IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v78y1988i5p1046-66.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Implicit Contracts, Labor Mobility, and Unemployment

Author

Listed:
  • Arnott, Richard J
  • Hosios, Arthur J
  • Stiglitz, Joseph E

Abstract

Firms' inability to monitor their employees' search effort forces a tradeoff between risk-bearing and incentive considerations when designing employment-related insurance. Since the provision of insurance against firm-specific shocks adversely affects workers' incentives to find better jobs, the optimal contract provides only partial insurance: it prescribes low (high) wages and under (over) employment to encourage workers to leave (stay) at low (high) productivity firms; and it employs quits and layoffs as alternative means of inducing separations at low productivity firms, with the mix depending upon the relative efficiency of the on- and off-the-job search technologies. Our analysis of implicit contracts with asymmetric search information establishes that any consistent explanation for worksharing, layoffs, severance pay, quits and unemployment must focus on questions of labor mobility.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Arnott, Richard J & Hosios, Arthur J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1988. "Implicit Contracts, Labor Mobility, and Unemployment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(5), pages 1046-1066, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:78:y:1988:i:5:p:1046-66
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28198812%2978%3A5%3C1046%3AICLMAU%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A&origin=repec
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jahn, Elke J. & Wagner, Thomas, 2005. "Contractual Employment Protection and the Scarring Risk of Unemployment," IZA Discussion Papers 1813, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Vesna Stavrevska, 2011. "The efficiency wages perspective to wage rigidity in the open economy: a survey," International Journal of Manpower, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 32(3), pages 273-299, June.
    3. Leonard, J.S. & Van Audenrode, M., 1998. "The Dynamics of Wages and Employment," Papers 9806, Laval - Recherche en Politique Economique.
    4. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2002. "Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(3), pages 460-501, June.
    5. Tomi Kyyrä & Ralf A. Wilke, 2007. "Reduction in the Long-Term Unemployment of the Elderly: A Success Story from Finland," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 5(1), pages 154-182, March.
    6. Burguet, Roberto & Caminal, Ramon, 2008. "Does the market provide sufficient employment protection?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 406-422, June.
    7. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1991. "Methodological Issues and the New Keynesian Economics," NBER Working Papers 3580, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Bo Rasmussen, 2015. "An interpretation of the Gini coefficient in a Stiglitz two-type optimal tax problem," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 13(1), pages 17-26, March.
    9. Hakola, Tuulia, 2002. "Economic Incentives and Labour Market Transitions of the Aged Finnish Workforce," Research Reports 89, VATT Institute for Economic Research.
    10. Rosen, Sherwin, 1985. "Implicit Contracts: A Survey," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 23(3), pages 1144-1175, September.
    11. Arnott, Richard & Stiglitz, Joseph E., 1986. "Moral hazard and optimal commodity taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 1-24, February.
    12. Jonathan Thomas, 2000. "Fair Pay and a Wagebill Argument for Wage Rigidity and Excessive Employment Variability," CESifo Working Paper Series 234, CESifo.
    13. Jonathan P. Thomas, 1999. "Fair Pay and a Wagebill Arguement for Wage Rigidity and Excessive Employment Variability," Discussion Paper Series, School of Economics and Finance 199919, School of Economics and Finance, University of St Andrews.
    14. Bengt Holmstrom, 1980. "Equilibrium Long-Term Labor Contracts," Discussion Papers 414R, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    15. Wang, Yanguo & Jaenicke, Edward C., 2005. "Pooling, Separating, and Cream-Skimming In Relative-Performance Contracts," 2005 Annual meeting, July 24-27, Providence, RI 19522, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    16. Łukasz Hardt, 2018. "Prawa ceteris rectis w ekonomii," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 1, pages 9-31.
    17. Guerrazzi, Marco & Meccheri, Nicola, 2012. "From wage rigidity to labour market institution rigidity: A turning-point in explaining unemployment?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 189-197.
    18. Bo Sandemann Rasmussen, 2014. "An Interpretation of the Gini Coefficient in a Stiglitz Two-Type Optimal Tax Problem," Economics Working Papers 2014-15, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    19. Tsoulouhas, Theofanis, 1996. "Labor and credit contracts with asymmetric information and bankruptcy," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 40(8), pages 1665-1682, November.
    20. Lam, Kit-Chun & Liu, Pak-Wai & Wong, Yue-Chim, 1995. "Wage structure when wage offers are private," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 19-32, March.
    21. Engström, Per, 2002. "Optimal Non-Linear Income Taxation in Search Equilibrium," Working Paper Series 2002:18, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    22. Kyyrä, Tomi & Wilke, Ralf A., 2006. "Reduction in the Long-Term Unemployment of the Elderly: A Success Story from Finland Revised," Discussion Papers 396, VATT Institute for Economic Research.

    More about this item

    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:aea:aecrev:v:78:y:1988:i:5:p:1046-66. 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: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.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.