effort and wages evidence from the payroll tax this is a pre copy editing author produced pdf file of an article accepted for publication canadian journal of economics following peer review this accepted manuscript is being archived under the conditions specified in the bu open access policy

incentives productivity and labor contracts the relationship between age earnings profiles and worker incentives is examined by contrasting wage and salary workers with the self employed it is argued that the steepness of wage and salary workers age earnings profiles reflects the desire to provide work incentives to those workers since self employed workers do not face this agency problem they are used as a benchmark to gauge productivity empirical support of the proposition is provided and the effects of human capital accumulation are separated empirically from incentive effects the most important conclusion is that under some strong assumptions most of the slope in age earnings profiles is accounted for by the desire to provide incentives rather than by on the job training

common pool politics and inefficient fishery management fisheries management often fails because total allowable catches tacs are set at inefficiently high levels to study why decision makers choose such high tacs we model the annual negotiation on tacs as a dynamic game in discrete time tacs are fixed by majority decision in a council consisting of decision makers who are heterogeneous with respect to their discount rates we show that the optimal feedback strategy for the less patient decision makers will set inefficiently high tacs in markov perfect nash equilibrium a binding commitment to a long term management plan could help solving this problem and lead to a more sustainable fishery management

pricing variation within dual distribution chains the different implications of externalities and signaling for high and low quality brands within many of the multioutlet branded chains that dominate the retail and services landscape the organizational form e g company management franchising used to manage an outlet varies from site to site as do the prices charged at those sites i propose that organizational form and prices may be systematically related as a result of brand externalities in particular i develop logic that the relevant form of externality should differ for upper quality tier brands and lower tier brands using panel data on price and organizational form from more than 6 700 branded u s hotels affiliated with 40 dual distribution brands those brands that simultaneously company manage and franchise individual outlets i find that consistent with the brand externality arguments company managed locations have higher prices within high quality chains whereas franchisees price higher in the lower tiers this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

product market competition and managerial slack this article analyzes the effect of product market competition on managerial incentives in contrast to hart 1983a i show that competition may actually exacerbate the incentive problem the difference in results derives from our different assumptions about managerial preferences the importance of assumptions about preferences suggests that we do not yet understand the precise mechanism through which competition affects incentives

contractual design and networks performance empirical evidence from franchising this article deals with the links between networks performance and the design of vertical contracts it provides evidence broadly consistent with the hypothesis that within franchising systems constraining contracts for the retailers favour a better performance at the network level

are effort bargaining models consistent with the facts an assessment of the early 1980s recent research has attempted to explain the impact of changes in union bargaining of the uk productivity miracle of the 1980s a central part of these explaniations is the concept of effort or working conditions as an observable component of negotiations after reviewing the evidence this paper shiows that in models where effort and wages are jointly negotiated in an environmenit of weakenitig union power a positive effort wage association as observed in the early 1980s in the uk emerges only unider quite special assumptions we show that the stylized facts are better explained by a model where effort and wages are bargained over sequentially

a multisector model of efficiency wages the pattern of effort and wages is derived in a multisector efficiency wage model firms choose effort endogenously easily monitored or low turnover jobs have high effort and may have low wages in equilibrium empirical wage differentials from a measure of supervision are smaller than observed industry differentials that have been attributed to efficiency wage models and are closer to those predicted by the model workers can search for and avail of on the job offers if sectors grow at different rates or the unemployment rate changes the pattern of wage differentials is unaffected

relational contracts limited liability and employment dynamics this paper studies a relational contracting model in which the agent is protected by a limited liability constraint the agent s effort is his private information and affects output stochastically we characterize the optimal relational contract and compare the dynamics of the relationship with that under the optimal long term contract under the optimal relational contract the relationship is less likely to survive and the surviving relationship is less efficient in addition relationships always converge to a steady state under the optimal long term contract but they can cycle among different phases under the optimal relational contract

intraurban wage gradients evidence by race gender occupational class and sector abstract a general functional form is used to estimate intraurban wage gradients for various groups of workers with 1980 data from the philadelphia detroit and boston metropolitan areas as predicted by the standard monocentric model of urban land use the following results are obtained for most groups of white workers negative and statistically significant wage gradients steeper wage gradients for higher wage earners and an increase in the steepness of wage gradients as the cbd is approached positive wage gradients are not found for black workers despite the fact that suburban employers hire large numbers of these workers who reside within the central city this result is taken as support for the hypothesis that blacks have been disadvantaged by job suburbanization and continued housing market segregation

is there a trade off between supervision and wages an empirical test of efficiency wage theory abstract the logic of efficiency wage theory suggests a trade off between wages and supervision this paper reports evidence that high levels of supervision are indeed associated with lower wage levels the empirical investigation centers on the effect that safety supervision by host employers has on the wages of contract maintenance workers in the petrochemical industry this narrow focus is important special institutional features of the contract employment relationship in petrochemicals make it possible to ameliorate econometric problems that may have influenced earlier studies

