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Incentive Contracts and Total Factor Productivity

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  • Demougin, Dominique M.
  • Bental, Benjamin

Abstract

This paper proposes a transactions cost theory of total factor productivity. In a world with asymmetric information and transactions costs, effort, and thus productivity, must be induced by incentive schemes. Labor contracts trade off the marginal benefits and the marginal costs of effort. The latter include, in addition to the workers? marginal disutility of effort, also organizational costs and rents. As the economy grows, the optimal contracts change endogenously, inducing higher effort and measured productivity. Transactions costs are also affected by societal characteristics that determine the power of incentive contracts. Therefore, differences in these characteristics may explain cross-economy productivity differences. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the model is consistent both with time series and cross-country observations. --

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Center for Applied Statistics and Economics (CASE) in its series Papers with number 2004,41.

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Date of creation: 2004
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Handle: RePEc:zbw:caseps:200441

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Keywords: incentive contracts; total factor productivity; economic growth;

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References

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  1. Stephen L. Parente & Edward C. Prescott, 1997. "Monopoly rights: a barrier to riches," Staff Report 236, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
  2. Shi, Shouyong, 1998. "Search for a Monetary Propagation Mechanism," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 314-352, August.
  3. Robert E. Hall & Charles I. Jones, 1999. "Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per Worker than Others?," NBER Working Papers 6564, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  4. Prescott, Edward C, 1998. "Needed: A Theory of Total Factor Productivity," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(3), pages 525-51, August.
  5. Dominique Demougin & Claude Fluet, 1998. "Mechanism Sufficient Statistic in the Risk-Neutral Agency Problem," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 154(4), pages 622-, December.
  6. Paul R. Milgrom, 1979. "Good Nevs and Bad News: Representation Theorems and Applications," Discussion Papers 407R, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
  7. Demougin, Dominique & Fluet, Claude, 2001. "Monitoring versus incentives," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(9), pages 1741-1764, October.
  8. Narayana R. Kocherlakota, 2001. "Building blocks for barriers to riches," Staff Report 288, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
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Cited by:
  1. Jürgen Jerger & Jochen Michaelis, 2010. "The Fixed Wage Puzzle : Why Profit Sharing Is So Hard to Implement," Working Papers 283, Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung (Institute for East and South-East European Studies).
  2. Benjamin Bental & Dominique Demougin, 2006. "Institutions, Bargaining Power and Labor Shares," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2006-009, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
  3. Dominique Demougin & Anja Schöttner, 2010. "Technology adoption under hidden information," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 100(1), pages 1-18, May.
  4. Dominique Demougin & Claude Fluet & Carsten Helm, 2004. "Output and Wages with Inequality Averse Agents," Cahiers de recherche 0419, CIRPEE.
  5. Stephane Straub, 2008. "Infrastructure and Development: A Critical Appraisal of the Macro-level Literature," ESE Discussion Papers 178, Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh.
  6. Bental, Benjamin & Demougin, Dominique, 2010. "Declining labor shares and bargaining power: An institutional explanation," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 443-456, March.

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