Contractual Fragility, Job Destruction, and Business Cycles
Abstract
The authors develop a theory of labor contracting in which negative productivity shocks lead to costly job loss, despite unlimited possibilities for renegotiating wage contracts. Such fragile contracts emerge from firms' trade-offs between robustness of incentives in ongoing employment relationships and costly specific investment. Contractual fragility can serve as a powerful mechanism for propagating underlying productivity shocks: in a simulated matching market equilibrium, i.i.d. shocks are greatly magnified in their effect on market output, and the effect is highly persistent. The authors also explore novel motivations for government policies that strengthen employment relationships. Copyright 1997, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by MIT Press in its journal Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Volume (Year): 112 (1997)
Issue (Month): 3 (August)
Pages: 873-911
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Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/
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Web: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=00335533
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