Employee Crime, Monitoring, and the Efficiency Wage Hypothesis

William T. Dickens, Lawrence Katz, Kevin Lang and Lawrence H. Summers

No 2356, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper offers some observations on employee crime, economic theories of crime, limits on bonding, and the efficiency wage hypothesis. We demonstrate that the simplest economic theories of crime predict that profit-maximizing firms should follow strategies of minimal monitoring and large penalties for employee crime. Finding overwhelming empirical evidence that firms expend considerable resources trying to detect employee malfeasance and do not impose extremely large penalties, we investigate a number of possible reasons why the simple model's predictions fail. It turns out that plausible explanations for firms large outlays on monitoring of employees also justify the payment of premium wages in some circumstances. There is no legitimate a priori argument that firms should not pay efficiency wages once it is recognized that they expend significant resources on monitoring.

Date: 1987-08
Note: LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Inter-American Law Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 321-357, (Spring 1989).
Published as "Employee Crime and the Monitoring Puzzle." From Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 331-347, (July 1989).

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