fishermen markets and population diversity fishing impacts biodiversity on multiple levels potentially resulting in unintended feedbacks to the economic performance of the fishery over time for example targeting observable traits within a population can impact genetic diversity and targeting valuable species can impact biodiversity at the ecosystem level the bioeconomic literature however has given little attention to the effect of fishing on population diversity even though population diversity contributes to ecosystem services and estimates of population extinction rates are three orders of magnitude higher than species extinction rates here we develop a stochastic bioeconomic model that links the harvest of multiple salmon populations in a single commercial fishery to the trajectory of population diversity in a salmon stock complex we parameterize our model with biological and economic data from the copper river chinook salmon fishery we show that markets can incentivize the degradation of population diversity reducing infra marginal fishery rents and increasing variability in economic returns we also show that second best management can conserve population diversity and improve welfare furthermore depending on fishermen s time preferences this management strategy is potentially self financing

wage premia in employment clusters how important is worker heterogeneity this article tests whether the correlation between wages and concentration of employment can be explained by unobserved worker productivity residential location is used as a proxy for unobserved productivity and average commute time to workplace is used to test whether location based productivity differences are compensated away by longer commutes analyses using confidential data from the 2000 decennial census find that estimates of agglomeration wage premia within metropolitan areas are robust to comparisons within residential location and that estimates do not persist after controlling for commuting costs suggesting that the productivity differences across locations are due to location not individual unobservables

minimum information management in fisheries this paper deals with problems of optimal management of common property fisheries it advances the proposition that many fisheries management schemes which are theoretically capable of generating efficiency are actually not practicable owing to their huge informational requirements this applies for instance to management by means of corrective taxes subsidies the paper proceeds to show that there exists under fairly unrestrictive conditions market based management systems that require minimal information for their operation but lead nevertheless to efficiency in common property fisheries one such system is the individual transferable share quota system

intrametropolitan variation in wage rates the case of atlanta fast food restaurant workers this paper utilizes a unique data base to provide some rare evidence on wage variation within a metropolitan area positively sloped wage gradients are found for both black and white employees of fast food restaurants in atlanta georgia blacks are found to work on that portion of the gradient where wage rates are lowest evidence on discrimination suggests that consumer prejudice affects the wages paid to black workers as distance from the central business district center increases the positive wage gradient effect is found to strongly dominate the negative effect on wages from greater consumer discrimination copyright 1994 by mit press

preferences over solutions to the bargaining problem there are several solutions to the nash bargaining problem in the literature since various authors have expressed preferences for one solution over another we find it useful to study preferences over solutions in their own right we identify a set of appealing axioms on such preferences that lead to unanimity in the choice of solution which turns out to be the solution of nash

fishermen s discount rates in itq systems in this paper the fishermen s planning and investment horizon is investigated using their discount rates it is shown that one might calculate the implicit discount rate in an itq regulated fishery from the available information from the quota market this gives information about how well the system is working in particular discount rates where itq systems are in operation initially were very high before they started to decrease this implies that it take some time to reap the full benefits of an itq system it also gives arguments for not letting itqs be perpetual property rights and hence enables more flexibility in the management system

technical inefficiency in manufacturing industries this article examines technical inefficiency of manufacturing industry in the united kingdom based on data for 19 023 establishments in 151 industries these data drawn from the annual census of production for 1977 have been used to estimate technical inefficiency in each industry by fitting translog stochastic frontier production functions and decomposing the residuals into two components one measuring inefficiency and the other unobservable random factors the work is the first step in a larger project to explain the sources of technical inefficiency and to compare efficiency between countries similar studies are currently taking place in australia the united states canada japan south korea and norway the first phase of estimation has been completed for the united states caves 1988 for the united kingdom green and mayes 1989 and australia harris 1989

customer discrimination and employment outcomes for minority workers this paper investigates the effects of customer discrimination on the employment and earnings of minorities particularly blacks data are used from a new survey of employers in four large metropolitan areas in the united states our results show that the racial composition of an establishment s customers has sizable effects on the race of who gets hired particularly in jobs that involve direct contact with customers and in sales or service occupations race of customers also affects wages with employees in establishments that have mostly black customers earning less than those in establishments with mostly white customers

the impact of franchising on labor standards compliance recent studies document pervasive noncompliance with basic labor standards in industries with high concentrations of low wage workers the authors examine how franchising a common form of business organization in low wage industries affects compliance they estimate the effect of franchise ownership on compliance with federal minimum wage and overtime standards in the fast food industry using unique data on top 20 branded restaurants franchised outlets have far higher levels of noncompliance than comparable company owned establishments the authors argue that observed differences arise from internal incentives facing franchisees versus franchisors rather than from external enforcement pressures facing the parties

agency theory and franchising some empirical results this article provides an empirical assessment of various agency theoretic explanations for franchising including risk sharing one sided moral hazard and two sided moral hazard the empirical models use proxies for factors such as risk moral hazard and franchisors need for capital to explain both franchisors decisions about the terms of their contracts royalty rates and up front franchise fees and the extent to which they use franchising in this article i exploit several new sources of data on franchising to construct a cross section of 548 franchisors involved in various business activities in the united states in 1986 the data are most consistent with a model based on two sided moral hazard the empirical models are also more successful at explaining the extent to which franchisors choose to franchise stores than at explaining the terms of franchise contracts finally contrary to the predictions of several theoretical models i find that royalty rates and franchise fees are not negatively related

