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Working Paper
Commitment as irreversible investment
Considering time inconsistency as a problem of irreversible investment brings some neglected points to the fore. Making a policy choice in real time and under current conditions emphasizes the importance of the timing of commitment, the regret over past decisions, and the option value of not committing. This paper applies these concepts to monetary policy, banking regulation, and capital taxation.
Journal Article
Search-theoretic models of international currency - commentary
Journal Article
An outsider's guide to real business cycle modeling
Conference Paper
Search-theoretic models of international currency - commentary
Journal Article
Feeding the national accounts
A complex tracking system, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) is used to measure and monitor the U.S. economy. This article surveys the main data sources currently used in the NIPA. It is not primarily an article about methodology, but focuses instead on the raw inputs to the process: Who is answering what kinds of questions? Closer acquaintance with the data sources behind the accounts highlights the considerable uncertainty about exact magnitudes of various aggregate quantities (and their growth rates) and the need for ongoing evaluation of the data-collection efforts that ...
Journal Article
Opening Pandora's box: the measurement of average wages
Journal Article
Economic models of employee motivation
Workers present employers with a range of tricky problems. They can be crooked, subversive, surly, or indolent, even if they are paid on time. Joseph A. Ritter and Lowell J. Taylor explore economists' main theories of how compensation is used to address employee motivation and how these models help to explain puzzling features of labor market. Although these theories are often regarded as competitors, the authors treat them as complementary tools in understanding how employers deal with the complex problem of motivating workers.
Journal Article
School and work
Working Paper
Seniority-based layoffs as an incentive device
This paper provides a simple economic rationale for two elements that often appear - implicitly or explicitly - in firms' personnel policies. When firms reduce their labor input they often (i) lay off a few individuals rather than adjust work hours, and (ii) make retention decisions on the basis of seniority. We show that in a stochastic environment, a seniority-based layoff policy can have the effect of making the job valuable to a worker over most of her career. This provides work-life incentives using a mechanism similar to Lazear's well known model of upward-sloping wage profiles. Firms ...
Working Paper
Low-powered incentives
We study low-powered incentives in a model that captures important features of workplaces in which incentive-pay approaches are minimally relevant. Our motivation is that incentive pay, while not rare, is clearly far less common than are agency problems: many firms with agency problems nonetheless pay fixed compensation and offer continued employment to all but those workers judged "unsatisfactory" according to largely subjective criteria. We find that low-powered incentives can achieve efficient outcomes in simple workplaces and function surprisingly well even when the environment is ...