This paper explains involuntary unemployment in terms of the response of firms to workers' group behavior. Workers' effort depends upon the norms determining a fair day's work. In order to affect those norms, firms may pay more than the market-clearing wage. Industries that pay consistently more than the market-clearing wage are primary, and those that pay only the market-clearing wage are secondary. Thus, this paper also gives a theory for division of labor markets between primary and secondary.

This paper derives an optimal job-searching strategy for workers on layoff, and an optimal recall policy for firms, when each side anticipates the other side's actions correctly. It shows that workers search for an alternative job only if the probability of recall falls below a critical level, and that firms may recall before the recovery of demand, depending on the costs of laying off and hiring workers, and the probability of losing workers on layoff. Through the use of optimal job searching and recall policies, the paper derives expressions for the duration of layoff unemployment and discusses briefly their comparative-static properties.

Richard A. Brecher, Ehsan U. Choudhri; Immiserizing Investment from Abroad: The Singer-Prebisch Thesis Reconsidered*, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, V