efficiency wage models of unemployment a second view kevin lang and shulamit kahn efficiency wage models in which firms find it profitable to pay wages above workers reservation wages provide a promising explanation for unemployment and interindustry wage differentials one criticism of such models is they imply firms should sell jobs by requiring up front bonds from new workers however only some efficiency wage models imply this moreover firms might not require bonds for many reasons we show that moral hazard and adverse selection models together explain many labor market phenomena the efficiency wage model conforms well to empirical finding but certain anomalies suggest the need to consider rent sharing models carmichael s paper in this volume is an important contribution to the debate over the importance of efficiency wages he clearly outlines some of the deficiencies in the theory and thus points out areas needing further research nevertheless his conclusions are far too negative he greatly exaggerates the theoretical weakness of the efficiency wage model and gives insufficient recognition to the empirical implications generated by this model and to tests of these implications i shirking models there is direct empirical evidence that shirking is a serious problem for firms firms spend significant sums monitoring workers levine 1987 reviews the evidence that worker shirking is widespread and costly the evidence in burroway 1979 and mars 1982 also demonstrates the importance of shirking and stealing carmichael s primary argument against shirking models is that if the payment of efficiency wages to deter shirking led to an excess supply of workers workers would buy their jobs by posting bonds since we do not observe workers posting bonds he concludes that firms do not pay efficiency wages either given the importance of shirking the absence of market clearing bonds needs explaining one explanation is that the market has found some reasonable substitute for bonds such as deferred wage payments it is theoretically feasible to substitute deferred wage payments for up front bonds as noted by akerlof and katz 1989 however the empirical evidence of industries with deferred payments i e where low beginning wages are balanced by high subsequent wages is mixed dickens and katz 1987b krueger and summers 1988 and abraham and farber 1987 indicate that industries which pay high wages to high tenure workers tend to pay high wages to low tenure workers on the other hand high wage industries also tend to have steeper earnings profiles which may be evidence of deferred earnings in these industries as shapiro and stiglitz 1984 note a second possible explanation for the absence of market clearing bonding is that bonding gives firms an incentive to fire workers immediately upon collecting their bonds however this explanation assumes that a firm will immediately fire every worker who posts a bond if there are any reputation costs at all some firms sometimes will not fire bond posting workers and we should observe some bonding yet with finite length contracts there must be some reputation costs because otherwise firms would never pay workers in the last period thus firm incentives to cheat and fire workers cannot explain the complete absence of bonding clearly the absence of market clearing bonding is not fully understood and further theoretical work is needed dickens katz lang and summers 1989 review a wide variety of possible reasons that bond posting is limited the important point is that there are many potential reasons for limited bonding other than the absence of efficiency wages on the other hand the lack of bonding despite the importance of shirking does not demonstrate that firms pay efficiency wages there may be reputation or other costs to the worker caught shirking even in the absence of bonding as dickens katz lang and summers 1989 demonstrate in the absence of bonding whether paying efficiency wages dominates relying solely on increased monitoring depends on the parameters of the model and is therefore an empirical issue

equilibrium unemployment as a discipline device when finding employment is costly in this paper we study a model that incorporates costly job search into an efficiency wage model we show that the relationship between wages and detection rates is ambiguous in this framework the model can generate a positive relationship consistent with empirically reasonable values for unemployment rates job finding rates and employment duration dans ce memoire on etudie un modele qui incorpore une recherche d emploi couteuse dans un modele de salaire d efficience on montre que la relation entre salaires et taux de detection est ambigue le modele peut generer une relation positive consistante avec des valeurs empiriquement raisonnables pour les taux de chomage les taux de detection d emplois et les durees d emplois

do the rich and poor colocate in large cities abstract this paper focuses on colocation rather than segregation in the context of japanese large cities using the time cost of commuting from traditional urban economic theory we analyze how different income households are sorted according to the distance from the city center by examining microdata on housing prices and rents in tokyo metropolitan area we find that the rich and poor tend to colocate and are sorted by income near the city center for detached housing prices this is predicted if the income differential is large enough we also find that different income groups coexist in the same location for condominium prices this is predicted if the income elasticity of demand for space is close to one and the pecuniary cost of commuting is zero

a note on uncertainty and rent capture in an itq fishery abstract this note addresses the effect of uncertainty on the expected resource rent the short run quota equilibrium and the methods of rent capture in an individual transferable quota fishery with heterogeneous fishers it presents some new results on the effects of output price uncertainty on the quota demands the short run equilibrium and the possible choice of a method of rent capture

endogenous firm efficiency in a cournot principal agent model abstract in a market of cournot firms managed by agents the degree of firm efficiency is inversely related o the number of firms in the market journal of economic literature classification numbers l22 d23 d43

