Wage-Experience Contracts and Employment Status

The objective of this paper is to study equilibrium in a labour market in which identical firms post wage-contracts and ex-ante identical workers search on the job. The main novelty of this paper is to generate dispersion in contract offers by allowing firms to condition their offers on workers' initial experience and employment status although these characteristics do not affect productivity. In this context I show that changes in firms' information set at the moment of recruiting can have strong effects on wage dispersion and turnover without changing the agents' payoffs. I construct an equilibrium in which firms compete in promotion contracts. Employed and more experience workers are offered better contracts with shorter time-to-promotion periods. This implies contract offers are disperse within and between experience levels. The earnings distribution within the firm is then such that workers who have acquired more 'outside' firm experience and more tenure are higher in the earnings scale. This generates workers cohort effects within a firm that depend on the level of experience at which they where hired

Recruitment Policy When Firms Observe Workers' Employment Status: an Equilibrium Search Approach

This paper considers an equilibrium search model, where firms use information on a worker's labour market status when recruiting new hires, and all workers search for a job. We show that firms segment their workforce in two. Unemployed workers are offered a lower wage than the workers they recruit from employment in a competing firm even when these workers have the same productivity. The unique equilibrium is given by the Diamond outcome in the market for unemployed workers and the Burdett and Mortensen (B-M) outcome in the market for employed workers. We show that the offer and earnings distributions derived in the model are first order stochastically dominated by the ones given in B-M and all workers are worse off. We also show that in this environment information on employment status is sufficient for firms to obtain the same profits as if they had complete information about workers' reservation wages and outside offers

Trade Blocks and the Gravity Model: Evidence from Latin American Countries

We apply the gravity model to examine the effects of the Andean Community and Mercosur on both intra-regional and intra-industrial trade in the period 1980-1997. After accounting for size and distance effects, the Andean Community preferential trade agreements had a significant effect on both the differentiated and reference products, in particular capital intensive goods. In contrast, Mercosur preferential trade agreements only had a positive effect on the capital intensive subcategory of the reference products

The Network Composition of Aggregate Unemployment

We develop a theory of unemployment in which workers search for jobs through a network of firms, the labor flow network (LFN). The lack of an edge between two companies indicates the impossibility of labor flows between them due to high frictions. In equilibrium, firms' hiring behavior correlates through the network, modulating labor flows and generating aggregate unemployment. This theory provides new micro-foundations for the aggregate matching function, the Beveridge curve, wage dispersion, and the employer-size premium. Using employer-employee matched records, we study the effect of the LFN topology through a new concept: `firm-specific unemployment'

Disaggregating the Matching Function

The aggregate matching (hiring) function relates gross hires to labor market tightness. Decompositions of aggregate hires show how the hiring process differs across different groups of workers and of firms. Decompositions include employment status in the previous month, age, gender and education. Another separates hiring between part-time and full-time jobs, which show different patterns in the current recovery. Shift-share analyses are done based on industry, firm size and occupation to show what part of the residual of the aggregate hiring function can be explained by the composition of vacancies. The hiring process appears to shift as a recovery starts, coinciding with shifts in the Beveridge curve. The paper also discusses some issues in the modeling of the labor market

Code for "An Equilibrium Search Model with Optimal Wage-Experience Contracts"

This code numerically solves for the equilibrium in the paper at http://repository.essex.ac.uk/2734

Wage-Tenure Contracts, Experience and Employment Status

The objective of this paper is to study equilibrium in a labour market with search frictions a la Burdett and Mortensen (1998). Identical firms post wage-contracts and ex-ante identical workers search for a job while unemployed and for a better one while employed. Although this situation has been analysed before, Stevens (2004) and Burdett and Coles (2003), the main novelty of this paper is to allow firms to offer contracts according to the worker's initial experience and employment status. We construct an equilibrium in which firms compete in 'promotion' contracts and offer unemployed workers longer 'probation'periods than to employed workers. An interesting feature of this equilibrium is that outside offers become more generous with experience. This generates workers cohort effects within a firm that depend on the level of experience at which they where hired. The distribution of earnings within the firm is then such that workers who have acquired more 'outside' firm experience and more tenure are higher in the earnings scale

Wage dispersion and wage dynamics within and across firms

This paper examines wage dispersion and wage dynamics in a stock-flow matching economy with on-the-job search. Under stock-flow matching, job seekers immediately become fully informed about the stock of viable vacancies. If only one option is available, monopsony wages result. With more than one firm bidding, Bertrand wages arise. The initial and expected threat of competition determines the evolution of wages and thereby introduces a novel way of understanding wage differences among similar workers. The resulting wage distribution has an interior mode and prominent, well-behaved tails. The model also generates job-to-job transitions with both wage cuts and jumps

Quit turnover and the business cycle: A survey

Workers might change jobs for many reasons. They might fall out with the boss and so decide to change employer, or learn that the job is not really for them, or they might accept a poorly paid job as being preferable to being unemployed - say gathering work experience improves one's CV - and continue search for something better while employed. A slightly different reason is that some firms may hit a sticky patch and, fearing the risk of layoff, employees quit to more permanent employment elsewhere. A competitive labor market ensures such quit turnover is efficient: it reallocates workers from less to more productive matches. In non-competitive labor markets, however, firms always have the incentive to increase profit by paying a wage below marginal product while, in the absence of slavery contracts, employees always retain the option of quitting to better paid employment. The interaction between these two forces need not generate efficient outcomes. The focus of this chapter is to consider new developments in the search and matching literature where wages, quit turnover and unemployment are endogenously determined in economies with aggregate shocks. The aim of the discussion is not only to highlight possible market failures but also to explain how on-the-job search and employee turnover fundamentally affect our understanding of fluctuations in aggregate employment