Labor Market Frictions, Job Insecurity and the Flexibility of the Employment Relationship

We analyze a search model of the labor market in which firms and workers meet bilaterally and negotiate over wages in the presence of private information. We show that a fall in labor market frictions induces more aggressive wage bargaining behavior which in turn leads to a costly increase in job insecurity. This adverse insecurity effect can be so large that firms and workers who are in an employment relationship can be made worse off by a fall in labor market frictions. In contrast, firms and workers who are not in an employment relationship and are searching the market for a counterpart are always made better off by such a fall in labor market frictions. We then endogenize the organizational structure of the employment relationship and show that a fall in labor market frictions induces a one off reorganization in which firms and workers switch from a rigid employment relationship to a flexible one. This reorganization leads to a large, one off increase in job insecurity and unemploymentjob insecurity, private information, flexibility of employment relationship

Stimulus demand qualities and reinforcement as determinants of interrogative strategy

It was the purpose of this study to investigate the effectiveness of reinforcement and order of presentation of stimulus on question-asking strategy of nursery school, first-grade and third-grade children. It was hypothesized that the sophistication of interrogative strategies of the children would increase with age, that when the material was presented in an ordered form that the children would ask more constraint-seeking questions than when the material was randomly arranged. It was also hypothesized that when children were reinforced for asking constraint-seeking questions their use of such questions would increase. It was hypothesized that there would be no difference in the kind of interrogative strategies used by reflective and impulsive children and that intelligence would make no difference in the kinds of question-asking strategy employed by children. Subjects were 32 children each of nursery school, first-grade, and third-grade level. The Twenty Questions Procedure, originally employed by Mosher and Hornsby (1966), was used