unemployment in britain male unemployment in britain has risen from around 2 per cent in the 1950s to around 17 per cent in 1985 see figure 1 the figures are for male unemployment because there is no consistent series for women 1 even more remarkably unemployment has fallen in only three years out of the last twenty 1973 1978 and 1979 to account for this we need a model that explains both changes in the natural or non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu and deviations from it we use a three equation supply side model centred on the labour market this has two main features the first concerns the determination of employment in the short run the labour demand function that we use cuts through the fruitless debate now raging especially in europe as to whether current unemployment is classical or keynesian according to the classical view employment is too high because real wages are too high according to the keynesian view real wages are not binding and unemployment is high because the product market does not clear with prices too high relative to nominal demand the whole debate is set in the framework of perfect competition yet in perfect competition prices are set by impersonal forces and it is not clear what could possibly stop prices clearing the market it is much more reasonable to think of prices as being set by imperfectly competitive firms existing prices being the best they can think of given the demand they face in this context firms demand for labour will depend on both the real product wage and the level of real aggregate demand this is the demand function we estimate and it conforms both to common sense and to the data however this does not imply that employment can be made to grow without limit by pumping up real demand for in the medium term when price surprises are eliminated our model determines three variables employment real wages and real demand on the basis of three equations an employment equation a price equation and a wage equation thus in the medium term there is a natural level of employment and corresponding to this a natural level of real aggregate demand the second key feature of our model concerns the medium term determination of unemployment in the medium term the planned mark up of wages over prices in wage settlements must be consistent with the mark up of prices over wage costs in employers pricing behaviour for if wage setters try to set real product wages higher than is consistent with employers pricing behaviour this generates ever increasing inflation thus the key to understanding unemployment in the medium term is the behaviour of wage setters if events occur that push them towards too high real wages then unemployment has to rise to offset these influences we shall call these influences wage pressure variables or push factors and they are clearly crucial in understanding unemployment the variables here include the social security system employment protection

limited entrepreneurial attention and economic development economic development depends on the allocation of entrepreneurial resources to efforts to discover new profit opportunities limited entrepreneurial attention is allocated between maintaining current activities and starting new activities this paper addresses the problem of allocating limited entrepreneurial attention in a variety of contexts the issues that are addressed are product improvement and new product development the choice of career as an innovative entrepreneur a managerial entrepreneur or a salaried employee the venture capitalist s attention to current and new ventures and funds the writing of internal contracts and market contracts and the supervising of current employees and hiring additional employees

the effect of organizational form on quality the case of franchising abstract the organizational form of franchising has been shown to yield higher profits and faster growth through reducing agency costs why then does anyone not franchise in this paper i argue that the diffuse residual claims of the franchise system reduce overall system quality and that this problem is inherent in the nature of franchising the theory is tested by examining evidence from both the restaurant and the hotel industries including chains that franchise and ones that own all of their units in both industries quality is negatively related to the percent franchising in the chain controlling for size growth in units monitoring costs market segment ownership structure multi chain operation and price the results suggest that the franchise contract increases free riding and decreases quality in decentralized service chains and that quality is not contractible in this setting

efficiency wages and employment rents the employer size wage effect in the job market for lawyers the efficiency wage hypothesis offers an explanation for employment rents according to this hypothesis firms pay wages above the opportunity cost of labor to elicit productivity or quality enhancing behaviors from employees firms pursue this strategy when alternative incentive schemes are unavailable or too costly thus firms will not pay premium wages when employees post sufficiently large performance bonds this article examines employment rents in a setting where employees post sizable performance bonds large law firms contrary to the efficiency wage hypothesis we find that associates in these large firms post substantial performance bonds while also receiving substantial ex ante rents

work rules featherbedding and pareto optimal union management bargaining this article examines a model of semiefficient bargaining in which the union and the firm bargain over wages and various types of work rules the results are compared to the outcomes that are associated with fully efficient bargaining i e over wages and the level of employment and bargaining solely over wages

the effects of competition on executive behavior economists presume that competition spurs a firm to be more efficient by forcing it to reduce its agency problems this article investigates this presumption it finds that the effects of competition on executive behavior can be decomposed into four effects each of which is of potentially ambiguous sign theory thus offers no definitive defense of this presumption this article also derives sets of conditions under which increased competition has the presumed effect of reducing agency problems in some sets important conditions are that increased competition reduce the executive s expected income and that agency goods e g shirking be normal goods for the executive the article shows that an increase in the shareholder bargaining strength can both reduce the agency problem and make it more sensitive to competition

do fast food chains price discriminate on the race and income characteristics of an area this article reports tests for differences in prices charged by fast food restaurants that serve markets with customers of widely divergent incomes and ethnic backgrounds the data contain detailed prices on items sold at over 400 burger king wendy s kfc and roy rogers restaurants in new jersey and pennsylvania locations i find significant differences in price based on the race and income characteristics of a zip code region when income and cost differences are taken into account meal prices rise approximately 5 for a 50 rise in the black population

the determinants of firms performance can finance constraints improve technical efficiency this paper analyses the mechanisms through which binding finance constraints can induce debt constrained firms to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits this hypothesis is tested on a sample of firms belonging to the italian manufacturing technical efficiency scores are computed by estimating parametric production frontiers using the one stage approach as in battese and coelli battese g coelli t 1995 a model for technical efficiency effects in a stochastic frontier production function for panel data empirical economics 20 325 332 the results support the hypothesis that a restriction in the availability of financial resources can affect positively efficiency 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

franchising agency problems and the cost of capital explanations for franchising are examined in the context of the us hotel industry the study is distinct from previous research on franchising because it explicitly recognizes the existence of three organizational forms whereas previous research has focused exclusively on two of these three forms the two organizational forms examined in previous work are franchising and company ownership the additional organizational form is company management investor ownership which involves management by the franchisor and ownership by outside investor groups a plausible explanation for the existence of the last organizational form is based on the availability of low cost capital from non chain sources

