Self-enforcing Wage Contracts

Jonathan Thomas () and Tim Worrall ()

Review of Economic Studies, 1988, vol. 55, issue 4, pages 541-54

Abstract: The authors examine long-term wage contracts between a risk-neutral firm and a risk-averse worker when both can costlessly renege and bu y or sell labor at a random spot market wage. A self-enforcing contract is one in which neither party ever has an incentive to renege. In th e optimum self-enforcing contract, wages are sticky: they are less variable than spot market wages and positively serially correlated. They are updated by a simple rule: around each spot wage is a time invariant interval, and the contract wage changes each period by the smallest amount necessary to bring it into current interval. Copyright 1988 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Date: 1988
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0034-6527%2819881 ... 0.CO%3B2-B&origin=bc full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:restud:v:55:y:1988:i:4:p:541-54

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0034-6527

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Studies is edited by Andrea Prat, Bruno Biais, Kjetil Storesletten and Enrique Sentana

More articles in Review of Economic Studies from Blackwell Publishing
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().