Contractual Incompleteness, Unemployment, and Labour Market Segmentation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Altmann, Steffen; Falk, Armin; Grunewald, Andreas; Huffman, David
• 署名单位: IZA Institute Labor Economics; University of Bonn; IZA Institute Labor Economics; University of Oxford
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdt034
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 30-56
• 关键词: Relational contracts; worker effort; fairness; RECIPROCITY; COMPETITION; promises; FIRMS; hypothesis; ECONOMICS; device

摘要

This article provides evidence that involuntary unemployment, and the segmentation of labour markets into firms offering good and bad jobs, may both arise as a consequence of contractual incompleteness. We provide a simple model that illustrates how unemployment and market segmentation may jointly emerge as part of a market equilibrium in environments where work effort is not third-party verifiable. Using experimental labour markets that differ only in the verifiability of effort, we demonstrate empirically that contractual incompleteness can cause unemployment and segmentation. Our data are also consistent with the key channels through which the model explains the emergence of both phenomena.