the role of employer employee interactions in labor market cycles evidence from the self employed self employed workers are less likely to be affected by implicit contracts efficiency wages and other forces that mute wage cyclicality and exacerbate employment cyclicality this observation motivates our comparison of the cyclical experience of the self employed with wage and salary workers who clearly have an employer we find negligible or small differences in annual hours cyclicality between the two groups but hourly wages and annual earnings are much more cyclical for the self employed these results are consistent with efficient contracting models where employers smooth workers income without causing inefficiencies in hours of work

spatial mismatch and costly suburban commutes can commuting subsidies help proponents of the spatial mismatch hypothesis argue that job decentralisation harms low income residents of central cities because of barriers that limit their access to suburban labour markets such barriers can take the form of housing discrimination exclusionary zoning or long and difficult commutes this paper uses an urban equilibrium model of spatial mismatch to analyse the impact of commuting subsidies on the welfare of low income central city households with restricted mobility specifically it seeks to determine how effective such subsidies are at reducing the welfare impact of spatial mismatch while subsidised outward commuting is found to raise the welfare of the low income households the welfare gains are only a small portion of the welfare loss due to spatial mismatch

competition long run contracts and internal inefficiencies in firms abstract internal reward structures in firms are often integral parts of their culture and are changed infrequently in comparison to decisions about e g prices this paper investigates how this feature of firm organization provides a mechanism through which product market competition affects firms internal efficiency the design of firms internal organization is modeled as a choice of an incentive structure between a principal and an agent with strategic implications for firm s competitive positions on the product market it is shown that contrary to popular beliefs there may be a negative relation between the competitiveness of the product market and effort incentives

a great fish war model with asymmetric players this paper analyzes the coalitional great fish war model under the assumption that players differ in their time preferences and use different discount rates we derive the equilibrium payoffs of this coalitional game and investigate the impact of the asymmetry assumption on the extreme schemes of cooperative and non cooperative equilibria we then proceed to the computation of stable coalitions using time consistent harvest sharing policies for the partial coordination scheme in the case where players are divided into two groups high and low discount rates we find that asymmetry has a significant impact on the way the resource is shared and on the profitability of coalitions we also find that asymmetry is not a sufficient feature to overcome the puzzle of small coalitions

the effect of the minimum wage on the fast food industry using a longitudinal survey of fast food restaurants in texas the authors examine the impact of recent increases in the federal minimum wage on a low wage labor market less than 5 of fast food restaurants were using the new youth subminimum wage in july august 1991 even though the vast majority paid a starting wage below the new hourly minimum wage immediately before it became effective although some restaurants increased wages beyond the level needed to comply with higher minimum wages in both 1990 and 1991 those federal minimum wage increases greatly compressed the distribution of starting wages in the texas fast food industry two findings at variance with conventional predictions are that 1 employment increased more in those firms likely to have been most affected by the 1991 minimum wage increase than in other firms and 2 price changes were unrelated to mandated wage changes

firm types price setting strategies and consumption tax incidence abstract we analyze price responses to large restaurant vat rate reductions in two different european countries our results show that responses in the short and medium run were clustered around two focal points of zero pass through and full pass through differences between independent restaurants and chains is the key explanation for this pattern while nearly all independent restaurants effectively ignored the tax reductions and left consumer prices unchanged a substantial fraction of restaurants belonging to chains chose a rapid and complete pass through in the longer run prices converged but primarily through a price reversion among chain restaurants the stark difference in price responses does not appear to arise because of different market characteristics such as location initial price levels meal types and restaurant segment

an empirical look at franchising as an organizational form franchise contracts are identified as a hybrid form of economic organization motives for the dominance of franchise arrangements are identified by examining the theoretical literature on franchising and related literatures on the theory of the firm firm growth managerial and employee selection a nd brand name capital empirical tests are performed on the incidence of franchise contracts across states for three industries in which f ranchising is prominent and data are readily available the results s uggest that both principal agent incentives and informational incenti ves favor the use of franchise arrangements copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

is there discretion in wage setting a test using takeover legislation anecdotal evidence suggests that uncontrolled managers let wages rise above competitive levels testing this popular perception has proven difficult however because independent variation in the extent of managerial discretion is needed in this paper we use states passage of anti takeover legislation as a source of such independent variation passed in the 1980s these laws seriously limited takeovers of firms incorporated in legislating states since many view hostile takeovers as an important disciplining device these laws potentially raised managerial discretion in affected firms if uncontrolled managers pay higher wages we expect wages to rise following these laws using firm level data we find that relative to a control group annual wages for firms incorporated in states passing laws did indeed rise by 1 to 2 or about 500 per year the findings are robust to a battery of specification checks and do not appear to be contaminated by the political economy of the laws or other sources of bias our results suggest that discretion significantly affects wages they challenge standard theories of wage determination which ignore the role of managerial preferences

