Search Results
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
Work motivation, commentary
Working Paper
Local price variation and labor supply behavior
In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: the wage and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most of theoretical and empirical work ignores prices other than wages when studying labor supply. The question we address in this paper is whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as has generally been assumed. We describe a simple model to demonstrate that the effects of wage and non-labor income on labor supply will typically differ by location. We show, in particular, the ...
Working Paper
Are children 'normal'?
In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely ?normal.? We examine this contention. Our first step is documenting an empirical regularity about the cross section of white married couples in the U.S.: when we restrict comparisons to households living in broadly similar locations (e.g., in expensive urban areas, or in rural areas), completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband?s income. Two alternative models rationalize the data?one in which children are ?normal? and a second in which the observed pattern emerges solely as a ...
Working Paper
The labor supply of married women: why does it differ across U.S. cities?
Using Census Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) data for 1980, 1990 and 2000, this paper documents a little-noticed feature of U.S. labor markets that there is wide variation in the labor market participation rates and annual work hours of white married women across urban areas. This variation is also large among sub-groups, including women with children and those with different levels of education. Among the explanations for this variation one emerges as particularly important: married women's labor force participation decisions appear to be very responsive to commuting times. There is a strong ...
Working Paper
The role of location in evaluating racial wage disparity
A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is specified to be a function of education, experience, and an indicator variable identifying race. Researchers hope that estimates from this exercise can be informative about the impact of minority status on labor market success. Here we set out a theoretical justification for this regression in a context in which individuals live and work in different locations. Our model leads to the traditional approach, but with the important caveat that the regression should ...
Working Paper
African-American economic progress in urban areas: a tale of 14 American cities
How significant was the economic progress of African-Americans in the U.S. between 1970 and 2000? In this paper we examine this issue for black men 25-55 years old who live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. We present the evidence that significant racial disparities remain in education and labor market outcomes of black and white men. We discuss changes in industrial composition, migration, and demographic changes that might have contributed to the stagnation of economic progress of black men between 1970 and 2000. In addition, we show that there was no progress in a financial well-being ...
Working Paper
Earnings functions when wages and prices vary by location
In this paper we study whether location-specific price variation likely affects statistical inference and theoretical interpretation in the empirical implementation of human capital earnings functions. We demonstrate, in a model of local labor markets, that the ?return to schooling" is a constant across locations if and only if preferences are homothetic ? a special case that seems unlikely to generally pertain. Examination of U.S. Census data (for 1980, 1990, and 2000) provides persuasive evidence that the return to a college education, relative to a high school education, does indeed vary ...
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 ...