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Countercyclical Endogenous Uncertainty Shocks, Efficiency Wages and Procyclical Precautionary Labor Productivity

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  • Jean-Michel Grandmont

    (Department of Economics, University Of Venice CÃ Foscari; CREST (EXCESS, UMR CNRS 9194), University of Paris-Saclay, France; and RIEB Fellow, University of Kobe, Japan)

Abstract

This work introduces a new mechanism generating procyclical comovements of labor productivity, employment, through endogenous variations of workers' effort, in a simple model with efficiency wages, near a locally indeterminate steady state. A current endogenous countercyclical uncertainty shock makes risk averse workers more willing to provide imperfectly monitored "precautionary effort" by increasing their expected utility gain of not shirking. If workers' relative prudence is small and decreasing fast near the steady state, firms' efficiency wage contracts generate significant endogenous procyclical variations of effort, employment and labor productivity, in particular when the capital-efficient labor elasticity of substitution is smaller than and close to 1.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-Michel Grandmont, "undated". "Countercyclical Endogenous Uncertainty Shocks, Efficiency Wages and Procyclical Precautionary Labor Productivity," Working Papers 2017:25, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
  • Handle: RePEc:ven:wpaper:2017:25
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Efficiency wages; unemployment; expectation driven business cycles; conditionally heteroskedastic sunspots; countercyclical uncertainty shocks; prudence; procyclical labor effort and productivity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • E10 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - General
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General
    • J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts

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