Is there a Wage-Supervision Trade-Off? Efficiency Wages Evidence From the 1990 British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey

Andreas P Georgiadis ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Efficiency Wages cannot be ruled out on a priori theoretical grounds and evidence is needed. Direct evidence on the effects of wages on productivity and indirect evidence from the wage structure does not seem persuasive. In this paper we offer an indirect test of the efficiency wage theory, by testing the prediction of the ‘shirking’ and ‘gift-exchange’ models of efficiency wages of a wage-supervision trade-off, using data from the 1990 British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. We highlight the main empirical problems that hinder the estimation of the wage-supervision relationship, and we offer a novel theoretical explanation of the wagesupervision trade-off in terms of union bargaining power. We find evidence that wages and supervision are substitutes in eliciting effort for unskilled manual workers. This evidence supports principal-agent models, many of which do not have the efficiency wage property. Finally, after we test whether wages are set optimally above the market clearing level we fail to find any evidence that can rule out efficiency wages in favour of incentive contracts.

Keywords: Efficiency Wages; Wage-supervision trade-off; Endogeneity bias; private and Non-Unionised establishments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J33 J41 J53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2006-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp152.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp152.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp152.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp152.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2006/wp152.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2006/wp152.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:06/152

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().