managerial incentives and product market competition are imperfectly competitive leibenstein 1966 claims that there may be a substantial amount of x inefficiency where x inefficiency measures the degree to which actual profits depart from the maximum of profits that could be obtained if all operations in the firm were carried out at minimal costs he offers empirical evidence from case studies showing that the welfare loss due to organizational slack is of an order of magnitude bigger than the welfare loss due to monopolistic price distortions on imperfectly competitive markets these results support the common presumption that increasing competition reduces organizational and in particular managerial slack however this early literature does not offer a theoretical explanation for the link between competition and managerial incentives in particular it ignores the fact that managerial incentives can be affected by the design of an incentive scheme in this paper i derive the optimal incentive scheme for a manager as a function of the competitiveness of the environment in which his firm operates the basic impact of increased competition is that it reduces the profits of a firm this has two effects in the model first if a firm has high costs then the reduction of profits may be sufficient to render the firm unprofitable so the probability that it has to be liquidated goes up this unambiguously induces the manager of the firm to work harder for a cost reduction in order to avoid liquidation and to keep his job second the reduction in profits may affect

the effects of new franchisor partnering strategies on franchise system size many young firms use strategic actions to attract partners who help them increase the size of their operations quickly this article examines the use of strategic actions to attract partners and increase system size in the context of franchising we build on research in entrepreneurship marketing organization theory strategic management and finance to develop specific hypotheses about the influences of franchisor pricing policy and strategic control decisions on system size we test these hypotheses empirically using panel data on a sample of 1 292 business format franchise systems from 152 industries that were established in the united states between 1979 and 1996 and followed from their inception forward in time our model accounts for the endogeneity of strategic decisions controls for unobserved firm and industry factors and accounts for selection effects due to system failure the results show that franchisors that grow larger 1 lower royalty rates as the systems age 2 have low up front franchise fees that rise over time 3 own a small proportion of outlets and lower that percentage over time 4 keep franchisees initial investment low and 5 finance their franchisees

an empirical study on contractual heterogeneity within the firm the vertical integration franchise contracts mix this paper tests a discrete choice model on the mix of franchised and company owned outlets contractual heterogeneity within the firm this is often explained by the existing literature as due to heterogeneous characteristics of the outlets however correspondence between outlets and contracts characteristics is not often observed in reality an explanation is proposed which suggests that contract mixing is driven by the contractual choice of both principal and agents and that heterogeneous agents will choose contracts that match their characteristics this hypothesis is supported by econometric results based on outlet level microdata collected by means of a survey of uk firms

the spatial distribution of black employment between the central city and the suburbs i introduction smock 1968 kain 1968 and leonard 1987 have shown that the share of jobs held by blacks is smaller in the suburbs in comparison to the central city little is known concerning the factors accounting for this skewness in the spatial distribution of black employment because of the absence of suitable data a number of possible factors can be suggested first there may be no incentive to commute to the suburbs if wages are no higher or jobs no more available than within the central city that is the alleged spatial mismatch that has presumably created a surplus of less educated workers living in the central city and a shortage of these workers living in the suburbs may in fact not exist second the distances to jobs in the suburbs may make commuting to these jobs prohibitively costly and may limit the information readily available to urban blacks on suburban job opportunities third becker type consumer and or employer discrimination may cause employers to prefer hiring blacks in the central city or prefer hiring whites in suburban areas or both finally in comparison to central city jobs fewer suburban jobs are within walking distance of a public transit stop and many central city blacks do not own automobiles 1 from a policy perspective it is crucial to determine the relative importance of the above explanations for black employment segregation for example based upon a belief in the spatial mismatch hypothesis kasarda 1989 orfield 1985 hughes 1989 skinner 1989 and wilson 1992 have recommended that improved public transportation be provided to reverse commuters however on its own this strategy may not be particularly effective if blacks encounter greater hiring discrimination outside the central city and or know little about suburban jobs to shed some light on the spatial distribution of black employment between the central city and the suburbs this paper 1 provides some evidence on whether the central city labor market is tighter or looser than the suburban labor market for less educated workers 2 develops and estimates a model which explains the racial composition of firms workforces and 3 uses the parameter estimates from this model to investigate the relative importance of the aforementioned factors as explanations for black employment segregation the data come from a survey which we conducted of the managers of 102 fast food hamburger restaurants in the atlanta georgia metropolitan area the results yield three conclusions first expected wages the probability of employment times the wage rate are higher in the suburbs than within the central city which lends support to the spatial mismatch hypothesis and reinforces the need to understand the spatial distribution of black employment second the manager s race the percentage of the restaurant s customers who are white distance from the central business district and the proximity of the restaurant to mass transit are all found to have an important influence on the racial composition of the restaurant s crew third all of these variables are found to play an important role in explaining the difference in black employment share between central city and suburban restaurants of particular interest is that approximately 36 percent of this difference can be attributed to the fact that suburban restaurants are less frequently served by public transit the next section reviews the literature on the spatial mismatch hypothesis and relates this hypothesis to black employment segregation section iii describes the data evidence is presented on the quality and availability of suburban in comparison to central city jobs in section iv a model of the racial mix of the restaurant s crew is developed in section v the results from estimating this model are discussed in section vi policy implications and suggestions for future research conclude the paper ii the spatial mismatch hypothesis and black employment segregation the last half of the 1980s witnessed a revival of interest in the old idea that the suburbanization of jobs and involuntary housing market segregation have acted together to create a surplus of workers relative to the number of available jobs in inner city neighborhoods where blacks are concentrated

