IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp5391.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Hierarchical Organization and Inequality in an Economy with an Implicit Market for Productive Time

Author

Listed:
  • Candelon, Bertrand

    (Maastricht University)

  • Dupuy, Arnaud

    (University of Luxembourg)

Abstract

This paper proposes an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economy with an implicit market for productive time. In this economy, agents have limited productive time and can choose to produce in autarky, buy productive time from helpers to increase own production or, sell their productive time to a leader and thereby give up own production. This implicit market gives rise to the formation of teams, organized in hierarchies with one leader at the top and helpers below. We show that relative to autarky, hierarchical organization leads to higher within and between team payoffs/productivity inequality. We investigate this link empirically in the context of road cycling. We show that the rise in performance inequality in the peloton since the 1970s is merely due to a rise in within team performance inequality and consistent with a change in the hierarchical organization of teams and an increase in the helping intensity within team.

Suggested Citation

  • Candelon, Bertrand & Dupuy, Arnaud, 2010. "Hierarchical Organization and Inequality in an Economy with an Implicit Market for Productive Time," IZA Discussion Papers 5391, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5391
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp5391.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    productive time; hierarchical organization; professional cycling; helping time; inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5391. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.