, families, and society. Hypergamy occurs when a husband's earning capacity systematically exceeds that of his wife. We provide a theoretical framework that rationalizes hypergamy even in the...

This paper proposes an explicit model of spillovers through labor flows in a framework with search frictions. Firms can choose to innovate or to imitate by hiring a worker from a firm that has already innovated. We show that if innovating firms can commit to long-term wage contracts with their...

We experimentally investigate buyer and seller behavior in small markets with two kinds of frictions. First, a subset of buyers may have (severely) limited information about prices, and choose a seller at random. Second, sellers may not be able to serve all potential customers. Such capacity...

We analyze the interaction between intertemporal incentive contracts and search frictions associated with on-the-job search. In our model, agency problems call for wage contracts with deferred compensation. At the same time workers do on-the-job search. Deferred compensation improves workers'...

All OECD countries have either legally mandated severance pay or compensations imposed by industry-level bargaining in case of employer initiated job separations. According to the extensive literature on Employment Protection Legislation such transfers are either ineffective or highly...

In an optimizing model of epidemics several externalities arise when agents shield to avoid infection. Optimizing behaviour delays herd immunity but also reduces overall infections to approximately the minimum consistent with herd immunity. For reasonable parameter values, and with no vaccine,...