time discounting and the overexploitation of coral reefs the incentive to overexploit a fishery resource is thought to exist if the resource owner s discount rate is sufficiently higher than the biological productivity of the targeted fish stock coral reef fisheries are extensively overexploited worldwide but the discount rates of reef fishers are largely unknown and there is little information about how discount rates relate to the exploitation status of fisheries we address these two research gaps for 48 small scale reef fisheries around the world we use a life history based method to derive fishery level intrinsic growth rates and then apply fisheries economics theory to investigate the compatibility of 2 different discount rates official and private with the exploitation status of reef fisheries we find that official discount rates that are normally used for policy making appear to be too low to fully reflect the short term outlook of reef fishers instead our inferred annual average private discount rate of 107 for fishers may better reflect the general overexploited state of reef fisheries our results indicate that in order to improve the chances of success fisheries policies which affect local fishers may need to be evaluated using private discount rates rather than the currently used official discount rates

where to go workers reasons to quit and intra vs interindustry job mobility we show that workers reasons for quitting their job affect their decision to stay in or leave their industry using survey data among public sector employees in the netherlands workers quitting for e g pay work pressure or job duties move relatively often to another industry in contrast to workers quitting for commuting time or the atmosphere at work this suggests that workers use their experience in the initial job to update their expectations on other jobs in the industry as the first set of job aspects is more likely to be related among jobs within an industry than the latter furthermore it is shown that workers reasons to quit fully explain the differences in wage growth between intra and interindustry job movers lastly we find that workers who quit for pay or management often leave the public sector altogether the data used in this article are proprietary

a model of regulated open access resource use abstract this paper develops a model of regulated open access resource exploitation the regulatory model assumes that regulators are goal oriented choosing target harvest levels according to a safe stock concept these harvest quotas are implemented by setting season lengths conditioned on the industry fishing capacity the industry enters until rents are dissipated conditioned on season length regulations harvest levels fishing capacity season length and biomass are determined jointly using parameter estimates from the long regulated north pacific halibut fishery predictions of these variables from the regulated open access model are compared to predictions that arise from the gordon model

privatisation and x inefficiency a bargaining approach the usual analysis of privatization and x inefficiency uses agency theory to model managerial effort the authors model worker effort as determined by a bargain between firms and workers workers dislike effort because it lowers utility firms prefer high effort because it raises productivity public sector firms are assumed to be social welfare maximizers and therefore compared to private sector firms they bargain lower effort levels since they have the interests of consumers and workers at heart the authors model predicts that under certain conditions privatization should raise effort and so lower x inefficiency and that wages may increase or decrease copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

minimum wages for ronald mcdonald monopsonies a theory of monopsonistic competition recent empirical work on the effects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment we develop a model of monopsonistic competition with free entry to analyse the effects of minimum wages and our predictions fit the empirical results closely under monopsonistic competition we find that a rise in the minimum wage raises employment per firm causes firm exit and may increase or reduce industry employment minimum wages increase welfare if they raise industry employment but welfare effects are ambiguous if employment falls

efficiency wages deferred payments and direct incentives in agriculture empirical evidence from agricultural labor markets is consistent with efficiency wage theory and inconsistent with several alternative explanations according to this theory the higher wage or deferred payment benefits that direct hire growers pay relative to that of farm labor contractors is an efficiency wage growers use this extra compensation to lower their monitoring expenses and reduce shirking by workers copyright 2002 oxford university press

crossing mother entrepreneur franchisees attempts to reduce franchisor influence abstract contractual terms guide many entrepreneur franchisees actions with the franchisor however it is impossible for franchisors to completely specify all future actions they compensate by continually attempting to influence franchisees using what franchisees perceive as suasion in their ongoing interactions we develop a theoretical framework for understanding the informal interaction dynamics between franchisors and franchisees most franchise arrangements include the payment of royalties based on sales this encourages a growth oriented strategy usually appropriate for the franchisees during the initial stages of their operations whereas a franchising strategy can reduce entreprenerial risk for franchisees it does not eliminate it thus as sales of the franchisees increase profit oriented strategies will be favored because they represent the payoffs that accrue to continuing entrepreneurial effort and risk taking these strategies may be in opposition to franchisors sales orientation when market conditions do not allow continual growth without margin penalties a research model is developed depicting the relationship between franchisees strategies and performance and the moderating effect that contractual goals and franchisees perception of franchisors attempts at suasion have on this relationship a set of research hypotheses was then empirically tested using a large sample of franchisees from the commercial truck retailing industry the results indicate that sales growth and profit growth goals are not always congruent balancing the goals of the franchisor and franchisee did not appear to be a popular option either one or the other was emphasized more importantly the results indicate that when franchisees perceive attempts by franchisors to use suasion lower levels of profits result but there is no corresponding increase in the level of sales in the long term franchisors are likely to determine that current contractual arrangements are not protecting their longer term interests thus they will be expected to attempt to modify franchise contracts in ways that force franchisees to implement sales gain strategies this will require that entrepreneur franchisees anticipate future events more carefully at the time they are examining the original franchise contract because most entrepreneurs are concerned with immediate survival at the start up stage this makes examination of the contract less likely to happen the franchise option is attractive because it reduces such risks we recommend that entrepreneurs write ex ante contingent claims contracts that ensure a gradual reduction of franchisor influence although this would assume a power or knowledge balance that favors the franchisees which is unlikely during the start up phase it will change over time as franchisees gain a better understanding of the local competitive dynamics thus it may well serve the franchisees to take a defensive posture or push a royalty arrangement that decreases the emphasis on sales over time this is most likely to be effective where the entrepreneur is considering several competing franchises at the time of the signing of the contract finally we recommend that entrepreneur franchisees should not assume that the expert advice offered by their franchisor is always in their best interests although technical advice is more likely to be unbiased and should be fully exploited as this is what makes the franchise valuable strategic advice or that which relates to goal setting may well be colored by the financial interests of the franchisor franchisors are unlikely to consider the possibility that franchisees would be better served by formulating their own strategies nor are they likely to consider that the franchise network would be better off in the longer term by the collective impact associated with numerous franchisees independently formulating their own strategies in short although we do not suggest that franchisees should always assume that crossing mother is the best response to all perceived franchisor suasion efforts they should carefully examine all strategic advice

