Knowledge that Transforms

This article develops and tests an implication of risk-shifting in labor market implicit contracts. A 2-period implicit contract model is presented. The optimal contract, in the face of bankruptcy constraints, calls for a real wage that responds asymmetrically to permanent and temporary shocks to the firm's revenue function. In particular, the real wage responds more to a permanent shock than to a temporary shock of the same size. This implication is tested on 12 4-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code industries. Eleven of the 12 industries sampled show evidence that supports the asymmetric wage response implication.

Previous studies of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) design ignore the impact of UI on human capital investment decisions. We show that fully experience-rated UI increases investment in human capital when future employment opportunities are not known with certainty. In the presence of wage taxation, the optimal level of UI trades off full insurance and the impact, through human capital, of UI on the wage tax base. This trade-off, in turn, depends on the extent to which human capital accumulation reallocates labor between market and untaxed nonmarket activities. Taxation of UI benefits increases the optimal level of UI provision.

Recent developments in rationing theory are used to examine the differences between the effects of in-kind and cash transfers on labor supply. It is not possible to tell a priori which type of transfer will cause the greater reduction in hours of work; the answer depends on the extent to which in-kind transfers distort consumption choices and on the relationship between the transferred commodities and leisure. Hicks-Allen complements can cause greater reductions in labor supply than equally generous cash transfers, while strong Hicks-Allen substitutes can induce increases in market work.

"We argue that the postwar baby boom [in the United States] caused substantial fluctuations in both the economic rewards to education and educational attainment over the last 3 decades. If substitutability between young and old workers diminishes with education, the present value of lifetime earnings for a boom cohort is depressed more for highly educated workers, reducing incentives for educational attainment. The opposite is true for pre- and postboom cohorts. The diminishing substitutability hypothesis explains the declines in both the returns to college and college completion rates in the 1970s and predicts a substantial increase in educational attainment for postboomers."

A general selection model is estimated in which workers select across four labor markets-private/nonunion, privat e/union, public/nonunion, and public/union. Evidence is found of posi tive selection bias in the private/nonunion sector and of negative se lection bias in the public/union sector. Union wage differentials in the public and private sectors as well as public/private wage differe ntials are contrasted. The authors discuss when it is appropriate to use each type of differential.

A general stochastic model of optimal job separation behavior is developed in the paper. The model nests both the job training and the job-matching hypotheses of the wage-tenure relationship as special cases. The purpose of the paper is to compare the implications of the two hypotheses for job turnover. That expected wealth-maximizing separation strategies are qualitatively identical under the two hypotheses is the principal theoretical result. Although the empirical implications of the two hypotheses for observations on the distribution of completed job-spell lengths are similar as a consequence, they are not quite identical.

This article evaluates the quality of workers' information regarding pension offerings using both administrative records and worker reports of pension provisions. Missing and incorrect information is wide-spread. Unionized employees, higher income workers, better educated workers, and those with seniority are better informed about their pensions. There are also demographic differences: minorities have less pension knowledge than whites, but women are better informed than men along several pension dimensions. Myopia about pension incentive structures is troubling since workers may save or consume suboptimally, change jobs, or retire earlier than they would have if equipped with better pension information.

This article investigates racial differences in 1985-86 salaries of individual professional basketball players. White and black players earn similar mean compensation; however, controlling for a variety of productivity and market-related variables and for the endogeneity of player draft position, we find a significant ceteris paribus black compensation shortfall of about 20%. Further, we find that all else equal, including team performance and market factors, replacing one black player with an identical white player raises home attendance by 8,000 to 13,000 fans per season. The compensation and attendance results together are consistent with the idea of customer discrimination.

In a labor market with tied hours-wage packages and wage dispersion for a particular type of job, constrained workers may be willing to sacrifice wage gains for better hours when changing jobs. Likewise, workers may accept jobs offering undesirable hours only if the associated wage gains are large. We investigate this issue empirically by examining whether overemployment and underemployment on the initial and new job affects the relation between hours changes and wage changes for quitters. Our results generally support the view that an individual requires compensation to work in a job that, given the individual's particular preferences, offers unattractive hours.

A model of wage determination in unionized oligopolistic industries is developed and used to compare the outcome of collective bargaining under two different bargaining structures-one in which the workers of each firm are represented by separate and independent unions (local bargaining) and one in which a national union represents all workers in the industry. In both cases, the bargaining problem has a unique outcome with industrywide bargaining resulting in higher wages. In addition, industrywide unions are inherently stable in that there are no incentives for independent unions to attempt to cheat on the collusive agreement.