A Model of Involuntary Unemployment and Wage Rigidity: Worker Incentives and the Threat of Dismissal

Roger Sparks

Journal of Labor Economics, 1986, vol. 4, issue 4, 560-81

Abstract: This paper analyzes a model that highlights imperfect monitoring and the threat of dismissal as microeconomic underpinnings for the efficiency-wage hypothesis. The author's major innovation is to allow the rules for dismissal, as well as the wage, to be determined endogenously as the equilibrium of a Stackelberg game played between firms and workers. The key results are as follows: a nontrivial equilibrium (where positive output is produced) must involve involuntary unemployment in that employed workers are strictly better off than are the unemployed; in addition, the equilibrium wage is rigid with respect to exogenous shifts in productivity. Copyright 1986 by University of Chicago Press.

Date: 1986
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