a bargaining model of farrell inefficiency abstract an enormous number of empirical papers have estimated technical efficiency the distance of firms inside a frontier following the model of farrell farrell 1957 the measurement of productive efficiency journal of the royal statistical society series a 120 3 253 290 we propose a theory that explains the distance these empirical papers seek to measure the theory is based on the idea that workers can bargain low effort high crew sizes etc if they and the firm have some monopoly power we provide simple theoretical expressions for the empirical measures of technical and allocative efficiency and compare them to those in the statistical literature we also consider the relation between competition and efficiency

the mechanisms of spatial mismatch the spatial mismatch hypothesis smh argues that low skilled minorities residing in us inner cities experience poor labour market outcomes because they are disconnected from suburban job opportunities this assumption gave rise to an abundant empirical literature which is rather supportive of the smh surprisingly it is only recently that theoretical models have emerged which probably explains why the mechanisms of spatial mismatch have long remained unclear and not properly tested this article presents relevant facts reviews the theoretical models of spatial mismatch confronts their predictions with available empirical results and indicates which mechanisms deserve further empirical tests

ownership agency and wages an examination of franchising in the fast food industry this paper estimates the difference in compensation between company owned and franchisee owned fast food restaurants the contrast is of interest because contractual arrangements give managers of company owned outlets less of an incentive to monitor and supervise employees estimates based on two data sets suggest that employee compensation is slightly greater at company owned outlets than at franchisee owned outlets the earnings gap is 9 percent for assistant and shift managers and 2 percent for full time crew workers furthermore the tenure earnings profile is steeper at company owned restaurants these findings suggest that monitoring difficulties influence the timing and generosity of compensation

resource rent in individual quota fisheries traditional fisheries management schemes generate incentives for vessels to maximize catch resulting in rent dissipation and overcapacity individual vessel quota management schemes change the incentives to maximize profit and have the potential to generate resource rent and reduce capacity an interesting question is whether it is the changed incentives due to individual quota or the capacity reduction due to transferability of individual quota that is most important in generating rent in this study a cost function approach is used to model and measure rent generated and potential rent in a fishery managed with individual vessel quotas

when patience leads to destruction the curious case of individual time preferences and the adoption of destructive fishing gears abstract the use of destructive fishing methods is a serious problem especially for tropical and developing countries due to inter temporal nature of fisheries extraction activities standard economic theory suggests that an individual s time preference can play a major role in determining the gear choice decision based on earlier theoretical work we identify two ways in which individual time preferences can impact the adoption of destructive extraction methods i the conservation effect which posits that patient individuals as indicated by relatively high discount factor are less likely to use destructive extraction methods since they are more likely to account for the loss of future income that is accompanied by using these methods ii the disinvestment effect which argues that patient individuals are more likely to use destructive extraction methods since they have greater investment capability using an agent based model we clarify the conditions under which one of these effects is more dominant than the other one our model suggests that the nature of destructive gear along with the level of social dilemma determines whether patient or impatient individuals relatively lower discount factor are more likely to adopt such a gear additionally agent s beliefs regarding future resource condition and other agent s extraction level can have a major influence in some cases

credit incentives and reputation a hedonic analysis of contractual wage profiles a hedonic analysis of principal agent employment contracts is developed in which workers and employers exchange labor services and contractual payment patterns within this framework tests of alternative hypotheses are formulated and applied to contract data from a unique household level survey of economic activity in rural china in 1935 the results indicate that credit market constraints motivated workers and employers contract choices that shirking by workers rather than by employers was the dominant incentive issue that reputational concerns rather than threats of termination were the key worker disciplining device and finally that the contract s third party acted as an enforcement device rather than as a matchmaker subject to the availability of matched agent principal data this structural approach to modeling agency relationships can also be used in contemporary settings

incomplete contracts and the choice between vertical integration and franchising abstract previous studies have demonstrated that geographical dispersion of outlets leads to an incentive for firms to franchise geographical dispersion alone however does not provide a full explanation of the firm s decision to franchise certain industries with highly dispersed retail outlets such as supermarkets almost never franchise this paper uses the incomplete contracting paradigm to demonstrate how the inability to contract over local outlet costs can drive the firm s decision to franchise or integrate since only owners have incentives to reduce cost ownership of the local outlet should rest with the party with the greatest ability to control cost the theory is then applied to several industries