According to Lazear, workers and firms enter into long-term implicit contracts that discourage shirking and malfeasance by shifting compensation to the end of the contract. Such "delayed payment" contracts are less likely to occur in jobs in which it is comparatively simple to monitor worker effort. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to test that hypothesis. In particular, it tests whether jobs that involve repetitive tasks tend to be characterized by an absence of pensions, mandatory retirement, long job tenures, and high wages for older workers.

This paper considers wage-hours contracts in the context of a jobsearch model. The response of a risk-averse worker to a wage translation of the offer distribution is examined. A robust example illustrates that some "natural" results need not hold.

Recent papers have used household equivalence scales to construct measures of welfare inequality. This procedure rests on an often implicit value judgement, namely, that if, after adjustment for demographic characteristics, two households are on the same indifference curve, they are equally well off. That value judgement is not compelling, and there are situations in which it is ethically repugnant. This is particularly likely if tastes are functions of past experience and income.

Common stock with limited voting rights changes managerial incentives by allowing managers to separate ownership of equity from ownership of votes. This study compares managerial ownership before and after the creation of a class of limited voting common stock by 44 publicly traded firms between 1962 and 1984, and examines whether the event affects the wealth of current shareholders. There is no evidence that current shareholders are harmed by the creation of limited voting common stock.

We develop a simple behavioral model of intergenerational transfers, with individuals being subject to uncertainty about their children's incomes. Individuals differ with respect to innate ability and to wealth transfers they receive at birth. The distributions of total wealth, of total income, and of their components are uniquely determined from the equilibrium distribution of intergenerational transfers, for which existence and uniqueness are proven. For a particular utility function and provided that earned income follows a stable law, we show that so do all endogenous distributions. Intergenerational transfers are relatively more equally distributed than earnings, capital income, and lifetime wealth.

An employer must choose a procedure for screening job applicants, a rate of hire, a training program for new employees, a criterion for the retention of new employees after observing their on-the-job performance, a compensation package, and a rate of capital investment so as to minimize production costs across time. This paper examines the effects of employer size on these hiring and training decisions when larger employers have greater monitoring costs. A unique data set is employed to estimate the empirical relation among employer size and employer search, training, capital investment, and wages.

John H. Evans III, James M. Patton, Signaling and Monitoring in Public-Sector Accounting, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 25, Studies on Stewardship Uses of Accounting Information (1987), pp. 130-158

Our paper extends prior work on abandonment and replacement policies by analyzing the effects of both the Darby and the Fisher interest rate hypotheses. In most of the new cases developed, the effect of increased inflation on economic life is ambiguous. In the abandonment problem, we find a greater tendency under the Fisher hypothesis than under the Darby hypothesis for increased inflation to result in an extension of economic life. In contrast, for the replacement problem, there is a greater tendency under the Fisher hypothesis (than under Darby) for inflation to shorten the asset holding period.

Journal Article The Spatial Incidence of Local Retail Taxation Get access Ralph M. Braid Ralph M. Braid Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 102, Issue 4, November 1987, Pages 881–891, https://doi.org/10.2307/1884286 Published: 01 November 1987

In this paper, we compare the robustness in application of the Gaussian assumption of security return distributions to the robustness of the general stable assumption. Using actual stock return data to simulate the “real world, ” a stock market is constructed in which stock returns conform to a Gaussian distribution as well as to a stable Pareto-Levy distribution. Using these two sets of stock returns, efficient frontiers are generated under both assumptions of parametric environments. It is shown that the Gaussian assumption, and its incumbent statistical techniques, is preferable to the general stable assumption.